Notes From Underground (#9): Prepare a Boycott of Palantir!
Palantir, Trump Surveillance Power, And What You Can Do
First, let me just say, what a week in news. If you want to here more about the Big Beautiful Blowout, though, I recommend you hop on over to my brother’s blog post on the matter.
Meanwhile, stay tuned for my take on the recent Abrego Garcia news (I guess they could get him out when they wanted to, couldn’t they? But amazingly, not when the Supreme Court ordered them to almost 2 months ago. Interesting, isn’t it?).
Okay, onto the main event...
Leading Palantir nowadays comes with a lot of perks. It has had contracts with the government for 14 years. In the past, it has collaborated with the Defense Department and the CDC, playing a critical role in the management of vaccine distribution during the Biden Administration.
Yet the return of Trump has proved a boon to Palantir. Why else would its stock have risen more than 140 percent since Trump’s election in November?
But let me back up for a second. A group of people including billionaire Peter Thiel (the billionaire bankrolling J.D. Vance) founded Palantir in 2003. It began as a “CIA-backed analytics firm” that received CIA investment and funding. Its technology has been used to do anything from predicting ambushes in Iraq to “unwinding the toxic mortgage portfolio” of JP Morgan in the years immediately after the 2008 Great Recession.
You can imagine the great amount of power a company like this wields over data. Indeed, in the aftermath of Edward Snowden, some have (perhaps rightly) worried that Palantir could become a potentially terrifying combination of Big Data and Big Brother.
Well, that time may be here—if we let it come. At least 3 DOGE members once worked at Palantir, and two others worked for companies associated with Thiel and with his financial backing. Little wonder, then, that the Trump Administration chose Palantir as its chief vendor for a project to merge data from federal agencies into one “master database” (see Trump’s March Executive Order).
That “master database,” particularly in the Trump Administration’s hands, could be used to “advance his political agenda by,” among other things, “punishing his critics.” Do you need an example of how this can be done? Look no further than China. They have master databases, facial recognition software, and “full digital dossiers” on its people. Plus they have an extensive and invasive movement tracking system that tracks protesters down to their train rides. That is the power of building up data systems—data systems that can eventually predict human behavior and tip off the authorities to possible “trouble.”
Now, imagine Trump starting to compile an individual profile of you from IRS records, Social Security records, and other government data points. Think of what he could try to drudge up on you should you try to cross him. He talks about weaponization? This is a perfect recipe for weaponization.
Palantir declined to comment on any work with the Trump Administration. To be clear, if we can take Palantir’s word via their blog posts, they only work to create more effective ways of processing data for their clients. In other words, they don’t exercise control over it, nor do they “collect, store, or sell personal data.” Still, that’s beside the point, isn’t it? If their clients can use Palantir’s data system-building power for bad ends, then Palantir is still doing their client’s dirty work.
Right? So, here’s what you can do. Even now, the Trump-Palantir Plan has received some pushback within Palantir itself. Some Palantir engineers have expressed worries about DOGE’s “sloppy” (understatement of the year) security practices. Others have further worried about damage to Palantir’s reputation. One employee has even quit due to the company’s recent expanded work with ICE.
More to the point, 13 former employees joined on a letter urging Palantir to stop its work with the Trump Administration. And one of Palantir’s co-founders was—at least once upon a time—a critic of Trump and “the excesses of Silicon Valley.”
It is time to exploit these political divisions within Palantir. We need a boycott to convey the people’s message to Palantir very clearly.
Now, of course, we only have so much power over a federal government/Palantir client that clearly does not care about the regular people of America. Luckily, Palantir is beginning to branch out into business beyond the government. Its partnerships include established multinational professional service networks like Deloitte, established national professional service networks like Booz Allen, new AI consulting firms like Fourth Age, emerging consulting and AI firms like DXC Technology, and fast-growing IT services companies like Infosys.
Especially as these brands navigate the new and rapidly expanding AI industry, their brand reputation matters. For example, DXC Technology has bragged about having been “recognized by Newsweek as one of America’s greatest workplaces for the second consecutive year.” Moreover, firms like Booz Allen work not only with large companies, but with small businesses and innovative start-ups.
Though it may be harder to put direct economic pressure on Palantir, we can put pressure on its partners. In the creator economy, every creator and small business owner and digital influencer can make a difference. And in the emerging AI economy, every day a company spends defending their brand from bad associations is a day that another more nimble competitor can easily overtake them.
So, here’s my proposal: either Palantir unequivocally goes on the record to reject any future plans or proposals to cooperate with the Trump Administration on this “master database,” or we express our displeasure by refusing to do business with Palantir partners like Deloitte, DXC Technology, and Infosys.
Maybe Palantir can predict terrorist attacks, but apparently it can’t foresee the power of the people’s wrath.
A vignette: circa 2008, my RI friend moved to Connecticut, so had to change her drivers license to the new state of residence.
For many years by that time, I had been researching cyber security after being targeted by a felony cyber crime. In response to my discussions on this topic, she used to say, “Eyes glaze over!” Thereby expressing her willful ignorance of how data related crime affects one‘s life in varied and extraordinary and dangerous ways.
God was watching, however, because when she went to the CT DMV, they wanted her to provide the documentary path between her name on her Social Security card required at age 16 through through her first marriage, annulment despite the three children resulting from that marriage, and a second marriage and divorce to where she reached her current name. When she brought the required documentation to the DMV, they scanned it all reportedly without her consent or foreknowledge, and told her that it was submitted to a federal office of data collection and correlation located somewhere outside Atlanta.
To say that she screamed down the telephone wireless to me complaining about this is putting it mildly, because as she put it, “There were a lot of intimate details in that annulment agreement!!”
Well, maybe she should’ve listened to me years before to have been better prepared to have evidence that the government already knows Everyman Everywhere’s Everything.
Truth to tell, Snowden did not go back far enough in time with his revelations. A lot has been going on behind the scenes, usually in the name of “National Security,“of which most Americans are utterly unaware. A whole town was built out west to house in service the data collection server farm belonging to the USIC.
Russia and China have long held to the practice of gathering and storing long-term referencing and cross-referring the communications data that they capture. Likely by now other nations do much the same.
Frankly, if the government would learn from what they gather, perhaps they might accidentally learn something of value to the common good of the order, but the problem really occurs when these technologies fall into the hands of the bad guys and are misused for targeted attacks against their objects du hatred or jealousy or covetousness or vengeance.
Therefore, it’s always best to abide by what I call “the Pope Rule.” That is, never think, say, right, or do anything that could not be presented before the Pope without embarrassment— and I’m a Protestant, so referring to the holiness of the Pope as judge of the merits of my activities says a lot about my respect for such a man of the cloth.
As to what the present regime is doing since doomsday in January, recall the lyrics of the folksong, “Heaven Help Us All:“
“Now I lay me down, before I go to sleep, in this troubled world, I pray the Lord to keep hatred from the mighty, and the mighty from the small. Heaven help us all!“