Palantir was not conceived as a commercial tech product—it was born from the wreckage of a failed government surveillance program. Created by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp as the private successor to DARPA’s Total Information Awareness initiative, Palantir’s mission from the outset was to fuse mass surveillance, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics into a tool for pre-crime governance. Its first and only client for years was the CIA, which deeply shaped the company's development and embedded it into the heart of U.S. intelligence infrastructure.
What emerged was a privatized version of the Panopticon, capable of predictive policing, pandemic modeling, and mass behavioral surveillance. From wastewater analytics during COVID to nationwide intelligence contracts, Palantir is now central to how the U.S. government processes and weaponizes information. But its roots reach even deeper, linking to PROMIS software, Iran-Contra operatives like John Poindexter, and shadowy data systems like Main Core—allegedly a secret list of Americans flagged for detention during “national emergencies.” These systems were not dismantled; they were privatized, insulated from oversight, and embedded across both government and corporate surveillance architectures.
Palantir’s rise is mirrored by other Thiel-backed ventures like Clearview AI and Facebook—technologies spun out of military research, marketed as innovation, and normalized into everyday life. As Whitney Webb reveals, we are already living within a surveillance state designed decades ago, now managed not by public institutions but by unaccountable corporations with intelligence roots and global reach.
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