Palantir and Total Information Awareness

Peter Thiel, um, as an example, uh, Palantir has been in the

news-

Yeah

... right? He's a co-founder of that. So how was Palantir created?

Well, there was this company

that was being run, or not company, sorry, it was a government, um,

program after 9/11 called Total Information Awareness.

It was housed within the Pentagon's DARPA office, and

the man they chose to put in charge of that was John Poindexter, who was the

highest ranking member of the Reagan administration to be indicted for his role

in

Iran-Contra. Um, which again, the continuity of government stuff

is, is relevant here. So, um, eventually,

uh, you know, it launches and whatever, but, uh, people un- are, are

outraged by it because as they rightly point out, as they rightly pointed out,

um, it would, uh, eliminate constitutional protections of

Americans' rights, specifically the right to privacy,

among other things.

It was a huge surveillance dragnet, and its goal wasn't just to,

um, you know, surveil everything.

It was to, um,

predict crime before it happens, predict terror attacks before it happens.

I mean, it's like Minority Report-

Yeah

... was basically the end goal of it.

Um, and so after all the pushback, they changed the name to Terrorist

Information Awareness and try and rebrand. Oh, it's not total. We're not gonna...

We are still gonna surveil innocent Americans, but we're focusing on the

terrorists. You know, they did all this stuff to try

and rebrand it.

Uh, but Congress defunded it, but in, hidden in that bill, Congress allowed

aspects of it to continue. Um, and essentially, um,

I argue in, in my work on Palantir that an effort was made to privatize

large aspects of TIA as Palantir.

Because when Alex Karp and, and Peter Thiel were, were setting it up,

they went to John Poindexter through this guy named Richard Perle, uh, who is

a, a ne- longstanding neocon actor with, uh, very extensive ties

also to the state of Israel. He was, like, caught in the '70s giving classified

information to Israel's embassy and should have gone to jail

and somehow did not.

Um, and had a lot of ties also to Netanyahu's

first government.

And he, Richard Perle is the guy that connected, uh, Thiel, Karp to

Poindexter, and they wanted, they basically wanted to talk to

Poindexter because

they wanted to recreate Total Information Awareness and saw him as

the godfather of modern mass surveillance.

And, um, in doing so, uh, they basically,

uh, you know, Peter Thiel teams up with In-Q-Tel,

the CIA's venture capital firm.

Uh, Alex Karp has said on record that the intended clients of Palantir from

the

beginning was the CIA. And, you know, uh, the CIA was their

first client for their first six years as a company.

Uh, their top developers went to Langley, Virginia, which is CIA headquarters-

Yep

... every two weeks just so that, show the CIA their project, uh,

their product and

have them tweak it to their liking.

And during that period of time, uh, one of the pe- top people at the CIA

that would

have been involved in that is this guy named Alan Wade, uh, who

was also intimately involved with Total Information Awareness.

And if you look at how Total Information Awareness was described, its privacy

protections, it's exactly the same as the way Palantir

sold their stuff, uh,

later on.

So there's an insane amount of overlap, and what's crazy here is

that Alan Wade a few years prior had created, um,

a Homeland Security software program that was also

pre-crime-esque and similar to, to what Palantir ended up doing.

It was called Chiliad, and he teamed up with Christine Maxwell to

do that