I have been watching the government’s love affair with a company called Palantir Technologies, and honestly, even my paranoid friends didn’t look that horrified, when they discovered Facebook for the very first time in their distrusting lives.
This is not the first time that I’ve written about Peter Thiel’s lovechild though, and if you want to get down with the basics, just read: America’s privacy gets Trumped by Palantir’s data monster and the Department Of Unrestricted Citizen Harvesting Endeavors | LinkedIn
When Uncle Sam signs contracts with tech companies, the details usually stay buried deeper than Jimmy Hoffa. But Palantir keeps popping up in headlines because they have become the government’s favorite data stalker, and their contracts are big enough to make Bozo the Benevolent* jealous.
Palantir sold two main platforms that sound like they were named by Warhammer nerds having a late night board meeting. There’s Foundry, and that one helps regular companies figure out their global ops, and then there’s the platform with the ominous sounding name – Gotham (walk along folks, nothing to see here). Like there’s nothing more sketchy than naming your government surveillance tool after Batman’s crime-infested dystopia.
Gotham markets itself as an “operating system for global decision making”. Now that is typical corpo-speak and when translated, it’s more like “we help governments connect every single dot about you until they know what brand of cereal you ate three Tuesdays ago and whether you poured the milk first like the psychopath that you are”.
As a person, I am very interested in knowing why the government got completely hooked on cramming data from every possible source into one massive cesspit of data.
Why did the government go down this route ya think (rhetorical question).
The answer is because it is lazy, greedy, and power-hungry.
Plan and Simple.
Collecting every scrap of data and stuffing it in one big central database is easier than doing real analytical ground-work. It makes them feel smart, like they suddenly have access to X-ray vision, but really they’re hoarding our information like they’re raccoons chasing crack.
They cram everything into one giant pool because they know that more data equals more control. And control is their drug of choice. Forget fixing schools or hospitals, that’s for wusses, just stalk your own citizens with shiny graphs and pretend you’re upgrading homeland “security”.
But the truth is they got addicted to it because snooping on people is easier than governing them. And once they tasted that rush, they couldn’t stop.
Because it begins with knowing who you are, with whom you’re linked, but next, it will be to predict your next action. And if you think this is not going to happen, my sweet bubble-wrapped snowflake, take another Zolpidem – your go-to blue pill you take to pretend this ain’t 1984 – because predictive analytics is just another add-on to the platform.
Welcome to 2025. The first month of democratic decline, if you believe in the shit my AI coughed up for y’all to read on Monday.
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It’s like playing Watchdogs**
Here’s how Gotham works, and it’s honestly frightening and sketchy as hell in all its simplicity. The platform takes whatever data a government agency already has lying around – your taxes, police reports, insurance records, DMV records, your Facebook, and Instagram check-ins, that cringe photo you posted in 2019, and bordering on almost certainty*** – probably also your WhatsApp messages, your backups in the cloud, internet traffic – it then breaks it all down into tiny pieces, and then plays the world’s most invasive game of connect-the-dots.
When Gotham is allowed to do its thing, it grabs intel scattered across different government agencies, and publicly available data, that speak different computer languages, and then transforms the whole hot mess into one searchable web where everything talks to everything else. This is called a graph – or a social graph – and the technology behind it is called a . . . graph database.
Just have a look at Palantir’s data lineage animated Gif I axed Manus to make for this piece.
Now that’s kinda how a graph database works.
And what can you pull out of it?
Well now, here comes the juicy stuff. Who knows who, who talks to who, who owes who money, who showed up at the same sketchy bar last Thursday (with whom), and how all of those little breadcrumbs connect into patterns you didn’t even know were patterns. A graph database doesn’t do what a regular database does, like say “this person has an address”, but instead it says “this person shares an address with three other people, one of whom bought a plane ticket to Saudi Arabia, and another just got out of county jail, and hey look, their friends like the same anti-government shit you did”.
It’s a huge spreadsheet, connected to thousands of other spreadsheets in a spiderweb that turns your life into nodes and edges, and the picture it paints is way more intimate than you’d ever want the government (or anyone) to see.
The stakes here aren’t exactly chump change either.
Law enforcement and government analysts connect massive datasets that used to live in separate universes, build super detailed intelligence profiles on basically anyone, and search for people based on characteristics as specific as tattoos. Basically, stalking became a government service with a yearly subscription and a citizen loyalty program.
These agencies use Palantir to assemble sick detailed profiles of individuals, and with that, they’re mapping out their social networks, tracking where they roll, cataloging their physical features, and reviewing their rap sheets. They can map a suspected gang member’s entire crew using arrest records and license plate reader data, or flag everyone in a specific hood with a particular citizen status, just in case you want to organize – say – a razzia**†**.
Need to find everyone who’s ever Googled “how to mix Sulphuric Acid, Nitrous Acid and Glycerine without blowing my hands off” and also happens to own a pickup truck?
. . . Child’s play with Gotham.
Predictive policing
To me, the most frightening aspect of Gotham isn’t so much the fact that it can tell you what people have done, and who they are doing it with, but it is the ability to predict what people are going to be doing next.
The platform crunches patterns and becomes a fortune teller, and it is using your entire digital footprint to fuel the crystal ball that guesses what your next move is going to be.
That predictive stuff is where things get hairy.
The system will flag people as potential risks before they have actually done anything wrong, based on algorithms that analyze behavioral patterns, location data, social connections – you name it. So if you hang out with the wrong crowd, shop at the wrong stores, or visit the wrong websites – you might just get the pre-crime treatment like in the Minority report movie.
Just watch the Movie’s Precrime Intro for a small glimpse into your Orwellian nightmare:
Maybe an analogy is in place here, to explain the consequences of what is becoming common practice in the Estados Unidos.
Have you ever kept a diary?
And in it, where you only talking about puppies, unicorns and your romances? Or did you once – a long, long time ago, and in a fit of rage, scrawl down how much you wanted to bash someone’s head in? Now imagine years later, the cops pull you over, find a rusty baseball bat in your trunk. They confiscate it, get a search warrant for your house and stumble on that diary, and suddenly that old venting entry becomes their “evidence of intent”.
That’s how predictive policing works.
Your private scribbles, your old texts, your Google searches, all of it can be stitched together into a profile that says you’re a “risk”, and what was once just dark thoughts in ink now becomes the state’s excuse to treat you like a criminal before you’ve even done a damn thing.
And let me tell you, the efficiency of platforms like Gotham is straight fire.
Because investigations took weeks of manually cross-checking different systems, but with these tools, that can now be done in hours or less. But the tea about efficiency is that sometimes the scariest bit isn’t that something doesn’t work, but that it works way too damn well.
Gotham completely flips the script on the relationship between the state and the people that it’s supposed to serve.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already blown more than $200 million on Palantir contracts, and that’s enough money to buy a small island, but instead they chose to buy the ability to stalk immigrants more efficiently. They use the software to run their Investigative Case Management system and to mash together travel histories, visa records, biometric data, and social media data into a surveillance smoothie.
And that was just the beginning.
The Department of Defense handed Palantir billion-dollar contracts to support battlefield intelligence and AI-driven analysis because regular human intelligence is so passé. Even domestic agencies like the the IRS, and local police departments like the NYPD have jumped on the Palantir bandwagon for their data integration projects, and even the CDC can now track disease outbreaks with the same technology that tracks suspected terrorists, which is either reassuring or terrifying depending on your perspective.
Palantir wants to sell its crystal ball to Europe
Here’s a Gedankenexperiment → Could Palantir actually sell its Gotham “pre-crime deluxe” package to Europe?
On paper, sure they can, because they already dipped their toes in with Germany and a couple of Nordic cops who got high on predictive policing demos, my country being one of them. The Netherlands is a highly efficient police state. You wouldn’t say that if you don’t live there, because all you’ll ever see are the windmills, those stupid-ass clogs no-one wears anymore, flowers, and – of course – the red light district (ya horny perverts). The Dutch police have quietly been using Palantir software since 2012, where it is tucked inside a secretive investigative platform with the harmless sounding name of “Raffinaderij” (refinery). Almost the entire contract remained redacted until lawsuits peeled back the layers.
Refinery takes everything that the cops can hoover up like phone metadata, license plate readers, arrest logs, financial scraps, and even information from social media – yes, also my posts about the country’s AI scandals, and my recent posts about Palantir, and with it they refine it into searchable “profiles”.
Read:
- TechTonic ShiftsThe Dutch government. Another lesson in how not to do AI (including petition)
- TechTonic ShiftsA European train wreck with AI in the driver’s seat
- TechTonic Shifts One man’s fight against Dutch AI corruption
The idea is that every citizen becomes a barrel of crude oil, and the refinery squeezes out the petrol of suspicion. Civil rights groups like Bits of Freedom have been screaming bloody murder about it for years, and they are pointing out that nobody outside a handful of unknown bureaucrats knows how this thing works or what guardrails (if any) are in place. The Dutch parliament (the opposition) has asked questions, and watchdogs have probed, but the answers are always the same redacted horseshit “for security reasons, we cannot disclose”, kinda like how the Dutch employment service UWV is handling inquiries related to its AI systems.
Listen to: https://suno.com/s/WAM0NW32sYF7SPVM
But luckily there’s this one and only positive thing the EU has done, which is called the AI Act, and that thing is designed to strangle exactly this kind of Orwellian circus before it starts selling tickets.
The EU classifies predictive policing systems as “high-risk AI”, which means we don’t trust you, and we’ll keep you on a leash anyway. It means that Palantir would have to cough up transparency reports, and explain how its black-box algorithms makes decisions, and they need to actually prove that they’re not laundering bias into glossy charts.
And since Gotham’s whole shtick is “proprietary secrets, sorry folks” you can already see the collision coming.
Cynically, though, Europe ain’t immune.
The same governments that are wagging their tails about ethics are quietly salivating at the thought of cutting crime by spreadsheet. The German Constitutional Court already had to slap Palantir on the wrist for turning its system into a dragnet, and that was before the AI Act. Politicians scream about privacy in the morning, then sign secret contracts in the afternoon, because what gets a minister reelected is promising to “get tough on crime” with an app.
EU legislation might slow the circus down, but it won’t stop governments from sneaking a peek into that predictive crystal ball. The only guarantee is that your diary, your browser history, and your late-night kebab run will end up nodes in a graph database somewhere in Brussels, Washington, Beijing and Moscow.
Nah, we’re just modernizing
Palantir supporters on the other hand, say that the company is just out there modernizing outdated government IT systems (uh-huh), and bringing them up to the same level of integrated analytics that private companies use every day. But the thing is that the stakes are slightly different when we are talking about public governance instead of selling people more stuff we don’t need in the first place.
Centralized, attribute-based searching – whether by location, immigration status, tattoos, or affiliations – creates the capacity for mass profiling on an unprecedented scale that would make Orwell’s claw his way out of his grave, because in the wrong hands, or even in well-intentioned hands when a political wind shift, this system will normalize surveillance of entire communities.
Brrrr. . . the thought alone.
The deeper story here is that the government is not only hoarding data, but that the structure of governance itself is shifting into a model where decision-making gets increasingly influenced by what integrated data platforms reveal.
Putting someone under suspicion in the pre-Gotham era, required specific evidence linked to an actual event or witness account, but in a Gotham-enabled system, suspicion can stem from patterns in the data, and predictions about the future – patterns and predictions whose importance gets defined by proprietary algorithms that nobody outside Palantir and the unnamed few can examine.
This level of data integration means government officials can use potential future risks to justify present action. It’s a predictive approach that aligns with what scholars call “preemptive security” – which is a logic that will erode traditional legal safeguards requiring proof before punishment.
Just ask yourself the following question: what if the Nazi’s had access to such technology. Read Monday’s article (again), and think about it.
Take your time.
Without independent oversight (which is being dismantled in the US), there’s a big risk that Palantir’s technology becomes normalized as the default mode of governance. These tools will end up being used to track suspected criminals or terrorists and also to monitor and suppress protests, to conduct predictive policing, and to enforce public health measures.
Signing off while there’s still freedom of thought, and speech, because soon enough even my daydreams will be subpoenaed and graphed into evidence.
Marco
* You know him as ‘Jeff Bezos’*
** Watch Dogs is an open-world hacker fantasy in which you hijack an entire city’s surveillance systems to spy, steal, and screw with people’s lives and pretend you’re the hero. Yes, like Mr. Robot (if that means anything to you).
*** Uncle Sam runs a whole peep-show buffet of surveillance tricks like PRISM sucking data straight from Big Tech, XKeyscore gobbling up internet traffic, Upstream tapping the cables themselves, ECHELON swapping intel with the other spy bros, and the CLOUD Act which is letting them snatch your files overseas—basically an all-you-can-eat snoop fest with the moral compass of a raccoon in a liquor store.
† In a razzia, police or military swoop in like a swarm, rounding people up, and swoop them away. Made ‘popular’ by Nazi’s during the great war.
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Big Tech keeps inflating its promises, and I just bring the pins.
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