Palantir's Origins and Surveillance Tactics

Peter Thiel, as an example, Palantir has been in the news, right?

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

Well, there was this company that was being run, not company, sorry.

It was a government 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.

Which, again, the continuity of government stuff is relevant here.

So eventually, you know, it launches and whatever.

But people are

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

it would 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, you know, surveil everything. It was to

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

I mean, it's like minority reporting was basically the end goal of it.

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 going to we are still going to surveil innocent Americans,

but we're focusing on the terrorists.

You know, they did all this stuff to try and rebrand it. But Congress defunded it.

But hidden in that bill,

Congress allowed aspects of it to continue.

And essentially,

I argue in my work on Palantir that an

effort was made to privatize large aspects of TIA as Palantir,

because when Alex Karp

and Peter Thiel were setting it up,

they went to John Poindexter through this guy named Richard Pearl,

who was a longstanding

neocon actor with 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

and had a lot of ties also to Netanyahu's first government.

And he Richard Pearl is the guy that connected 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 in doing so, they basically,

you know, Peter Thiel teams up with In Q Tel, the CIA's venture capital firm.

Alex Karp has said on record that the intended clients

of Palantir from the beginning was the CIA.

And, you know,

the CIA was their first client for their first six years as a company.

Their top developers went to Langley,

Virginia, which is CIA headquarters every two weeks to show the CIA their project,

their product and have them tweak it to their liking.

And during that period of time,

one of the top people at the CIA that would

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

who was also intimately involved with total information awareness.

And if you look

at how total information awareness was described, it's privacy protections.

It's exactly the same as the way Palantir sold their stuff 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

a homeland security software program that was

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

It was called Kiliad,

and he teamed up with Christine Maxwell to do that.