You Know Palantir. Now See How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes.
How one company infiltrated everything from war zones to your medical records.
Palantir wasn’t some accidental byproduct of innovation. It was born to watch you. Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp, and bankrolled by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own tech investment firm (yes, that’s a real thing). Palantir was built from the jump to track, profile, and flag “threats” before they could commit a crime.
Palantir was built to spy. Not in theory but in practice. First in Iraq on enemy insurgents, then in Afghanistan, then on you.
The Origin Story
The CIA fronted the cash, but Palantir kept the keys.
From day one, they refused to hand over the code. This wasn’t about protecting the country after all, it was about leasing surveillance to the highest bidder. If America wanted security, it would have to pay good money for it.
For an agency that thrives on secrecy, the idea of relying on an outside company to run its internal surveillance ops was a step too far.
So the CIA stepped back and Palantir went quiet.
But war creates need and dysfunction, and Palantir knew how to exploit both.
As the Department of Defense flailed with its bloated surveillance platform, Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A), soldiers in Iraq found themselves drowning in data they couldn’t use. Palantir saw an opportunity and offered their brand-new program Gotham.
Gotham wasn’t just software, and it still isn’t now.
Gotham was the prototype for all of the Palantir systems that still exist today. Even in it’s origins, it pulled together reports, coordinates, call records, photos, and social ties, then spit out connection maps and “insights.”
It didn’t need warrants or confirmation. It needed data and trust. The military gave it both.
Gotham started running inside the war machine. Palantir even went as far as sending their own engineers to active combat zones to allow for real-time IT-services. This sold not only the product, but Palantir to the Field Commanders, and ultimately, the U.S. government.
In 2012, the U.S. Army’s Test and Evaluation Command, or ATEC, released a technical report comparing Palantir’s Gotham software to the Army’s internal surveillance system, DCGS-A.
Officially, the result was a tie. Both systems were rated as equally effective, but behind that carefully neutral language was a scandal.
News headlines popped up that reported how Army intel officials had allegedly doctored the results, scrubbing praise for Palantir to protect their own broken system. It wasn’t about what worked. It was about what kept the budget flowing.
Congress launched an investigation.
It was during this investigation in 2013 that a fight with words had exploded onto the House floor involving GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter and Army General Raymond Odierno.
It was about the scandal, and Duncan, was waging a war in Palantir’s honor. At that point, Palantir was no longer just software. It was political.
Interestingly, this is the same Duncan Hunter, who along with his wife Margret, was charged with misappropriating more than $250k in campaign funds.
From 2009-2016, they spent this money on vacations, tuition for their children, and even flying their family's pet rabbit, Eggburt, cross-country.
They both pled guilty.
They did not serve any time because both of them were pardoned by Donald Trump in December 2020. I guess when you argue with an army general for the guy who bankrolled Trump’s rise (Peter Thiel), you get favors like that.
Then came 2016. The start of a bad year. Yes, partially because Trump was the president, but this was also the year that Palantir sued the Army for shutting them out of federal contracts, and won. The court ruled that the government had illegally refused to consider commercial tools like Gotham.
The message was clear… Palantir wasn’t going away.
But they didn’t replace DCGS-A and instead they fused with it. One public failure and one private predator, hardwired into each other. Now they operate as one bloated surveillance organism, feeding off war, profit, and permanent suspicion.
That merger wasn’t just a compromise. Palantir, bloated with contracts and court victories, didn’t stop at the battlefield. It looked back at the country that built it and decided to turn the lens inward onto Americans.
It started in Los Angeles.
The LAPD quietly deployed Palantir’s Gotham system. Officers were handed tools to “connect the dots” a sanitized phrase that really meant labeling people by proximity. If your cousin had a record, if your friend got stopped, if your phone pinged in the wrong place, your name entered the net. No crime needed. Just association.
Then came New Orleans. That one wasn’t just quiet.. it was buried.
From 2012 to 2018, the New Orleans Police Department partnered with Palantir in total secrecy. There were no contracts filed with the city. No disclosure to the public. The deal was brokered through the nonprofit Mayor’s Fund, funded by JP Morgan Chase, and deliberately routed to avoid oversight.
Palantir helped NOPD build predictive policing models that flagged entire neighborhoods as “hot zones” and labeled individuals as “chronic offenders” based on opaque risk scores. People were surveilled, profiled, and harassed without ever knowing their data was being used against them. Not even city council members were told it was happening. It only came to light years later, when investigative journalists blew the lid off.
New York wasn’t far behind.
The NYPD used Palantir to supercharge its dragnet, feeding Gotham arrest records, gang affiliations, license plate scans, and social media scrapes.
The software mapped out entire social ecosystems and spat out "threat scores." This was used by police departments for “predictive policing” and bring people in to warm them they were being watched before ever committing a crime.
Over time, the NYPD started pulling away. They wanted control. They didn’t want to rent suspicion anymore. So they partnered with IBM to build a new system called Cobalt, a alternative that would integrate with the city’s Domain Awareness System. Also, it would let them search by race (what the fuck, NYPD?).
Palantir didn’t just resist. They retaliated.
When NYPD tried to transition off Gotham, Palantir refused to release the department’s own data. The company claimed the information was too complex, too embedded, too tangled in proprietary architecture to export without extra payment. The NYPD had fed Gotham years of intelligence and Palantir locked the door on the way out.
But honestly? By then, Palantir didn’t need the NYPD anymore. The real money, the real power, was waiting at the federal level.
Did you know Palantir has your Medicaid & Medicare data already? Thanks, Obama.
No, seriously. In 2009, the economy was bleeding out and the government scrambled to stop the collapse. Obama had created the The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to fix that. It flooded agencies with cash and just like that, Palantir found its way into the federal bloodstream. So, to keep the message of honesty and transparency, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) was born with it.
America found out in a later announcement from the (at the time) Vice President Joe Biden. Gotham, the same software used to track insurgents and label gang affiliations, was quietly enlisted to monitor Medicaid and Medicare for fraud.
It didn’t matter that it was originally built for war. Now it was watching hospitals. Clinics. Claims. Doctors. Patients.
What they built was infrastructure. Every reimbursement was tracked, every deviation scored. Gotham became a microscope aimed not at terrorists, but at the sick and the poor. The war on waste, they said. A war on public healthcare, in practice.
Then came disease surveillance.
Public health agencies saw how Gotham operated, and they wanted it too. Palantir struck deals with HHS and the CDC. By 2020, the same software was folded into pandemic tracking. Lab results, hospitalizations, vaccine data, demographic trends, contact tracing… all fed into the machine.
And while the public screamed about RFK Jr. proposing a national autism registry, Palantir likely already has one. RFK admitted the registry would use Medicaid & Medicare information.
Now. . . who do we know that was granted access to Medicare & Medicaid data years ago? It’s important to understand that even if Palantir doesn’t have this specific database yet, they have the bones of it, the data for it, and the ability.
It does make you wonder why RFK backed down from the idea, perhaps he found a quiet alternative. We know that Palantir loves secret deals, Peter & Trump have a relationship, and just look at the history with the New Orleans Police Department.
The Feds Love Palantir
By the time Palantir was embedded in hospitals and police departments, the federal government had already started buying in. The FBI wanted a shortcut to answers. The Department of Homeland Security wanted to spot threats before they happened. Palantir was ready.
Gotham became the nervous system of domestic surveillance. It flagged travel, scraped social media, tracked donations and associations, and layered it over criminal databases and facial recognition. You didn’t need to break the law. You just had to show up in the feed.
Homeland Security fed it everything.
Suspicious activity reports. Fusion center data. School alerts. Local intel. The software didn’t change. Only the targets did.
The FBI used Gotham to flag so-called lone wolves and trace digital footprints across timelines. A tweet. A text. A payment. Suddenly you were part of a network. Not criminal. Just close enough.
Then came immigration.
The border was the testing ground. No Miranda. No due process. Just data. And Palantir was eager to turn it into arrests. The company built Investigative Case Management, or ICM, a system that turned scraps of information into full-blown dossiers. School records. Cell logs. Utility bills. Friends. Family. Neighbors. If you were adjacent to risk, you became the risk.
ICM didn’t just store data. It weaponized it. It connected dots, created maps, and flagged names. Probable cause became a suggestion. Deportation became a software output.
Then came FALCON, ICE’s tactical brain. It linked nearly every system Palantir touched. DMV records. Gang databases. Private contractors. Workplace raids. A single search could pull license plates, tax returns, arrest reports, and family connections in seconds. No context. Just results.
FALCON is now being upgraded to ImmigrationOS. A whole different demon that uses everything from utility bills to dark web data. That’s their loop hole. They could take anything and say it came from the dark web, even when it’s actually from places they shouldn’t be sticking their nose.
What started with ICE spread. Border Patrol. USCIS. Local sheriffs under 287(g) agreements.
Anyone with a badge and a login could tap into the machine.
Palantir calls it safety. But safety for who?
This was never about fighting terror. It was about building tools to decide who belongs and who gets erased.
And the border was only the beginning.
Note From The Author:
Palantir is just the beginning; there are others lurking behind the curtain, more than one, more than two, and I’ll be writing about them soon.
I will keep researching and keeping track of the PayPal Billionaire Doom Club & Palantir, and I will keep talking about it.
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Thank you for being here.
— Dissent ♥
This level of surveillance would make the Gestapo, KGB and the CCP flush with envy. This is the movie ‘Minority Report’ made real.
If an AI spits up your name for any reason, the chain reaction will end with your imprisonment, deportation, or execution.
Land of the Free.
The biggest joke is that if they turned their surveillance software to look at themselves, I suspect Thiel and a host of other billionaires who have been part of developing this system would be marked as ‘Public Enemy #1’ in rapid succession. Not to mention people like Johnson, Miller, Bannon, Noem, Patel, Homan and DJT, who have all committed acts that would have landed anyone else in prison already.
Please keep researching and posting. If we are to have a livable world, we cannot allow imperfect human designed and coded software to decide who gets to be part of this world.
It's "interesting" that they think/believe that they can "spot" a criminal Before he/she commits a crime...why are "they" Not Using it for "GOOD"? vs Gestapo tactics?!!