Palantir
Folder: 02 - THE MANAGED Source note: SRC - Palantir
What This Note Is
Every other company in this vault harvests data to sell advertising.
Palantir harvests data to give governments and militaries the ability to find, track, target, and remove people.
The distinction matters. Meta wants to sell you shoes. Palantir wants to help the state decide what to do with you.
This is not hyperbole. It is in their own contracts, their own CEO’s statements, and their own product names.
The Name
Palantir is named after the seeing stones in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings — objects that allowed their holders to see events across great distances and into other minds.
In Tolkien’s story the seeing stones were corrupted. Those who looked into them could be shown whatever the dark lord wanted them to see.
Peter Thiel named the company after these objects deliberately. Whether he intended the full implication of that choice is a question I. The Observer holds. theory
The Origin — CIA From Day One
In 2003 Peter Thiel — co-founder of PayPal, libertarian venture capitalist, member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group — incorporated Palantir Technologies.
The stated mission: help governments catch terrorists without violating civil liberties. Adapt PayPal’s fraud detection systems to identify threats in large datasets.
Every major Silicon Valley VC passed. Sequoia’s chairman reportedly doodled through the entire pitch meeting. Kleiner Perkins told them they were doomed to fail.
The only investor who believed in the company from the beginning was In-Q-Tel — the venture capital arm of the CIA.
In-Q-Tel invested $2 million in 2004 to fund Palantir’s prototype. The CIA was their first real client. The intelligence community was their first real market.
Palantir did not find its way to the CIA eventually. The CIA was there at the beginning. verified
The Products
Palantir Gotham Palantir’s flagship government and military intelligence platform. Designed to integrate data from multiple siloed sources — CIA databases, FBI databases, NSA databases, foreign intelligence — and surface connections that human analysts would miss.
By 2013 leaked documents confirmed Gotham was being used by at least twelve US government agencies including the CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, and the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization. verified
The CIA and FBI — whose databases had never been connected — were linked for the first time through Palantir software.
Palantir Foundry Launched 2015. The commercial version of the same architecture. Designed for private sector clients: healthcare, finance, manufacturing, supply chain. Currently inside the NHS in the United Kingdom.
Palantir AIP AI Platform. Launched 2023. Integrates large language models into Palantir’s existing data infrastructure. Gives government and military operators the ability to query battlefield data, immigration databases, and healthcare records in natural language. verified
Palantir Apollo The operating system that deploys and maintains Palantir software across all environments — classified government clouds, battlefield edge devices, commercial servers. The plumbing that connects everything together.
The CEO’s Own Words
Alex Karp — PhD in neoclassical social theory, Palantir CEO since 2004 — has been unusually direct about what the company does and what he thinks of people who object to it.
In a 2020 interview with Axios: “Our software is used on occasion to kill people. If you’re looking for a terrorist in the world now you’re probably using our government product and you’re probably doing the operation that actually takes out the person in another product we built.” verified
In February 2025, responding to critics of Palantir’s ICE contracts: “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.” verified
These are not anonymous sources or leaked documents. These are statements the CEO made in public interviews.
ImmigrationOS — The Deportation Machine
In May 2025 ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million no-bid contract to build a platform called ImmigrationOS.
Contract Federal ID: 70CTD022FR0000170 verified
What ImmigrationOS does: verified
- Integrates data from government databases including passport records, Social Security files, IRS tax data, licence plate reader data, and medical records
- Identifies individuals prioritised for removal
- Provides “near real-time visibility” on self-deportations
- Generates confidence scores on individuals’ current addresses
- Populates a map with potential deportation targets
- Produces a dossier on each person
- Streamlines the logistics of deportation from identification to removal
The contract runs through September 2027.
ICE agents using Palantir’s existing ELITE platform — Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement — used addresses from medical records to locate individuals for deportation raids in January 2026. verified
In January 2026 ICE agents conducting deportation operations fatally shot two US citizens: Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, and Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse. Both were killed during operations where Palantir software was in use. verified
The civil liberties risk: The American Immigration Council warned that a system built to target undocumented immigrants could easily be expanded to target any American. The same architecture — aggregate data, generate confidence scores, produce dossiers, populate a map — works on any population. The question is who decides who becomes a target. credible
The conflict of interest: Stephen Miller — the Trump administration’s chief architect of immigration policy — holds a substantial financial stake in Palantir. The man designing the policy and the company building the infrastructure to execute it are financially connected. verified
The NHS — Your Medical Records
as a Surveillance Asset
In 2023 Palantir won a £330 million contract with NHS England to deliver the Federated Data Platform (FDP) — a centralised system that integrates patient data across NHS trusts in England. verified
NHS England’s October 2025 planning framework mandated that all trusts and integrated care boards must onboard to the FDP. The contract runs until 2027. verified
What is being put inside Palantir’s platform: Patient records. Medical histories. Appointment data. Diagnostic data. Prescription records. The most sensitive personal data that exists about a human being — the record of their body, their illnesses, their treatments, their vulnerabilities.
The concern raised by doctors, health workers, and civil society:
The British Medical Association voted at its annual meeting in June 2025 to lobby against Palantir’s involvement in the NHS, citing lack of transparency, a track record of discriminatory policing software in the US, and close links to a US government that shows little regard for international law. verified
The Good Law Project took legal action after NHS England published a heavily redacted contract — particularly opaque on how personal data would be used. verified
Medact — a health justice charity — published a briefing in March 2026 warning that Palantir’s “highly interoperable” software has “drag and drop” capabilities that could allow a future UK government to link NHS data with Home Office immigration enforcement, HMRC tax records, DVLA vehicle data, banks, and police databases. verified
This is not hypothetical. Reform UK’s August 2025 policy document “Operation Restoring Justice” explicitly states it would use new legislation to automatically share data between the Home Office, NHS, HMRC, DVLA, banks, and police — and has pledged mass deportations. verified
The infrastructure being built by Palantir for the NHS could become — with a single change of government and a change of law — the infrastructure of a mass deportation operation. Exactly as it has in the United States.
Palantir’s response: “Palantir has no intention of and no means of using the data in the way the Medact report is suggesting. To do so would be illegal and in breach of contract.” verified
The honest note: This was also the position of Palantir’s use of medical records for ICE targeting — until it wasn’t. The ELITE platform used medical addresses to locate deportation targets in January 2026. Intentions and capabilities are different things. credible
The Military and Intelligence
Contracts
Palantir’s government revenue accounts for just over half of its total income. Its clients include: verified
- CIA
- NSA
- FBI
- DHS
- US Army
- US Air Force
- US Marine Corps
- US Special Operations Command
- NATO
- GCHQ (UK)
- Ministry of Defence (UK)
- Multiple EU member state intelligence agencies
- Israeli military
In 2024 Palantir became a strategic partner of Israel in military technology. Both Thiel and Karp visited Israel in 2024 to formalise the partnership.
In June 2025 the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories published a report accusing tech firms of actively “aiding and abetting” Israel’s crimes — specifically highlighting Palantir’s supply of data platforms and automated decision-making systems.
Storebrand Asset Management — one of the largest Nordic asset managers — divested from Palantir in October 2024 citing its AI-based predictive policing systems supporting Israeli surveillance of Palestinians. verified
NATO signed a contract with Palantir for an AI-powered battlefield command system in 2024 — rapid data collation, target tracking, and decision-making. verified
Predictive Policing
Palantir has provided predictive policing software to police departments across the United States and Europe for over a decade.
In Los Angeles alone Palantir helped the LAPD analyse data ranging from licence plate photos to rap sheets, traffic tickets, foreclosed property listings, and more — surfacing patterns and generating lists of individuals predicted to commit crimes before they commit them. verified
The fundamental problem with predictive policing is that it trains on historical data. Historical policing data reflects historical policing bias. Systems trained on that data reproduce that bias at scale — and give it the authority of an algorithm. credible
The BMA cited Palantir’s “track record of creating discriminatory policing software in the US” as a primary reason for opposing its NHS contract. verified
The Corporate Architecture of Power
Palantir implemented a governance structure featuring a voting trust for Class F common stock — a mechanism that centralises control among the founders regardless of public shareholder ownership.
This means that despite being a publicly traded company, Thiel, Karp, and Cohen retain effective control over every major decision. Shareholders cannot override them. verified
In 2024 Palantir was the best performing stock in the S&P 500. Karp received $6.8 billion in total compensation that year. The surveillance state is very profitable. verified
The Honest Assessment
Palantir does not hide what it does. Karp writes books about it. He gives interviews about it. He says his software is used to kill people in public on camera.
The company is not secret. It is simply ignored — because the mechanisms it operates through are institutional, contractual, and governmental rather than consumer-facing.
You will never download Palantir. You will never agree to its terms. You will never see it in the App Store. But if you have ever been to a hospital in England, been stopped by a US police department, crossed a border, filed a tax return, or lived in a country with a government that has signed a Palantir contract — your data has very possibly moved through its systems.
This is what the end of the surveillance pipeline looks like. Every other company in this vault is a data source. Palantir is what the data becomes when it is aimed at you.
See The Managed World See The Planetary Nervous System
The Connection to This Vault
Every thread in the technology section of this vault converges here:
- Meta harvests your social graph
- Google & Alphabet harvests your information diet
- Spotify harvests your emotional state
- Map Applications & Location Tracking harvests your physical movement
- Microsoft harvests what is on your screen
- TikTok harvests your biometric data
Palantir takes all of it — from these sources, from government databases, from healthcare records, from financial records — integrates it, runs it through AI models, and produces actionable intelligence for whoever holds the contract.
It is the beast that eats the data. verified
Linked Notes
The Managed World · The Planetary Nervous System · Surveillance Capitalism · MKUltra · The Pattern of Revelation · Havana Syndrome · CIA Heart Attack Gun · 6G & WiFi Sensing · Digital Privacy & Protection · I. The Observer · SRC - Palantir