Yes, their contracts reach every branch of the US military, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Space Force. Yes, it is used by Ukraine and Israel in their military efforts. And now a 400 billion market cap, bigger than Intel and IBM combined. On the surface, it’s easy to point at Palantir and say, there’s big brother. But here’s the twist I wasn’t expecting. Palantir isn’t the real villain. This is going to be an unpopular opinion. But you need to hear the truth. The threat isn’t the software. The threat is us. It’s the voters who cheer age verification laws without seeing the tracking implications.

It’s the users who buy ring cameras and smart devices that feed data upstream. It’s the local governments wiring our streets with flock cameras and LPRs. It’s the users who choose phones that capture locations 24 seven. It’s all of us being cavalier about privacy because safety sounds good in the moment. We built the data empire and now tools like Palantir turned into super intelligence for governments, militaries, anyone with access. It can be used for good, but it’s ripe for abuse. Stay with me. I’m going to show you exactly how Palantir works, where it’s deployed, including Ukraine, and why we’re the ones who handed over the keys.

You’re not going to look at surveillance the same way again. And at the end, I see a flaw in the Palantir model. Not everyone is vulnerable to Palantir surveillance. Average people just wanting to disappear from mass surveillance can accomplish some of that. But only if you understand the hooks of the data. Stay right there. Palantir has no data. This is the main spoiler and I will state it up front. And this is kind of surprising. What do we think of when we think of mass surveillance? We imagine cameras everywhere, wiretapping of communications, capturing copies of emails and SMS, an eye in the sky, tracking all our movements, a central database of all people’s locations at any given moment, satellites that can capture exact details from miles up in the sky, cell traffic traced and triangulated, automatic license plate readers recording every car, electronic records of health care visits, vaccinations, purchases, IRS records, credit card payments, and now even every click on the internet.

But here’s the funny part. As much as a lot of this is attributed to Palantir, it actually does not collect any of this data. Google does. Facebook does. Amazon does. Apple does. Microsoft does. Your local government does. Your state government does. And of course, the biggest of them all, the US federal government collects it all. And we already know it from Snowden. So one of the biggest collectors of data is of course, the surveillance monster that is the NSA. And the CIA was supposed to focus on external threats, but it appears it has been repurposed to also identify internal threats.

And now without any limits, limits imposed prior to the Patriot Act of 2001, all canceled by 9-11. In our imaginations, we are actually thinking in our heads of analysts at Palantir working in front of a computer doing active surveillance, controlling the cameras, sending instructions to operatives across the nation. And that image would be wrong. The operators of these systems are no different than they ever were. It will be the NSA and CIA analysts, the military planners, the FBI, the police agencies, the local governments. They are the users. They are the ones conducting the operations.

And in the military environment, they’re the ones initiating the kill chain. What does Palantir actually do? Palantir is actually a software toolkit that is meant to make sense of large amounts of disparate databases. Let’s talk about a military example. The military has the surveillance satellites that can capture imagery of the entire earth. Military logistic databases lay out the positioning of every type of armed force with their equipment all over the world. Intelligence data compiles information on movements of troops, including men and materiel, in every area of possible conflict. Military strategies mock up plans for defense and offense in various scenarios.

Technical documents lay out the application of each weapon system and identifying what is best suited for a given purpose. And those goes on and on with supply lines, communication systems, maintenance, and repair capabilities of both allies and global opponents. The problem is that these are all in thousands of databases and someone has to manually pore through each of these and no one in the past had a good big picture view of the situation. Here’s just a sample video from Palantir itself. By replicating the content of the military databases and then creating new relationships between the data and using a software interface that can intelligently find the data and mesh them logically using AI, Palantir basically creates the illusion of a God’s eye view.

The all-seeing eye, which is actually where the name Palantir comes from, it was from the Palantir Globe from Lord of the Rings. Gotham foundry and AIP. The main pieces of software that drives the implementation of Palantir at some government facility is Gotham. This is often described as the operating system of defense. It combines the disparate data sources I mentioned earlier, intel feeds, satellite imagery into one giant data model where a military planner can do mission planning, investigations, real-time decision making in the intelligence and military applications. This is enabled by graphical tools that can do things like heat maps, mapping of assets, relationship mapping, and even precise targeting.

For example, Palantir is used by Ukraine for target acquisition and just to give you an example of the power of combining databases, Palantir was able to identify cell traffic coming from Russian positions because it was hooked up to cell network databases. Apparently the Russian communications were spotty and a lot of officers use cell phones and from what I read this enabled pretty precise targeting. The second side of Palantir is called foundry and this is more for enterprise use and the application is the same. Combining databases related to business information and providing management with tools to analyze the business as a whole from the supply chains to delivery to quality control, all previously viewed as separate pieces of data instead of an integrated whole.

AIP or artificial intelligence platform is used to enhance both Gotham and foundry with an LLM interface that allows the data to be extracted and analyzed in totality with intelligence as well as to enable automated agents to execute functions in the enterprise. Data comes from the clients. What is key in all of these use cases is that the data provided to Gotham foundry and AIP really come from the clients themselves, the government agencies or the internal data of the enterprise. To highlight this point, the CEO of Palantir, Alex Karp, who really has been running the day-to-day of Palantir since the beginning, does not even have a security clearance so he’s not even allowed to see the government data.

Only the engineers with security clearances can interface with government data from the intelligence agencies, for example, and even then they are just used in the build-up process. Now even the updates to the software are done independently of the data using a technology they call Apollo. This means that on-site presence of Palantir associates is not even needed to maintain the software. The point of this is to highlight that operators of these Palantir systems are done primarily by the usual expected operators, NSA and CIA analysts, spies, military operators, law enforcement, and government officials.

There’s an interesting story by the way where the CTO of JPMorgan Chase, who was an early Palantir client, used Palantir for internal surveillance and was tracking email messages and actions of executives within JPMorgan. So this was the internal user of the system who actually abused the capability of Palantir and thus this is the real source of potential surveillance in cases where a Palantir type of system is enabled. Leadership of Palantir. One interesting thing about the leadership of Palantir is that the original founder Peter Thiel is a well-known name in right-wing circles.

He would post statements early on like, will we have more security with less privacy or less security with more privacy? Often pitting figures like Dick Cheney against the ACLU. And it’s comments like these that raised the specter of Palantir being focused on mass surveillance. But the more interesting figure which I learned more about lately is Alex Karp. Alex is the CEO of Palantir and is the one actively involved in operations, while Thiel is more of the finance here. Alex Karp was raised as an ultra progressive and has no tech background. He is a doctorate in philosophy and he’s an enigmatic and typically weird image of a billionaire.

He actually originally believed in opposite things from Thiel but they were friends from law school at Stanford. So it’s not your typical Dick Cheney type of hawk. Yet he positioned Palantir clearly as a tool of the Western democracies. He refuses to have contracts with potential adversaries of the United States. He’s even stated clearly that we have a right to be weird in our private lives and his own secretive private life as an unmarried man with multiple partners demonstrates this. And as I said earlier he doesn’t even want to have a security clearance because he thinks it will subject him to restrictions from the government even though he deals with government three-letter agencies all day.

He does love the drama though and I think Alex Karp enjoys having Palantir be described as being used to kill. He thinks it keeps the stock value up. The reality as I said is that it is the military and intelligence operatives that use Palantir data to kill. That does not change. Palantir is not in that loop. So Palantir being part of the kill chain is hyperbole. Where is the threat? Folks, when I watch all the videos especially from people who are privacy focused and using Palantir as the clickbait, I think it is a disservice because it takes the focus away from the real problem.

My view here will be unpopular because I’m the privacy guy that has the appearance of defending Palantir. But I’m not defending Palantir. It’s just that if it’s not Palantir then some other company will take its place and nothing would change. The problem has not really changed from when Snowden revealed the mass surveillance issue. The various three-letter agencies are all engaged in extreme mass surveillance and the intensity of this at the federal level will surprise you so I will state them all. But it also now permeated into states and local governments and new entities like Celebrite have created alternative platforms preferred by law enforcement.

The threat has not diminished. It has increased. Let me just focus on the data threat to normal U.S. citizens and exclude the military data and foreign persons from this analysis. First of all, average people in the U.S. are subject to normal data collection from payroll data, social security information, health information, vaccination records, IRS data, even publicly available credit reports, public records, driver’s licenses, banking records, credit and monetary transaction records, court records, traffic violations, phone records, and so on. All of this data is keyed into your real name, your address, your citizenship status, your credit rating, your phone records.

So you can assume that if Palantir is assigned to be a contractor for a particular government agency then all this information is immediately part of the database. That’s an incredibly big start and no surveillance is even involved yet. Now we include the surveillance elements. Using AT&T peering stations, the NSA has been collecting your emails. Using the prison program, all your phone records are being collated and captured. Using voice print tracking, anyone can be identified by voice. Using cell tracking data, MZs of phones can give positions of people. Using the CALEA law, every SMS message is recorded and tracked.

Using the location data collected by cell bright and other such firms, phones reveal every location. Using flock cameras and automatic license plate readers, ALPRs, there’s a trace of every car and where it’s going. Using cameras in intersections, cameras record who’s in the car. Using ring cameras, private videos of people’s movements are captured and made available to law enforcement. These are the pieces that law enforcement has access to, which means these are the databases that will be linked to each other in a Palantir enabled system using Gotham. Non-Palantir accessible databases. The problem is even broader than the Palantir issue.

Some data is owned by private firms that are not shared. The biggest of this is Google’s data. Google has the Google Sensor Vault, which tracks the location of every person with a phone 24-7. While Google shares this data with law enforcement on a case-by-case basis, they have not given unfettered access to have this data captured by the likes of Palantir. And as I demonstrated in a recent video, Google using your Google ID can capture all of your internet clicks and record it in their database, basically giving a clear indication of all your internet actions.

Facebook has immense data on every user of Facebook, including every connection of every person with each other, both publicly or privately via WhatsApp. While some engineers at Palantir have been involved with capturing some Facebook data from the Cambridge Analytical debacle in 2016, there is no direct access to this data from Palantir today. The problem is that these companies have enough data by themselves, and they are the bigger threat because they actually collect data. If this data is ever joined to government data, we are truly zocked. Heads up. Do you get this? We have accepted this.

We have accepted because we don’t care that most of our phones are tracking us constantly. We don’t complain when local governments put cameras and ALPRs in every corner. We don’t complain when new laws lay out a requirement that you supply ID for everything. This show ID law has the common label of Know Your Customer, or KYC, and is frequently a requirement with getting cell phone service. And now here’s the new layer, H-Verification. So now your internet access will be tracked because you, the voters, chose to enable H-Verification via KYC, show ID.

The result, every access on the internet will be trackable to your identity, and that will be in a database, and that database will be integrated into Palantir, and that will be used by your government. And why is this a problem? It is a problem by those who know. Having no anonymity in anything means that you will be afraid to speak out depending on who is in power. The lack of anonymity instills fear and silences the masses that don’t want any trouble. They don’t want to be hiding anything, so the solution is silence.

And the fact of that is a limited source of information to make decisions that can be used to select an elected official. Basically, it makes a population easy to control and for the powerful to remain in power. How to evade Palantir surveillance. Although I label this Palantir surveillance, it is actually more properly labeled as how to create government mass surveillance. And surprisingly, the answer is simple. So far, not everything we do requires KYC or ID. In other words, the less we supply ID, the better chance that what we are doing does not get attached to our name.

The primary index of the government databases which power Palantir are identity databases. Name, address, social security number, phone number with KYC, matching email, IP address, and the MZ of the cell phone. These are your typical identifiers. Thus, when we connect to the internet and do our social media by being aware of which areas require KYC and which don’t, we can partition our lives and have a little bit of pseudo anonymity. Pseudo anonymity means that whatever name we use on the internet is not directly attached to our real identity. Thus, it prevents direct tracking links.

This is not a simple task. It involves being conscious of email addresses used, segregating phone numbers by purpose, avoiding contactless capture, using VPNs to anonymize an IP address, using phones that don’t capture your location 24-7, and generally not using a real name. And upcoming threats, including preventing AI agents with see-what-you-see technology from stooping on your device like a Windows Recall. I have many videos discussing these. The main focus of this channel is pseudo anonymity because that breaks the bonds that enable mass surveillance. This is why I’m truly angered by the age verification laws and the laws related to child safety in the EU and the UK.

These laws are covered for surveillance. Enable them and you feed into a volunteer database and you will become a future victim. Final thoughts I need to refocus you all. The threat comes from the data collection. Instead of focusing on volunteer, why are you all ignoring the actual organizations collecting the data? Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, three-letter agencies, state government, local government. Stop the laws that enable data collection and you blunt the privacy effects of having a volunteer. Stop using devices that give data to the private companies. Folks, if you’re serious about privacy, come join us at Braxme.

It’s a growing community where all real privacy people hang out. No censorship, no nonsense. While you’re there, check out the tools we actually built and use ourselves. These are all no KYC solutions, no ID. Braxmail, unlimited illnesses, no IP leaks. Brax virtual phone, real, anonymous, unlisted phone numbers. Bites VPN, no logs, piehole DNS, no big unknown corporation. The Google phones and more in the store. The Brax 3 phone second batch is open for pre-order right now at Braxtech.net. The first batch sold out shortly after release. Big thanks to everyone supporting us on Patreon, locals, and YouTube memberships.

You keep this channel alive. See you next time. [tr:trw].

See more of Rob Braxman Tech on their Public Channel and the MPN Rob Braxman Tech channel.