Palantir and Government Surveillance History

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 nine eleven 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 was 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, th- 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 t-to

what Palantir ended up doing. It was called Chiliad, and he teamed up with

Christine Maxwell to do that.