Palantir, Surveillance Capitalism, and the Normalization of Fascist Infrastructure

There is a particular kind of horror in watching something degrade in real time while the people responsible issue press releases about transparency and human rights. Palantir Technologies — the Denver-based data analytics firm that for two decades cultivated the image of a necessary evil, a sober and principled intermediary between raw state power and the civil liberties it might otherwise devour — has recently abandoned even that pretense. In April 2026, CEO Alex Karp published a 22-point manifesto on social media, drawn from his book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, in which the company publicly declared that some cultures are superior to others, that pluralism "glosses over" this fact, and that Silicon Valley owes a "moral debt" to the United States that can only be repaid in weapons, surveillance infrastructure, and ideological loyalty. The post reached over thirty million views. It was not a slip. It was a flag being planted.

The manifesto tells us something about what Palantir has always been. But to understand what the company is becoming — and what the broader surveillance software industry represents — we need to read the whole history, not just the recent acts of self-disclosure. Because the problem with Palantir is not that it lost its way. The problem is that the way it is going is precisely the one it was always on.

Origins: The CIA Builds a Startup

Palantir was born in 2003, in the febrile post-9/11 moment when the American national security apparatus was drowning in data it could not meaningfully process. Peter Thiel, flush from the PayPal acquisition, launched the startup focused on counterterrorism and tapped his Stanford colleague Alex Karp to run it. When commercial venture capital wanted nothing to do with them — Sequoia Capital's Michael Moritz reportedly spent most of a pitch meeting absentmindedly doodling in his notepad — they found their patron in a different kind of investor. In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, seeded the company with millions and opened the door to every major intelligence and defense agency. The logic, as Common Dreams noted, was deliberate: the American security state had recognized that surveillance and targeting infrastructure could be run more profitably and with far less democratic accountability through private contractors. When a government agency surveils its own citizens, there are hearings, FOIA requests, oversight committees. When a private company does it on a government's behalf, the whole apparatus recedes behind NDAs, trade secret protections, and the fog of commercial confidentiality.

The company's name came from J.R.R. Tolkien's palantíri — the seeing stones of Middle-earth, through which vast distances could be observed in real time. The branding is almost offensively on the nose. In the books, the stones are instruments of total surveillance, and their use invariably corrupts or destroys the person wielding them. Sauron turns the palantíri into weapons of deception and control. It is not clear whether Thiel and Karp chose the name with irony or as aspiration.

In its early years, Palantir operated largely out of the public eye, embedding engineers within government agencies to co-develop tools tailored to uncovering terrorist networks, criminal activity, and financial fraud. This was the founding myth: not a surveillance company, but a partnership — human analysts augmented by software, with privacy engineers embedded in the product to ensure civil liberties were protected. Karp played this role with evident relish, presenting himself as the progressive conscience of an otherwise Thiel-shaped enterprise. In a Forbes profile in 2013, he said: "I didn't sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair... We have to find places that we protect away from government." That statement now deserves to be read as a document of pure cynicism. In the intervening years, his company built exactly the infrastructure he claimed to be protecting people from.

The Machine: What Palantir Actually Builds

The products themselves require careful description, because the company's primary rhetorical defense has always been that it is merely a "data integration" platform — a neutral technical layer that connects databases other agencies already own, and therefore bears no responsibility for how those connections are used. This is a lie constructed from technically accurate components, which is the most durable kind.

Palantir's Investigative Case Management (ICM) platform — which ICE describes as "mission-critical" — gives every ICE agent access to a network of federally and privately owned databases, profiling people and making them searchable by combining immigration history, employment records, biometric identification, family relationships, license plate readers, and social media profiles. This is not passive infrastructure. Building a system that fuses all of those data streams into a single searchable interface, assigns algorithmic confidence scores, generates geographic heat maps of "target-rich areas," and presents individual dossiers with photographs and addresses is not neutral engineering. It is a targeting system. The choice to build it, the choice to sell it, and the choice to continue enhancing it as evidence of its abuse accumulates — those are moral choices, and Palantir has made them repeatedly.

The ELITE platform (Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement) is perhaps the starkest example. ICE agents use ELITE to find "target-rich areas" — neighborhoods where many high-confidence targets are clustered together. This is how raids get planned: not based on individual criminal investigations, but based on where the algorithm thinks the most targets live. The system ingests data from Medicaid and other government databases to generate dossiers and "leads" on people ICE believes may be deportable, mapping potential targets and providing a "confidence score" as to an individual's current address.

Here is what this means in practice: When someone updates their address to continue receiving medical care, they are updating their deportation file. A person seeking cancer treatment, prenatal care, insulin — any interaction with the healthcare system that requires a current address — feeds directly into the apparatus that may come for them in the night. The Electronic Frontier Foundation called this precisely what it is: ICE using a Palantir tool to "stalk people for arrest." Immigrant rights groups have warned that this will have a chilling effect on healthcare, discouraging immigrant families from seeking adequate coverage or treatment. Palantir built that chilling effect. They engineered it. It is a feature, not a bug, because a frightened population is a more controllable one.

The scale of data involved is staggering. ICE and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed a data-sharing agreement that allows ICE to receive personal data on nearly 80 million Medicaid patients. Eighty million people — many of them entirely legal residents, citizens, and US-born children — whose healthcare records were converted, without their consent, into ammunition for immigration enforcement. EFF has noted that Palantir's responses to questions about the legal basis for using Medicaid data in this way lean heavily on legal compliance, offering legal answers to what are fundamentally human rights questions. Legal compliance as a human rights standard is not a standard at all. The Jim Crow South was legally compliant. The Nuremberg race laws were passed by a legislature.

The Profit Motive in the Kill Chain

The financial architecture of all this is important to name clearly, because it reveals that what is happening is not mere ideological alignment but direct personal profit from suffering. Palantir has received more than $900 million in federal contracts since Trump took office. The company holds a $30 million contract through 2027 for ImmigrationOS, which has ballooned to over $145 million as part of a broader sole-source ICM deal, meaning it was awarded without competitive bidding. During 2011–2025, ICE awarded Palantir contracts worth a combined $287 million.

Now consider who benefits directly from the expansion of those contracts. Stephen Miller, the Trump administration's chief architect of immigration policy, owns between $100,000 and $250,000 in Palantir stock, according to financial disclosures reported by the Project on Government Oversight. Miller's stake is tucked away in a brokerage account for one of his three children, all of whom are under the age of six. This is not a conflict of interest in the bureaucratic, technical sense — it is a corruption loop. The person designing the policy that generates the contracts profits financially from the company executing those contracts. At least a dozen Trump White House staffers own Palantir stock. The federal government's own chief information officer was a former Palantir employee. Policy and profit are not merely aligned here; they have merged into a single organism, feeding on itself.

And behind it all sits Peter Thiel, who wrote in a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute that he no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible, and who has spent years and millions funding Curtis Yarvin — the political theorist who argues democracy should be replaced by a corporate monarchy with a CEO-king wielding absolute authority. This is not fringe ideology accidentally associated with a tech company. It is the founding philosophy of the enterprise.

Blood in Gaza and the Question of War Crimes

If the domestic abuses constitute a slow-moving atrocity, Palantir's international operations represent something more immediate. After agreeing to a "strategic partnership" with Israel in January 2024, Palantir significantly expanded its operations in Gaza and the occupied West Bank, combining data sets from intercepted communications, satellite imagery, and other online data to compile targeting databases — effectively, kill lists — for the Israeli military.

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, concluded in a formal report that there are reasonable grounds to believe Palantir's AI platform has been used in Israel's "unlawful use of force," causing disproportionate loss of civilian life in Gaza. She called on Palantir to either prevent the misuse of its technology or withdraw, warning of potential legal liability for complicity in war crimes and crimes against humanity. This is not advocacy language. This is the formal assessment of a UN mandate-holder based on documented evidence.

Israel also relied on Palantir in its September 2024 attacks in Lebanon using exploding electronic pagers and radio devices, which killed dozens and wounded thousands. UN experts condemned those attacks as a "terrifying violation of international law" because of their indiscriminate nature and because their targets posed no imminent threat at the time. Palantir has drawn heavily on the expertise of former members of Israel's cyber-intelligence unit, Unit 8200, the same unit implicated in mass surveillance of Palestinian civilians and the development of offensive cyber capabilities deployed against civilian infrastructure.

Senior figures at the United Nations have argued that technologies such as Palantir's materially shape the pace and scale by which the Israeli army is able to target people. Karp has been explicit about his pride in this. He has stated publicly that he is "proud" of supporting Israel's war effort and acknowledged the "strategic partnership" with Israel's Ministry of Defense for "war-related missions." This is not neutrality. This is conscious, enthusiastic co-authorship of operations that international human rights bodies have characterized as genocide.

And then there is the United Kingdom, where the contradictions become surreal. In November 2023, NHS England signed a £330 million contract with Palantir to run the Federated Data Platform — the centralized data integration system for the country's National Health Service. The UK government also signed a defense contract worth £240 million with Palantir in January 2026. A company building targeting infrastructure for a military campaign that the UN has characterized as genocidal is simultaneously managing the health records of 67 million British citizens. The NHS contract uses the same data fusion logic — the same collapsing of siloed information into a unified searchable interface — that ELITE uses to hunt immigrants in American cities. That is not a coincidence. It is the same product, differently labeled, for a different market.

The Manifesto and the Ideology Behind It

None of what Palantir has done in recent years should be read as a departure from its values. What has changed is the company's willingness to articulate those values explicitly. The April 2026 manifesto, a 22-point document drawn from Karp and Zamiska's book The Technological Republic that has racked up over 32 million views on social media, is not a shift in position but a shedding of disguise.

The manifesto declares that modern pluralism "glosses over" the fact that some cultures are superior to others, attacks what it describes as elite contempt for religion, praises stronger nationalism, and argues that postwar Germany and Japan should no longer be constrained by decades-old pacifism. The Nation's analysis observed that Karp "dips a toe into eugenics" by claiming that certain cultures are superior and that diversity and inclusion programs baselessly elevate inferior humans. That this language should be issued by the chief executive of a company operating inside the targeting systems of active military campaigns is not ironic. It is structural. The ideology and the infrastructure are the same project.

Professor Shannon Vallor, in response to the manifesto, argued that unelected men like Karp were "imposing their own grand narratives of cultural superiority, militarized control, and public power without public accountability." This is the fundamental democratic crisis that surveillance capitalism in its current form represents. The decisions that determine who gets hunted, who gets killed, whose medical records become weapons, whose neighborhood becomes a "target-rich area" — none of these are being made through democratic deliberation, legislative process, or judicial review. They are being made by a small class of ideologically aligned technologists, operating through proprietary systems shielded from FOIA requests, accountable to no one beyond their shareholders and their government clients, and increasingly explicit about their belief that accountability itself is a weakness.

Karp has stated publicly that the company's position on employee dissent is simple: if you have a position that does not cost you even one employee, it is not a position. He treats the departure of engineers troubled by complicity in killing as proof of moral courage rather than what it actually represents — institutional collapse. This is a man who spent most of his adult life in Germany, who earned a doctorate in neoclassical social theory from Goethe University Frankfurt, who claims to call himself a progressive. The Frankfurt School produced thinkers who spent their careers analyzing the relationship between authoritarian politics, administered society, and the colonization of reason by instrumental logic. What Karp has built is precisely the thing those thinkers warned against, and he has built it while citing their intellectual tradition.

The Internal Fractures

As House of El's analysis noted in a recent video essay, the tell that something fundamental has shifted inside Palantir is not coming from external critics — it is coming from the engineers who built the system. The greeting exchanged between two former Palantir employees reconnecting by phone: "Hey, are you tracking Palantir's descent into fascism?" — not "how are you," not "what are you working on now," but a direct check-in on the state of the company's political trajectory — represents the kind of internal accounting that organizations rarely survive intact.

Following the ICE shooting of Amir Locke, a Black man killed during a no-knock raid in Minneapolis (a city where Palantir's tools have been used in policing operations), and following the January 2026 ICE killing of Alex Prey — an intensive care nurse who was filming law enforcement with his phone when he was shot multiple times — Palantir employees asked basic questions in internal Slack channels: were we involved? are we doing anything to prevent recurrence? According to Wired's reporting, the company's response was to begin auto-deleting conversations in at least one Slack channel after seven days. A company that sells transparency and data analytics to governments started scrubbing its own employees' questions about whether their software helped facilitate killings.

When an airstrike struck a girls' elementary school in Iran in late February 2026, killing 120 children — an attack that multiple investigations concluded relied on targeting data over a decade out of date — employees again asked whether Palantir's platforms, which are embedded in US military targeting systems, bore any responsibility. CEO Karp's response was to release an hour-long pre-recorded video that, according to reporters, carefully avoided any specifics about product capabilities or their use. He then offered one-on-one briefings — but only to employees who first signed NDAs. To learn whether your work helped kill children, you must legally agree never to tell anyone what you find out. This is the behavior not of a company navigating a difficult ethical terrain but of a company that knows exactly what it has done and is managing exposure.

Thirteen former Palantir employees have signed public letters criticizing the company's work with the Trump administration. When Google employees pushed back against Project Maven in 2018, the company had options — consumer products, cloud services, advertising revenue. It withdrew from the contract. Palantir took that contract on, and unlike Google, it has no such diversification; roughly 60% of its revenue comes from government work. The engineers who are questioning the mission are the business model. Every departure is a loss of irreplaceable institutional knowledge, and the company's response — treat attrition as moral courage, hire only ideological loyalists — is the response of an organization that has chosen to calcify into something rigid and ultimately brittle.

The Broader Industry and the Architecture of Control

Palantir is the most visible node in a broader infrastructure of surveillance capitalism that has no equivalent historical precedent. Its collaborators and competitors deserve equal scrutiny. AI systems, cloud infrastructure, and surveillance tools supplied by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Palantir have become integral to Israel's military campaign against Palestinians, with billion-dollar contracts like Project Nimbus providing cloud and machine-learning capabilities that automate lethal targeting and mass surveillance. DHS has also consolidated AI surveillance capabilities into large vendor platforms from Palantir, Clearview AI, and Paragon, integrating ID scanning, device analytics, video and audio analysis, and social media monitoring into systems that operate in continuous real time without meaningful human review.

The privatization of state violence is not new. What is new is the scale at which a small number of companies — accountable to their shareholders, invisible to citizens, operating behind trade secret protections — have embedded themselves into the literal kill chains of democratic governments. When a government decides to bomb a building, or conduct a deportation sweep, or revoke someone's status based on algorithmic confidence scores, the technical infrastructure underlying that decision is now overwhelmingly private. The old accountability mechanisms — congressional oversight, FOIA requests, judicial review — were designed for governmental actors. They have almost no purchase on a private company's software architecture.

This is the central political problem that Palantir represents, and it is bigger than Palantir. The company is the leading edge of a transformation in the nature of state power: the outsourcing of coercive capacity to private actors who share neither the state's formal accountability obligations nor its theoretical democratic legitimacy, but who exercise, through their infrastructure, precisely the kind of power that democratic theory holds must be subject to popular control.

Fascism as a Business Model

The word "fascism" is used loosely enough that it has sometimes lost its analytical bite, so it is worth being precise about why it applies here. Classical fascism was not primarily characterized by brutality — all authoritarian systems are brutal. Its distinctive features were: the merger of corporate and state power into a single apparatus; the replacement of democratic deliberation with technical administration by an expert class that claimed the authority to define national interest; the articulation of a cultural hierarchy in which certain populations were defined as threats to civilizational health; and the use of surveillance and enforcement infrastructure to manage that population accordingly. Palantir checks every box. A company literally born from CIA seed money, whose founders explicitly reject democracy as a viable system, which has merged its financial interests with the policymakers directing its contracts, which publicly declares the cultural inferiority of those its tools are used to hunt, and which provides the targeting infrastructure for mass deportations and military campaigns characterized by international bodies as genocidal — this is not fascism by analogy. It is fascism by definition, dressed in startup language and valued by the market at $340 billion.

Palantir's own defense of its role is that it merely provides "data integration," enabling government agencies to incorporate data sources to which they already have access, in accordance with legal and technical requirements. This is the Nuremberg defense in software form. The engineers who built the targeting systems at Zyklon B's manufacturer were also, technically, just providing a product to clients who made their own decisions about how to use it. The historical judgment on that defense is unambiguous.

There is, finally, the question of what comes next — both for Palantir and for the democratic societies that have allowed this infrastructure to be built inside them. On its current trajectory, Palantir appears to be betting on irreplaceability: that it has embedded itself so deeply into government operations that no political transition can dislodge it. This is a rational bet in the short term. It is, in the longer term, catastrophically miscalculated. A company whose value proposition is explicitly ideological alignment with a specific political project becomes a visible target — institutional, legal, and potentially physical — the moment that project loses power. The current American political environment, whatever its immediate trajectory, has not permanently suspended electoral politics. When the political climate shifts, the infrastructure Palantir has built does not disappear, but the relationships sustaining it become liabilities.

The deeper problem is that by the time that reckoning arrives, the infrastructure will already exist — the databases fused, the targeting tools operational, the precedents established, the constitutional challenges largely exhausted in courts hostile to them. Surveillance infrastructure, once built, does not revert to innocence when its builders fall from power. It waits for whoever comes next.

Conclusion: Tools and Weapons

The question one of Palantir's former employees framed in their internal Slack message — "Were we supposed to be preventing these abuses, and now we're enabling them?" — is the right question, and it deserves a harder answer than the framing allows. There was never a version of Palantir that was on the right side of that line. The infrastructure of total information awareness, of fused databases and algorithmic dossiers and confidence-scored addresses, does not have a safe version. It does not have a safeguard-equipped version that can be handed to the CIA and ICE and the Israeli Defense Forces and the NHS and somehow remain an instrument of human flourishing rather than human control. The safeguards are marketing copy. The product is the targeting system.

What Palantir's manifesto accomplished, whatever its intent, was to make visible what was always there: a company founded on the belief that some people should be watched and some people should be safe, that the watchers and the safe are the same category, and that the watched are those whose cultural and demographic profile marks them as threats to civilizational health. The seeing stones of Middle-earth, in Tolkien's telling, showed their users exactly what was there — but they showed it through Sauron's eyes. The corruption was not in the information. It was in the perspective from which it was assembled.

We are now living in the world Palantir built. The least we can do is see it clearly.

Sources

  • House of El (YouTube channel). Palantir's Internal Crisis and the Descent into Fascism. April 2026. https://www.youtube.com/@houseofEl
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation. Report: ICE Using Palantir Tool That Feeds On Medicaid Data. January 15, 2026. https://eff.org/deeplinks/2026/01/report-ice-using-palantir-tool-feeds-medicaid-data
  • Electronic Frontier Foundation. Palantir Has a Human Rights Policy. Its ICE Work Tells a Different Story. April 2026. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/04/palantir-has-human-rights-policy-its-ice-work-tells-different-story
  • ACLU. All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump's Abusive Removal Campaign. 2026. https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/palantir-deportation-roundup
  • Fortune Magazine. ICE Alleged to Use Palantir-Developed Tool That Uses Medicaid Data to Track Arrest Targets. January 26, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/01/26/ice-allegedly-uses-palantir-tool-tracking-medicaid-data/
  • Fortune Magazine. Palantir's Mini Manifesto Claims Some Cultures Are 'Harmful' and 'Middling'. April 22, 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/22/palantir-alex-karp-mini-manifesto-national-security-defense-tech-ai/
  • The Nation. Palantir's Manifesto Promises a Dystopian Future. April 2026. https://www.thenation.com/article/society/alex-karp-palantir-techbro-fascism/
  • Al Jazeera. Technofascism? Why Palantir's Pro-West 'Manifesto' Has Critics Alarmed. April 21, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/21/technofacism-why-palantirs-pro-west-manifesto-has-critics-alarmed
  • Al Jazeera. Blood Tech: The UK Ambassador, the Sex Offender, Palantir, and Gaza. March 17, 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/17/blood-tech
  • Amnesty International UK. No Palantir in Our NHS. April 2026. https://www.amnesty.org.uk/issues/international-crisis/no-palantir-in-our-nhs/
  • PassBlue. Palantir, Seemingly Everywhere All at Once. October 12, 2025. https://passblue.com/2025/10/12/palantir-seemingly-everywhere-all-at-once/
  • Al-Shabaka. AI for War: Big Tech Empowering Israel's Crimes and Occupation. November 2025. https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/ai-for-war-big-tech-empowering-israels-crimes-and-occupation/
  • Project on Government Oversight (POGO). Stephen Miller's Financial Stake in ICE Contractor Palantir. June 24, 2025. https://www.pogo.org/investigates/stephen-miller-conflicts-of-interest
  • The New Republic. Damning Report Exposes Stephen Miller's Shady Ties to Palantir. June 24, 2025. https://newrepublic.com/post/197149/stephen-miller-palantir-stocks-immigration-report
  • Fast Company. How Silicon Valley Rejection and CIA Cash Fueled Palantir's Rise. November 25, 2025. https://www.fastcompany.com/91446398/cia-police-palantir-alex-karp-predictive-peter-thiel-paypal-sequoia
  • Common Dreams. Palantir Is Leading a New Age of Empire. March 18, 2026. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/palantir-new-age-empire
  • The Intercept. How Peter Thiel's Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World. 2017. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/
  • American Immigration Council. ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir to Track Immigrants' Movements. August 2025. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-immigrationos-palantir-ai-track-immigrants/
  • Truthdig. Palantir Just Unmasked Itself to the World. April 2026. https://www.truthdig.com/articles/palantir-just-unmasked-itself-to-the-world/
  • AFSC Investigate. Palantir Technologies Inc. 2026. https://investigate.afsc.org/company/palantir
  • State of Surveillance. Palantir's ELITE App: "Kind of Like Google Maps" for Finding Deportation Targets. January 2026. https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/palantir-elite-ice-targeting-app-confidence-scores-2026/
  • Steinberger, Michael. The Philosopher in the Valley: Alex Karp, Palantir, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Avid Reader Press / Simon & Schuster, 2025.
  • Karp, Alexander C. and Zamiska, Nicholas W. The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Crown Currency, 2025.
  • Albanese, Francesca. UN Special Rapporteur Report on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. 2025.