Posts Tagged ‘tech’

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

Posted: September 13, 2025 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

“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

Follow anarchyroll:

Wisdom Is Resistance

White House Takes #Privacy as Congress Sells Publics’

Posted: May 23, 2017 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

590

 

 

By @anarchyroll

The golden rule. Only hard to abide when it is an inconvienience to our ego.

The right to privacy is not explicitly stated in the US Constitution. However, Americans have since the country’s inception, have implicitly demanded a right to privacy. If that were not the case, the Quartering Act of 1765 wouldn’t have been a big deal, catalyst for the colonies.

Americans work hard. So whether or not we play hard or not, we seemingly demand to know that if we do play hard that it will remain our business. What is our business? Whatever we do when we are not trading our time for money or services from another person or persons. That time off the clock, that is our personal time, our free time.

Personal and free are two words the vast majority of Americans take to heart regardless of age, creed, color, sex, or status. What we do with our personal/free time is nobodies business but our own as long as no laws are broken.

Is that not the perceived right to privacy? Is that asking too much?

Apparently the ask is too low because it is a right that has been bought and sold in a deal between the Republican controlled Congress and Internet Service Providers. The only thing surprising is how public and unapologetic the entire thing was. The legislation may have been crafted in the smokey backrooms of private Washington D.C establishments, but the sellout was done very much in the public eye.

The legislation was covered both by the internet press and mainstream media. There was plenty of outrage but very little resistance. The parties that will benefit from this have gerrymandered themselves into partisan footholds of the legislative branch. Hardline partisan politcal lines have been made facing consequences for many in Congress as much a part of the past as the personal privacy they just stripped away from everyday Americans.

Privacy may not be good enough for common folks anymore, but those in power still command it. Literally at the same time Congress took away privacy from the public, the White House announced it would no longer make public its visitor list citing “privacy concerns“. This two faced hypocrisy is a poster for why having a title or position of power does NOT make a person a leader.

Taking away from the many and giving more of it to the few. Yep, that is what America was founded on alright. That is definitely the cornerstone of American values. That is what the grand experiment of democracy is all about right? Right?

What’s the Value & Purpose of #Snapchat?

Posted: April 18, 2016 in Anarchy Journal Constitutional
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

mm@C4logo2ajclogo2

by @anarchyroll

Temporary, private multimedia messages exchanged through a smartphone application.

Sharing personal moments. That is what Snapchat is about. That is why it is the social media platform de jour in America, it is THE preferred method of communication to a number of young people that warrants the phrase of a generation.

The early adopters may have used it predominantly for NSFW purposes. But the majority of users these days are using it to share their lives with a limited spectrum of people in their social circle. And of course young people use it to for the inherent ability of the app to prevent parents, relatives, teachers, and bosses from seeing their communications and embarrassing them on another public and achievable medium.

Big business has recently come around to the idea of leveraging Snapchat to build community like loyalty for their products. Snapchat still has an air of being counter culture cool and ahead of the curve. So anyone trying to make money is trying to utilize Snapchat’s young, cool factor.

Is Snapchat cool?

Well it is fun.

The people who use Snapchat have fun doing it. The ability to customize messages in so many ways, then send it out only to people the sender wants seeing it, for a limited amount of time. Snapchat has stood on the shoulders of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter and has built a platform that combines the positives of each without the negatives.

Snapchat, like Tinder has an earned reputation for as an medium for the explicit and salacious. To deny that Snapchat is used as an exchange for sexual/sexualized acts and content is to deny reality. However, both Snapchat and Tinder are about much more than people’s naughty bits. Both are very much mainstream and both have a vastly large number of users who use the services for very much on the level, straightforward communication.

The purpose of Snapchat is that it is a temporary, multimedia messaging service and social media combo. The value is that the messages are temporary. In the era of big brother watching, there is an inherent comfort in sending a visual message that will self destruct in a maximum time of ten seconds. Whether the files actually delete themselves is another story and the public has decided is not important. The illusion of self destructing messages is just fine for most people whether they are sending goofy faces and/or nudes.

That comfort and intimacy whether illusionary or authentic is currently being exploited by every company and celebrity A list to Z. The business of Snapchat is on the exclusivity of the people the messages are shared with by the users and by the limited number of companies allowed to be featured in its Discover section. The personal of Snapchat is the fun factor that comes with the variety of ways to customize each message.

Snapchat has helped me open up more and share more personal moments with the world. For an antisocial who has battled depression and social anxiety for over half his life, that is a very good thing.

What Does it Mean when #Apple Has More $$$ Than the US Govt?

Posted: October 16, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
10/15/2014

It turns out Apple is worth more than a lot of things. A lot of things and a lot of other companies.

The company is valued at over half a trillion dollars and at any one time, has around $160 billion of liquid assets on hand.

The US government for instance, has less than 1/3 of that on hand. Although, as the Forbes article linked above makes sure to note, the US Treasury can at any time print more money and invest it into treasury notes.

What does it mean when a company has more than three times the amount of money as the government  of the country it operates in? Does that tremendous gift on incredible wealth come with added responsibility? A responsibility not just to employees and shareholders, but to cities, cultures, and societies?

Apple hoards so much cash, that Carl Ichan, the man who the lead character in the movie Wall Street is based on, thinks Apple is being too greedy with their profits. That takes a whole lotta greed. Ichan is as ruthless of a capitalist as it gets. If someone who makes his living using money to make money thinks Apple owes something to other people, that puts Apple in a different light than the idolatry bestowed upon their founder and products.

Apple already deserves some scorn for their notorious tax dodging/avoidance practices. They dodge taxes and hoard cash from even their own stockholders. What about the societies that have enabled the company to become richer than governments? What about the roads, schools, bridges, farms, poverty, intelligence, and morale of the places and people Apple has made their billions in? Do they owe something? Should they bear more responsibility to the public than slightly newer, slightly modified consumer electronic gadgets a few times per year?

With great power comes great responsibility. Money equals power in the world we live in. No one person, government, or corporation in the world has more money than Apple. Where does responsibility come in?

 

What is #Alibaba? And How Did It Become the Biggest IPO Ever?

Posted: October 7, 2014 in Excess and Algorithms
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

eanda logoajclogo2

by @anarchyroll
10/6/2014

The biggest Initial Public Offering (IPO) in the history of the New York Stock Exchange occurred recently.

Have you heard of Alibaba? Had you heard about Alibaba before last month? Have you already forgotten about Alibaba after it didn’t carry over to a fresh news cycle? When someone mentioned it to me last month, all I thought of was the Beastie Boys song.

What is Alibaba?

  • Google, Amazon, PayPal and eBay all rolled into one
  • A wholesale marketplace; Alibaba is the middleman the connects retailers/sellers directly to customers/buyers
  • Alibaba is the top dog in the largest e-commerce market in the world

How did Alibaba become the biggest IPO ever?

  • Capitalizing on the Chinese consumers’ desires to shop online, for cheap, with trustworthy retailers/merchants
  • 80% of China’s e-commerce is done through Alibaba
  • Domination of the world’s largest growing market paired with international expansion has Wall Street drooling

So China’s biggest internet cash cow has gone public on stock market. Yahoo is the biggest American company to directly benefit from Alibaba’s IPO success as the two are very  much in bed together, on the level, and in public NOT under the table. In fact, Yahoo has benefited so much from Alibaba’s success there is talk of them investing in and/or acquiring Snapchat.

What are potential problems with Alibaba?

  • It’s Chinese, the communist government/central bank could throw a monkey wrench into the mix at any time, and already has
  • The stock being bought isn’t actual stock in the company, but in their Cayman Islands shell corporation
  • Is Alibaba-Mania a product of a new Dot Com Bubble? The question is worth asking.

Should you go out and buy as much Alibaba stock as you can afford? Well, if you’re a good investor, you should always asked yourself; what would Warren Buffett do?

As with most IPOs, if you weren’t ahead of the curve or a fan of the band before they were cool, the ship has mostly sailed on this one. What I find personally noteworthy about Alibaba, is everyone I know who invests and is well off because of it, wants nothing to do with Alibaba. Why? They all say the same thing; the Chinese government. How much is the government involved with Alibaba? How much influence do they have? How much transparency is there and how much of that can actually be trusted?

When the Head of the FBI goes on 60 Minutes and openly talks about the Chinese military attempting to cyber attack the US economy, one should be very cautious about investing in the Cayman Islands shell company of a Chinese internet marketplace with direct ties to the Chinese government.

Older Entries