Posts Tagged ‘online privacy’

📱 When Our Phones Watch Us: Palantir and the Panopticon We Didn’t Elect 👁

Posted: September 13, 2025 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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“It isn’t ‘They’re spying on me through my phone’ anymore. Eventually, it will be ‘My phone is spying on me.’” That warning from Philip K. Dick captures the slope Palantir is already halfway down—turning citizens into data points, and autonomy into algorithmic obedience (Goodreads).

As Edward Snowden put it, “Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free” (Goodreads). That’s the business Palantir is in: surveillance disguised as efficiency, control dressed up as analytics.

This isn’t theory. Palantir already fuels ICE raids, predictive policing, corporate risk dashboards, and battlefield logistics in Ukraine (IBANet). As Thor Benson reminds us, “Don’t oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists and all of the other people our liberty relies on” (Ammo.com).

Palantir isn’t just selling software. It’s selling obedience. And like all Silicon Valley myths, it started with a story about “innovation” that hid something darker.

Origins & Power Connections

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and Stephen Cohen (Wikipedia), Palantir wasn’t born in a garage—it was born in Langley’s shadow. Early funding came from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm (DCF Modeling). When your first investors are spymasters, your product isn’t disruption. It’s surveillance.

Its flagship platform, Gotham, was built hand-in-glove with U.S. intelligence agencies. Palantir engineers embedded inside government offices stitched together oceans of data: phone records, bank transactions, social media posts, warzone intel (EnvZone). Palantir didn’t just sell a tool; it sold itself into the bloodstream of the national security state.

By the time it was worth billions, Palantir was indispensable to the U.S. war machine. Its software was used in Afghanistan and Iraq (SETA Foundation), where surveillance wasn’t a civil liberties debate but a weapon of war. When those tools came home to American cities, they carried the same battlefield logic: control first, questions never.

Domestic Impact: Policing & Immigration

Palantir’s second act was on U.S. streets. Its predictive policing contracts in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and beyond promised crime prevention through data. In reality, biased arrest records fed the machine, and the machine spit bias back out dressed as math (SETA Foundation).

Shoshana Zuboff warned: “Surveillance is the path to profit that overrides ‘we the people,’ taking our decision rights without permission and even when we say ‘no’” (Goodreads). Prediction isn’t neutral—it’s a form of control.

Immigration enforcement sharpened that control. Palantir built ImmigrationOS for ICE, consolidating visa files, home addresses, social media posts, and more (American Immigration Council). Critics call it “deportation by algorithm.” In Palantir’s language, that’s “efficiency.” The human cost is invisible in the spreadsheet.

A traffic stop can spiral into deportation. A visa application can flag someone as “high risk” with no explanation. Entire neighborhoods live under digital suspicion. And when protests erupted against these tools, six activists were arrested outside Palantir’s New York office in 2025 (The Guardian).

Palantir insists it only “builds the tools.” But when those tools fracture families and criminalize communities, the line between code and consequence vanishes.

Global Expansion: From Battlefields to Boardrooms

War proved Palantir’s business case. In Afghanistan and Iraq, its engineers sat beside soldiers, mapping bomb patterns and insurgent networks with data fusion software (SETA Foundation). The Pentagon called it a breakthrough. Critics called it privatized intelligence.

Now, Ukraine is Palantir’s showcase. Its tools analyze satellite imagery, coordinate battlefield logistics, and even gather evidence of war crimes (IBANet). CEO Alex Karp boasts Ukraine is a “tech-forward war.” But once normalized on the front lines, surveillance rarely stays in the trenches.

And Palantir’s reach doesn’t stop at war. Its Foundry platform runs inside JPMorgan, Airbus, Merck, and Fiat Chrysler (Wikipedia). What began as battlefield software is now a corporate dashboard—tracking supply chains, financial risks, and consumer behavior. The architecture is the same: consolidate data, predict outcomes, reduce uncertainty. Only the labels change.

Surveillance Capitalism & The Future

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon imagined a prison where one guard could watch every inmate without them knowing when they were being watched. “Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower… Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at” (Farnam Street). It was a theory then. Palantir has built it for real—and scaled it to entire societies.

Zuboff called surveillance capitalism a regime that reshapes human behavior for profit (Yale Law Journal). Palantir goes further, reshaping governance itself. Its platforms don’t just analyze data; they dictate institutional behavior, target populations, and define acceptable outcomes. The architecture dictates the politics.

Glenn Greenwald cut to the core: “The mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent” (Goodreads). That stifling doesn’t make headlines. It happens in silence—when a protest isn’t planned, when a whistleblower doesn’t speak, when communities live in quiet fear of an algorithm they can’t see.

And that’s why Benson’s warning should stick: “Don’t oppose mass surveillance for your own sake. Oppose it for the activists, lawyers, journalists, and all of the other people our liberty relies on” (Ammo.com). Because the weight of Palantir’s code doesn’t fall evenly. It presses hardest on those who dare to resist.

Orwell said it plainly: “Big Brother is watching you.” The 21st-century twist is worse. Big Brother has been privatized, optimized, and sold at a markup (The Guardian).

Truth Over Tribalism

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#PardonSnowden ‘s Interruption

Posted: September 27, 2016 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
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by @anarchyroll

Life is shades of gray. Black and white, right and wrong seems to increasingly be in the eye of the beholder. Edward Snowden to say the least is a controversial figure. A hero to some, a traitor to others? Did he break numerous laws? Yes. Did he do the American public a great service? Yes.

Privacy is a unique topic of discussion. It is a special issue in that the vast majority of people regardless of political affiliation, gender, race, or religion believe we as humans are entitled to our privacy. From the strictest catholic straight white man to the most flamboyant, liberal, multi racial, transgender. If we didn’t value privacy, there would be no suburbs, there would be no houses, there would be no doors.

The first world may have given up its privacy unknowingly/ignorantly as it embraced smartphones and free internet services over the past decade. When Edward Snowden helped reveal to America and the world the scale of privacy invasion being purposefully deployed by the US government on its citizens, the outrage was split evenly.

One part anger at the government for abuse of power, one part at Snowden for breaking the law and potentially endangering military operation(s), and one part anger at ourselves for being willfully blind to what we as a society didn’t want to think about or acknowledge…that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The free services that seemed too good to be true, were. We have been paying for Facebook, Google, Spotify and the like with our personal data and privacy.

It is human nature to direct and reflect self-hatred outward. That is what Edward Snowden‘s critics are doing. They are angry that he let the world know that which we wish we didn’t. That we are being watched.

That is what he blew the whistle about. That is why he is in exile in Russia. That is why the newspapers that he leaked his information to are swimming in Pulitzer Prizes. Because he removed all shadow of doubt that the government is indeed watching us. They’re watching us, listening to us, tracking us, and there is nothing we can do to stop them. Just typing that out makes me angry. Reading it probably makes you angry or apathetic, both are natural.

It’s natural to point the finger and blame a person. It’s natural to label one person as an enemy.

Snowden is not the enemy. Trying to profit from the information would have made him the enemy. Staying silent, blind, deaf, and dumb would have made him the enemy. But rather than stay comfortable, he took the road less traveled by. He faced the fear of being classified an enemy of the US government. But whistleblowers are not the enemy of the people. They are some of our greatest allies. Snowden is an ally of freedom, an ally of privacy, an ally of innate human rights. Snowden shouldn’t need a pardon but whistleblower protections have failed him. He did the right thing for the public, let’s do the right thing for him, and push for a pardon so he can come home.