Palantir, Predictive Policing & the Surveillance State- Part II
In the post-9/11 world, as America scrambled to build new defenses against terror, a different kind of infrastructure was quietly emerging—one not made of steel or concrete, but code, data, and algorithms. At the center of this quiet revolution stood
Palantir Technologies, a company co-founded and funded by Peter Thiel.
Palantir wasn’t built to keep you safe.
It was built to watch you!
🔵 The Myth of the All-Seeing Eye
Marketed as a superhero-style defense tool that could “connect the dots” between threats, Palantir found early success working with the CIA, NSA, and military intelligence. Its secret weapon? A platform that can ingest massive amounts of public, private, and classified data and turn it into visual, trackable networks of information—names, emails, purchases, movements, relationships.
Palantir named its products with dystopian flair:
- Gotham – used by police and ICE to identify, detain, and deport undocumented individuals.
- Foundry – used by corporations, hedge funds, and even government agencies to mine behavior and forecast decisions.
What separates Palantir from other tech giants is its purpose-built nature: it’s not just collecting data—it’s actively weaponizing it.
🔵 Predictive Policing and Minority Report Logic
The most controversial aspect of Palantir’s tech is its use in predictive policing—an idea lifted straight from science fiction and made real. Police departments across the U.S. (from Los Angeles to New Orleans) have used Palantir’s tools to:
- Create “heat maps” of neighborhoods.
- Flag “future suspects” based on associations.
- Prioritize patrols not on crime committed, but crime anticipated.
This kind of modeling doesn’t just raise civil liberty concerns—it reproduces bias at scale. If you’re poor, brown, or live in the wrong ZIP code, the system’s data logic sees you as a potential threat, not a citizen.
“The data doesn’t lie,” they say— But the data reflects the same inequality that has plagued our systems for decades."
🔵 What Does This Mean for Us Now?
Palantir went public in 2020, but its mission didn’t change. If anything, its reach has only expanded—into healthcare, finance, and education.
When algorithms shape who gets police attention, medical care, or financial opportunities—democracy itself becomes data-driven.
And in Thiel’s world, that’s exactly the point.
📢 What’s Coming in This Series
In Part III: We dive into Anduril Industries, Thiel’s next-generation defense tech company using AI to militarize the border and automate surveillance across land, sea, and sky.🚀