On May 30, the New York Times revealed that the Trump administration tapped Palantir Technologies to create a database with unprecedented amounts of private information on every American citizen.
This database could hypothetically be sold, hacked, or used by our own government to go after Trump’s critics, blackmail elected officials, and expand surveillance powers beyond anything we’ve seen before.
Palantir is here to disrupt. And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp
We’ve known for months that the Trump White House and DOGE were violating government policies in their efforts to compile private data from as many agencies as possible. But today’s news explains where that data is going (and, to some extent, who has access to it). It’s unclear when Palantir became involved, but signs point to the end of March.
Palantir is also attempting to sell one of its products to the agencies that refused to bend to DOGE’s demands, including the Social Security Administration and the IRS. The product, called Foundry, is a data collection and analysis tool that would potentially allow the company to merge new data as it’s collected by those agencies with the data already taken from other institutions.
Foundry is already in use at the Dept. of Homeland Security, Health and Human Services, and at least two other agencies.
Privacy advocates, student unions, and labor rights organizations are among those who have sued to stop Trump’s data collection efforts. Palantir’s involvement also gives a powerful tech company access to this data, and its CEO, Alex Karp, doesn’t exactly have a benign agenda, hoping to cash in on American techno-militarism. Musk too has plans for government data, using his AI, Grok, to analyze it.
The New Republic
Your bank account number. Place of birth. Income from gambling. Mother’s maiden name. How much alimony you’ve paid. In all, the federal government wants to combine more than 310 categories of private information on each and every one of us.
The company, co-founded by tech billionaire and Christian nationalist Peter Thiel (J.D. Vance’s primary backer), has already received more than $900 million worth of government contracts this year. According to The New York Times, at least three DOGE members formerly worked at Palantir, while two others worked at other companies funded by Thiel.
Palantir’s own employees have urged the company to step back from the Trump administration, but there’s too much incentive to turn down this opportunity. If Palantir combines the government’s data with the social media, internet usage, and other digital data it already has on Americans, it will own the single greatest spy machine ever known to man.
While this concern has not come up in our research, it’s worth considering the consequences of Foundry being installed in government agencies; the program will still be there when Trump leaves office. The GOP’s tech billionaire donors could potentially use that data to influence elections or even blackmail future administrations after Trump leaves office. The list of potential uses for this much information on the American public is endless.
Editor’s Note: We do our best not to editorialize or overstate the problem when adding to the Trump Timeline. It seems fair to call these data profiles “blackmail profiles” considering that respected news agencies have gone as far as calling this data tool “an unprecedented spy machine.” Truthfully, this collection of our data is such a huge risk to our privacy and our national security that the potential for blackmail may be minuscule compared to its eventual uses.
