--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Noel King: The data analytics company Palantir has been working with the U.S. government for about 15 years on all sorts of things. This year, ICE is going to pay Palantir $30 million to improve how it targets and surveils undocumented immigrants.
--:-- Noel King: And your response to this probably depends to some degree on your politics. But the Trump administration is also expanding Palantir's reach on something that would affect all Americans. The idea is to link together all the data that the government has about us. This is unprecedented.
--:-- Noel King: So anyway, Theo Vaughn freaks out. This sounds crazy, dude. And confronts J.D. Vance. It can tell if your kids can have a limp or whatever. He'll be in the Christmas play.
--:-- Noel King: Veep is like, it's going to be okay. But FYI, I also just learned about this. I actually just read about it earlier today or maybe yesterday.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained, what's Palantir up to?
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--:-- Noel King: This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King, and heretofore, the U.S. government has kept your personal data siloed across many different agencies in the interest of protecting your privacy.
--:-- John Davison: It is a long list, and it depends on the ways that you interact with the government. Some of the ones that are quite common would be income information, certainly your contact information, your sources of income, your charitable donations, all the types of things that many will be familiar with from having filed a tax return before.
--:-- John Davison: So the data that's collected to process your taxes and that information is kept separate from the information that the State Department has about your passport and travel records, which is kept separate from Social Security data, which is kept separate from information about you if you are an immigrant or if you've come under an investigation at one time or another by a law enforcement agency.
--:-- John Davison: Talking about driver's licenses, bank and credit cards, birth and marriage certificates, pension information, home and work addresses, school records, immigration and naturalization records, family court records. The most sensitive personal data of millions of Americans.
--:-- John Davison: What happens when you break that down, when you start to pool all of that data together, you consolidate power in a single entity, in a single actor. And that's whoever has access to that system.
--:-- John Davison: And so that can then be used to certainly, as we've seen, attack immigrants. It can be used to generate exaggerated claims of fraud, waste and abuse. It can be used to, in the future, target political opponents.
--:-- John Davison: I say in the future, that's already happening in some cases, to target marginalized groups, ordinary Americans, you name it. Once you build the weapon, there is an enormous range of ways that it can be used to harm the people you dislike or disagree with.
--:-- John Davison: Give me some specifics. We've seen this happen where and how.
--:-- John Davison: I think one of the most alarming examples of this is the agreement that's been reached between the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security.
--:-- John Davison: The IRS is the latest government entity to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security over the crackdown on undocumented immigrants.
--:-- John Davison: That's right. Immigration is now requesting additional information in home addresses of immigrants from the agency where the immigrants are actually filing and paying their taxes.
--:-- John Davison: So, you know, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are conducting really harrowing, stunning enforcement raids and immigration enforcement activities.
--:-- John Davison: And in order to do that, they need a lot of information to identify who they believe are unlawfully present in the country.
--:-- John Davison: They went to the IRS and they said, can we have information about non-citizens who are taxpayers still?
--:-- John Davison: And the IRS, a lot of the civil servants, the career folks there, put up quite a fight because they understood that it was a really radical departure from the way the IRS has approached privacy and data protection historically.
--:-- John Davison: And very dubious as a legal matter because there are strict legal safeguards on that information.
--:-- John Davison: But in the end, after a lot of browbeating, the two agencies entered into a memo that permits a certain degree of sharing of information from the IRS to Homeland Security.
--:-- John Davison: And so there you see information that these taxpayers provided in good faith so that they could pay into the funding of the U.S. government.
--:-- John Davison: And then it's being taken and turned against them and used for the purposes of deportation and surveillance and immigration enforcement.
--:-- John Davison: I know there's some percentage of Americans who will say, all right, you've just given me example of people who are unlawfully in the United States. They're breaking the law.
--:-- John Davison: I'm not breaking law. I follow the rules. Why should I be worried about this?
--:-- John Davison: First of all, many of the people that have been subject to immigration enforcement, it has developed that they are in fact legally present in the country.
--:-- John Davison: The government has always had a lot of data on us, but as you said, it has kept it separate across different agencies.
--:-- John Davison: Where did that start and why exactly?
--:-- John Davison: This country has a long history of being concerned about privacy. It's baked into the Constitution in the form of the Fourth Amendment.
--:-- John Davison: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated.
--:-- John Davison: But it was in the 1960s when computerized systems of records were becoming increasingly common.
--:-- John Davison: There was a proposal put forward to construct a national data center that would essentially pool all of that information in a one-stop shopping kind of structure.
--:-- John Davison: Report of the Committee on the Preservation and Use of Economic Data, 1965.
--:-- John Davison: Such a federal data center should have the authority to obtain computer tapes and other machine-readable data produced by all federal agencies.
--:-- John Davison: That proposal provoked a lot of backlash, a lot of concern.
--:-- John Davison: New York Times headline, March 15, 1967.
--:-- John Davison: Professor warns of robot snooper. Tell senators data bank could destroy privacy.
--:-- John Davison: My own personal reaction to the proposal for a national data center was, I suppose, similar to that of most citizens.
--:-- John Davison: Intense apprehension at the prospect of still more invasions of personal privacy.
--:-- John Davison: I think folks have a sort of instinctive understanding of why they should be afraid of Big Brother.
--:-- John Davison: And that's what was motivating the response to the proposal at the time.
--:-- John Davison: Then... Mr. Nixon says emphatically that the White House is in no way involved in the burglary and bugging of the Democratic headquarters, and he'll have no further comment on that matter.
--:-- John Davison: In Watergate, there were additional abuses proven that members of the Nixon administration had dipped into systems of personal information to carry out retribution and to target political opponents.
--:-- John Davison: And those two things together in 1974 added up to the Privacy Act.
--:-- John Davison: There will be hot pursuit of tough laws to prevent illegal invasion of privacy in both government and private activities.
--:-- John Davison: And that was Congress stepping in and saying, we have to limit the ability of agencies to collect information, to transmit the information.
--:-- John Davison: It's a system of restrictions that limit the ability to share that data within government.
--:-- John Davison: And now we're seeing exactly the type of consolidation and aggregation of data that Congress was afraid about when it passed the law in the first place.
--:-- John Davison: Let me ask you a question. Americans are people who think a lot and worry a lot about privacy.
--:-- John Davison: And many of us, and I would actually include myself in this, can't exactly put our finger on why.
--:-- John Davison: There's just a sense that if the government has a lot on me, then it might use it.
--:-- John Davison: Does a move like what President Trump is trying to do, does it change our relationship to the government in some way?
--:-- John Davison: We are talking about a government that is determined to eliminate safeguards that were put in place quite intentionally by Congress to prevent the sort of runaway accumulation of power that is made possible by the runaway accumulation of personal information.
--:-- John Davison: And I think it is something to be quite concerned about because you build the surveillance weapon, you don't necessarily need to know every nefarious way that you're going to use it before you build it.
--:-- John Davison: The point is that you've built it, it's available to you, it is a source of tremendous power and that's what we should be worried about even if we can't predict every way today that it's going to be used.
--:-- Noel King: John Davison of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Epic has sued the Trump administration over privacy. The company that the administration has asked to organize all your data? Palantir.
--:-- Noel King: Up next.
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--:-- Noel King: P. R. Palantir is a dangerous tool, Salaman.
--:-- Noel King: We do not know who else may be watching. Or listening to Today Explained.
--:-- Noel King: I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I'm Joseph Cox, a co-founder of 404 Media and the host of the 404 Media podcast.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Palantir can be rather secretive. And we called Joseph because he's got sources there.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And those sources are yapping to Joseph about what's going on on the inside.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Palantir, at its root, is a data analysis company, which sounds very boring, but it does have serious consequences.
--:-- Joseph Cox: They specialize in being able to take all sorts of disparate pieces of data, stuff that ordinarily wouldn't be linked together.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Maybe it's in strange formats. Maybe it's messy.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And it brings it all into one interface or platform and makes it very easy to draw connections, search for different things or drill down onto certain pieces of information as well.
--:-- Joseph Cox: You can imagine it's used in banks, for example, to maybe look for fraud.
--:-- Joseph Cox: It could be used by health services to look for patterns there as well.
--:-- Joseph Cox: They're sort of data agnostic in that way.
--:-- Joseph Cox: What has Palantir been doing for the U.S. government to this point?
--:-- Joseph Cox: Palantir has been working with the U.S. government for a very, very long time.
--:-- Joseph Cox: It goes all the way back to wars in the Middle East and the war on terror, when the U.S. had obviously this really large problem with IEDs, and all of these soldiers were getting blown up, and they had all of this data such as where the explosions were happening, the fingerprints of maybe the bomb makers, the materials being used.
--:-- Joseph Cox: But this data was very spread out and it wasn't really in one place and nobody could really make sense of it.
--:-- Joseph Cox: So they started to use Palantir and apparently that was quite impactful for them being able to find out how to combat this problem.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Our team spent three days gathering a wide variety of open source data, then integrated them into Palantir to develop a clearer picture of the Afghan insurgency.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Everybody's clamoring for it. All the special forces are using it. our allies are using it, our intelligence communities are all using Palantir.
--:-- Joseph Cox: The military's begging for it.
--:-- Joseph Cox: After then, obviously that's very much a defense and an intelligence agency in a military context, Palantir eventually moved into, you know, local and state law enforcement, essentially working with agencies around the country on that.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And of course, most consequentially at the moment is Palantir's work with immigration and customs enforcement.
--:-- Joseph Cox: What has it been doing with ICE?
--:-- Joseph Cox: So Palantir has been working with ICE in some capacity for quite some time.
--:-- Joseph Cox: ICE already has these data tools which allows it to bring together different sorts of information about people, social security number, addresses, personal information, all of that sort of thing.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And Palantir has been contracted for years to work on that tool.
--:-- Joseph Cox: What has changed recently is that, according to leaks I got from inside Palantir, ICE has become a much more mature partner for the company.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And that means they're taking on a much more hands-on role developing this custom solution, which they're calling Immigration OS, which is basically supposed to supercharge what ICE is able to do with the information it has at the moment, or what information it's going to have in the future as well.
--:-- Joseph Cox: When I first revealed the $30 million extension to this contract, when you go into the procurement records and you read, well, why did Palantir just get $30 million?
--:-- Joseph Cox: The record says it was for, quote, complete target analysis of known populations, end quote, which was obviously very ominous.
--:-- Joseph Cox: So I started looking into it more, got leaks from inside Palantir, and is basically to track the location of people who've been marked for deportation in real time.
--:-- Joseph Cox: It is supposed to make ICE's work more efficient, effective, and in the eyes of Palantir, fair and accurate and transparent.
--:-- Joseph Cox: They believe, well, if we take the data and we clean it and we present it in a really accessible way, this will actually make it easier and better for ICE to be able to execute its functions in a very fair manner.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Now, obviously, I think a lot of people might think that is naive when ICE is doing things which aren't necessarily based on the data itself, such as having masks, people with no identification, pulling people off the street.
--:-- Joseph Cox: But that is how Palantir sees it internally.
--:-- Joseph Cox: OK, OK. Independent of its existing contract with ICE and with other parts of the American government, the Trump administration recently said it was going to partner with Palantir in an effort to make all of our data more accessible and efficient.
--:-- Joseph Cox: People seem very unnerved by this announcement.
--:-- Joseph Cox: This is real. It's not a sci-fi plot.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I fuck with Trump. I really do.
--:-- Joseph Cox: But I don't like the government overstepping its reach to be all in our business.
--:-- Joseph Cox: No one is talking about it, so spread the word.
--:-- Joseph Cox: We'll do a full breakdown of my Substack, link to my bio, subscribe for free, and follow along for more.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And then immediately you saw pushback from supporters, from people who really like Palantir, saying, like, look, these are the good guys.
--:-- Joseph Cox: The public perception of Palantir seems to be both divided and quite different from how the company views itself
--:-- Joseph Cox: Palantir is generating new data and this is often something the company will stress It is instead bridging gaps between existing data.
--:-- Joseph Cox: But that is still exceptionally powerful and important when you take data in one context and then you weaponize or leverage it for another.
--:-- Joseph Cox: What got me onto covering Palantir journalistically was the clear link between the company's work and immigration enforcement.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And specifically, you have Immigrations and Customs Enforcement driving around, picking up people without identifying themselves, wearing masks.
--:-- Joseph Cox: You have flights to El Salvador violating court orders.
--:-- Joseph Cox: it's not only the context of the data that has changed, it is the context of the democracy that has changed.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And I think that is really key to understand for Palantir's perception.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I've read Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, his book, and he very much frames Palantir as, you know, a force for good.
--:-- Joseph Cox: We are here to uphold Western democratic values.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Judge democracy by the fruits it bears.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And we make the mistake at our peril in the West to forget, if we do not deliver fruits to our people in the form of a better, fairer, healthier society, we will lose people.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I don't know how you square the idea that we are here to uphold Western democratic values while you are providing the technical infrastructure for a government agency that is actively undermining those same values.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I can't logically do that in my head.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I can't ethically find the argument.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And I've sincerely tried to think about it after I've read the leaks I've got from inside Palantir.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And I've even asked my Palantir sources, like, what do you think about this cognitive dissonance between upholding Western values and then facilitating the activity of this particular agency?
--:-- Joseph Cox: And one of the sources said it was absolutely unhinged.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Another said, is the classic Palantir doublespeak?
--:-- Joseph Cox: They talk about these ideals, I only care as far as the public perception sees it.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I don't know if I necessarily agree with that.
--:-- Joseph Cox: That is what my Palantir sources are saying.
--:-- Joseph Cox: But there's absolutely a dissonance there, which I can't really square that circle.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I, against my better judgment, while on vacation, read a very long magazine piece about Alex Karp and found myself really, really curious.
--:-- Joseph Cox: This is an interesting man.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Tell us what we know about him.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Yeah, I would say Alex Karp is pretty different to other tech CEOs.
--:-- Joseph Cox: He went to Stanford, clearly reads a lot of sociology and philosophy.
--:-- Joseph Cox: He met Peter Thiel, the infamous investor and tech mogul.
--:-- Joseph Cox: They co-founded Palantir together.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And I really think from the jump, it was about protecting these Western values, be that the work of the military or other agencies as well.
--:-- Joseph Cox: So a country has to have a border, the educational institutions have to work, the military actually has to be scary, you actually can have things function in a way where the outputs are much greater than the inputs.
--:-- Joseph Cox: When you read Karp's writings about how he sees the tech industry, he really doesn't like what Silicon Valley has become, which is basically a part of the industry that makes food delivery apps and social networks and Uber clones.
--:-- Joseph Cox: In a very derogatory sense, it's my impression when I'm reading his book, he thinks that the tech industry should be much more closely aligned with the state and specifically the American project.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I think the West, as a notion and as a principle upon which it is executed again, is obviously superior.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And not acknowledging that, because by not acknowledging it or denying it, you could pretend you were smarter or better than you were, has led to enormous problems in our society.
--:-- Joseph Cox: And also for the sake of...
--:-- Joseph Cox: So question is, how powerful does Palantir become? If it becomes the company that under the Trump administration takes control of merging all of our data across agencies, what does that do for it?
--:-- Joseph Cox: You can almost see a situation where Palantir becomes the technical infrastructure for the US government and it becomes so deeply embedded into different agencies that it would be nonsensical to sever these Palantir contracts.
--:-- Joseph Cox: Carp uses the word dominance when talking about his projects and i think an important thing to understand about palantir is that they know tech is imperfect they know their tech can be imperfect they know the government policy can be imperfect and they even admit that there will be mistakes made in immigration enforcement as well but they don't think either of those are a reason to stop progress.
--:-- Joseph Cox: They think you need to keep going, you need to keep building.
--:-- Joseph Cox: This is pretty different to how government operates.
--:-- Joseph Cox: I would like to believe a government agency will be very, very careful and will really try to minimise damage as much as possible, which is not to say that Palantir won't do that as well, but it acknowledges that mistakes will be made in this pursuit, but broadly it is to preserve America and the West.
--:-- Noel King: It's Today Explained.
