After the current revelation that Donald Trump had chosen J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public consideration not solely turned towards Vance, but in addition to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been one among a number of outstanding Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent times, with different protégés of the PayPal co-founder together with OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.
Latest studies have additionally famous that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle whereas Vance was nonetheless a pupil at Yale Legislation Faculty. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s funding agency Mithril Capital, the place he labored for 2 years earlier than becoming a member of Revolution Ventures. Vance performed a significant function in Revolution’s “Rise of the Relaxation” seed fund whose main buyers included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton household of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton household. Vance later launched his personal enterprise capital agency Narya Capital in 2020, which was closely funded by Thiel in addition to former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt, a significant Democrat donor, has been the guiding hand behind the Biden administration’s science and know-how coverage and has dominated the event of the AI insurance policies of the US army and intelligence communities, largely by means of his management of the Nationwide Safety Fee on AI (NSCAI). As Limitless Hangout beforehand reported, the Schmidt-led NSCAI promoted insurance policies like the tip of personal automobile possession and in-person procuring in america to advance Individuals’ adoption of AI as supposed nationwide safety crucial within the lead-up to the Covid-era lockdowns.Each Schmidt and Thiel are key members of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door and overtly globalist Bilderberg convention. Newsweek as soon as referred to as Schmidt and Thiel the 2 most influential figures at Bilderberg.
Thiel has donated closely to Vance’s political profession, giving $15 million to Vance’s profitable Senate bid within the 2022 election cycle in what was then the biggest donation ever given to at least one Senate candidate. Thiel additionally joined Vance, a former “By no means Trumper,” on a go to to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago the place Vance efficiently received the previous president’s blessing. Thiel additionally related Vance to different members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks who donated $1 million to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, together with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, have been allegedly a key think about Trump’s collection of Vance as Vice President as they ran “a secret lobbying marketing campaign” for Vance that additionally included media presenter Tucker Carlson.
Thiel had been a significant donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential marketing campaign and served on Trump’s transition crew, with different Thiel-linked figures like Trae Stephens dramatically influencing Trump’s Pentagon appointments. Stephens’ affect on the Trump Pentagon additionally helped develop the army’s relationship with the Thiel-funded firm Anduril, which was co-founded by Stephens and Thiel fellow Palmer Luckey. Earlier than Anduril, Luckey develop the Virual Actuality system Oculus Rift, which was later offered to Fb, the place Thiel then served on the board. Anduril is now constructing a “digital border wall” for the federal authorities and Trump, who lengthy campaigned on constructing a bodily barrier on the US-Mexico border, deserted that promise throughout his first time period and now helps the precise resolution Anduril is promoting.
Anduril’s unmanned drones have additionally come to play a significant function in Ukrainian army operations through the Russia-Ukraine battle, as produce other controversial Thiel-funded corporations like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used primarily images posted on Fb (one other Thiel-backed firm) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These corporations’ shut ties to the Ukrainian army might influence a second Trump administration’s insurance policies because it pertains to American assist for Ukraine, significantly if Thiel is slated to carry vital affect. Past Ukraine, this community of Thiel-funded protection corporations are remaking the face of warfare and slowly however absolutely changing human decision-making with AI.
Whereas these ties ought to be unsettling on there personal, the potential affect of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration ought to concern each American, no matter the place they fall on the political spectrum, as a result of Thiel’s efforts to rehabilitate and remake a number of the intelligence communities’ most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to focus on home dissent.
Thiel Info Consciousness
Whereas Peter Thiel has lengthy marketed himself as a libertarian, his monitor report from PayPal on has revealed him to as a substitute be an architect of the trendy surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had as soon as tried (however failed) to do the identical. Throughout PayPal’s earliest days, Thiel and his colleagues went round to numerous authorities companies, together with intelligence companies, to see how they might finest tailor their product to win authorities assist (and contracts) for his or her services and products. After leaving PayPal, Thiel would observe an analogous path in creating one other firm, Palantir. Palantir is the engine on which the surveillance state runs and, quickly after Vance was introduced as Trump’s Vice President, it was reported that Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale in addition to Palantir itself have been backing a Trump-Vance tremendous PAC referred to as America PAC.
Limitless Hangout has reported extensively on Thiel and Palantir for a number of years. As famous in previous studies, the corporate was created to be the privatized model of a post-9/11 surveillance program that had been dreamt up by the Iran-Contra criminals accountable for the unconstitutional Foremost Core database. Through the Reagan administration, the people on the coronary heart of the Iran-Contra scandal developed a database referred to as Foremost Core, which firmly positioned the US national-security state on its present, tech-fuelled path for crushing dissent. A senior authorities official with a high-ranking safety clearance and repair in 5 presidential administrations instructed Radar in 2008 that Foremost Core was “a database of Individuals, who, typically for the slightest and most trivial cause, are thought-about unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic is likely to be incarcerated. The database can establish and find perceived ‘enemies of the state’ virtually instantaneously.”
Foremost Core was expressly developed to be used in “continuity of presidency” (COG) protocols by the important thing Iran-Contra determine Oliver North and his allies that operated an “off the books” intelligence equipment with direct CIA involvement generally known as “The Enterprise.” North and his associates used COG and Foremost Core to compile a listing of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be handled if the continuity of presidency protocol was ever invoked. Troublingly, these protocols might be invoked for quite a lot of causes, together with widespread public, non-violent opposition to a US army intervention overseas, widespread inside dissent, or a vaguely outlined second of “nationwide disaster” or “time of panic.” North would later brush up towards the Trump administration, becoming a member of former Blackwater founder Erik Prince in an effort to foyer the administration to create an “off the books,” non-public CIA.
Foremost Core utilized the PROMIS software program, which was stolen from its homeowners at Inslaw Inc. by prime Reagan and US intelligence officers in addition to Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Additionally intimately concerned within the PROMIS scandal was media baron and Israeli “tremendous spy” Robert Maxwell, the daddy of Ghislaine Maxwell and reportedly the person who introduced Jeffrey Epstein into the Israeli intelligence orbit. Like PROMIS, Foremost Core concerned each US and Israeli intelligence and was a giant information strategy to the surveillance of perceived home dissidents.
The Iran-Contra and PROMIS scandals have been uncovered, however have been subsequently lined up, largely by the then US legal professional normal William Barr, who would return to serve in that very same place through the Trump administration. Using Foremost Core by the federal authorities persevered and continued to amass information. That information couldn’t be absolutely tapped into and utilized by the intelligence neighborhood till after the occasions of September 11, 2001, which supplied a golden alternative for using such instruments towards the home US inhabitants, all beneath the guise of combating “terrorism.” For instance, within the rapid aftermath of 9/11 authorities officers reportedly noticed Foremost Core being accessed by White Home computer systems.
September 11 was additionally used as an excuse to take away info “firewalls” throughout the national-security state, increasing “info sharing” amongst company databases and, by extension, additionally increasing the quantity of information that might be accessed and analyzed by Foremost Core and its analogues. As Alan Wade, then serving because the CIA’s chief info officer, pointed out quickly after 9/11: “One of many post-September 11 themes is collaboration and knowledge sharing. We’re taking a look at instruments that facilitate communication in ways in which we don’t have immediately.”
In an try and construct on these two post-9/11 targets concurrently, the US national-security state tried to create a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it simply months after its creation as a result of considerations it might utterly get rid of the fitting to privateness within the US. Referred to as Whole Info Consciousness (TIA), this system sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance equipment managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. TIA’s supporters argued that invasive surveillance of all the US inhabitants was needed to stop terrorist assaults, bioterrorism occasions, and even naturally occurring illness outbreaks (reminiscent of pandemics) earlier than they might happen.
The architect of TIA, and the person who led it throughout its comparatively transient existence, was John Poindexter, finest recognized for being Reagan’s Nationwide Safety Advisor throughout Iran-Contra and being convicted of 5 felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, through the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his obligation to withhold info from Congress.
In regard to TIA, one among Poindexter’s key allies was the chief info officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA quite a few occasions and managed the participation of not simply the CIA however all US intelligence companies that had signed on so as to add their information as “nodes” to TIA and, in alternate, gained entry to its instruments. Wade, whereas on the CIA, had beforehand partnered with Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Christine Maxwell, on nationwide safety software program referred to as Chiliad, which had similarities to TIA (in addition to Palantir) however fell in need of the proposed program’s scope and ambition. Christine had beforehand been concerned in her father’s efforts to market bugged PROMIS software program to US nationwide laboratories.
The TIA program, regardless of the perfect efforts of Poindexter and his allies reminiscent of Wade, was ultimately compelled to close down after appreciable criticism and public outrage. Although this system was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was by no means truly shut down, with its varied applications having been covertly divided among the many net of army and intelligence companies that make up the US nationwide safety state. Whereas a few of these TIA applications went underground, the core panopticon software program that TIA had hoped to wield started to be developed by the corporate now generally known as Palantir, with appreciable assist from the CIA and Alan Wade, in addition to Poindexter.
On the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was instantly controversial, main it to vary its identify in Might 2003 to Terrorism Info Consciousness in an obvious try and sound much less like an all-encompassing home surveillance system and extra like a instrument particularly aimed toward “terrorists.” The TIA program was shuttered by the tip of 2003.
The identical month because the TIA identify change Peter Thiel included Palantir. Thiel, nevertheless, had begun creating the software program behind Palantir months upfront, although he claims he can’t recall precisely when. Some studies state that Palantir started as an anti-fraud algorithm at Thiel’s PayPal. Thiel, Karp, and different Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the corporate had been based in 2004, regardless of the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel instantly contradicting this declare.
Additionally, in 2003, apparently quickly after Thiel formally created Palantir, Iraq Conflict architect and Bush-era neoconservative Richard Perle referred to as Poindexter, saying that he wished to introduce the architect of TIA to 2 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. In keeping with a report in New York Journal, Poindexter “was exactly the particular person” whom Thiel and Karp wished to fulfill, primarily as a result of “their new firm was comparable in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create on the Pentagon,” that’s, TIA. Throughout that assembly, Thiel and Karp sought “to choose the mind of the person now broadly seen because the godfather of recent surveillance,” shaping Palantir right into a TIA equal.
Quickly after Palantir’s incorporation, although the precise timing and particulars of the funding stay hidden from the general public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel turned the corporate’s first backer, other than Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir wouldn’t be publicly reported till mid-2006. As well as, Alex Karp lately instructed the New York Instances that “the true worth of the In-Q-Tel funding was that it gave Palantir entry to the CIA analysts who have been its supposed shoppers.” A key determine within the making of In-Q-Tel investments throughout this era, together with Palantir, was the CIA’s chief info officer on the time, Alan Wade.
After the In-Q-Tel funding, the CIA held the distinctive place of being Palantir’s solely shopper till 2008. Throughout that interval, Palantir’s two prime engineers—Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia each two weeks. Jain remembers making a minimum of 200 journeys to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. Throughout these common visits, CIA analysts “would take a look at [Palantir’s software] out and provide suggestions, after which Cohen and Jain would fly again to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s resolution to spend money on Palantir, the CIA’s chief info officer on the time, Alan Wade, performed a key function in lots of of those conferences and subsequently within the “tweaking” of Palantir’s merchandise. It ought to come as no shock, then, that there’s an overlap between Palantir’s merchandise and the imaginative and prescient that Wade and Poindexter had held for the failed TIA program. The intensive overlap between the 2 is detailed in earlier Limitless Hangout investigations.
The advantages in repurposing the “public-private” TIA into a totally non-public entity after TIA was publicly dismantled are apparent. As an illustration, on condition that Palantir is a personal firm versus a authorities program, the best way its software program is utilized by its authorities and company shoppers advantages from “believable deniability” and frees Palantir and its software program from constraints that may be current if it had remained a public mission.
A 2020 New York Instances profile on Palantir famous:
The information, which is saved in varied cloud providers or on shoppers’ premises, is managed by the client, and Palantir says it doesn’t police using its merchandise. Nor are the privateness controls foolproof; it’s as much as the shoppers to resolve who will get to see what and the way vigilant they want to be.
Not lengthy after Thiel helped resurrect TIA as Palantir, one other post-9/11 DARPA program was additionally searching for a personal sector makeover. Developed by Douglas Gage, an in depth pal of Poindexter’s and a DARPA program supervisor, LifeLog sought to “construct a database monitoring an individual’s complete existence” that included a person’s relationships and communications (cellphone calls, mail, and so forth.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and far more in an effort to construct a digital report of “the whole lot a person says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured information and manage it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots whereas additionally “mapping out relationships, recollections, occasions and experiences.”
LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of this system, would create a everlasting and searchable digital diary of an individual’s complete life, which DARPA argued might be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and provide customers a “near-perfect digital reminiscence.” Gage insisted, even after this system was shut down, that people would have had “full management of their very own data-collection efforts” as they might “resolve when to show the sensors on or off and resolve who will share the info.” Within the years since then, analogous guarantees of consumer management have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, solely to be damaged repeatedly for revenue and to feed the federal government’s domestic-surveillance equipment.
The data that LifeLog gleaned from a person’s each interplay with know-how was to be mixed with info obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the particular person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the particular person noticed and mentioned, in addition to biomedical screens that gauged the particular person’s well being. Like TIA, LifeLog was promoted by DARPA as doubtlessly supporting “medical analysis and the early detection of an rising epidemic.”
Critics in mainstream media retailers and elsewhere have been fast to level out that this system would inevitably be used to construct profiles on dissidents in addition to suspected terrorists. Mixed with TIA’s surveillance of people at a number of ranges, LifeLog went farther by “including bodily info (like how we really feel) and media information (like what we learn) to this transactional information.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Digital Frontier Basis, warned on the time that the applications that DARPA was pursuing, together with LifeLog, “have apparent, straightforward paths to Homeland Safety deployments.”
On the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA weren’t related, regardless of their apparent parallels, and that LifeLog wouldn’t be used for “clandestine surveillance.” Nonetheless, DARPA’s personal documentation on LifeLog famous that the mission “shall be ready . . . to deduce the consumer’s routines, habits and relationships with different individuals, organizations, locations and objects, and to take advantage of these patterns to ease its activity,” which acknowledged its potential use as a instrument of mass surveillance.
Nonetheless, regardless of its proponents’ finest efforts, LifeLog was shuttered identical to TIA. Given what had transpired with TIA, some suspected this system would proceed beneath a special identify. For instance, Lee Tien of the Digital Frontier Basis instructed VICE on the time of LifeLog’s cancellation, that: “It could not shock me to study that the federal government continued to fund analysis that pushed this space ahead with out calling it LifeLog.” Together with its critics, one of many would-be researchers engaged on LifeLog, MIT’s David Karger, was additionally sure that the DARPA mission would proceed in a repackaged kind. He instructed Wired that “I’m certain such analysis will proceed to be funded beneath another title . . . I can’t think about DARPA ‘dropping out’ of a such a key analysis space.” The reply to those speculations seems to lie with the corporate that launched the very same day that LifeLog was shuttered by the Pentagon: Fb.
The Army Origins of Fb
Fb’s rising function within the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” equipment of the nationwide safety state calls for new scrutiny of the corporate’s origins and its merchandise as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was basically analogous to what’s at the moment the world’s largest social community.
A couple of months into Fb’s launch, in June 2004, Fb co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz introduced Sean Parker onto Fb’s govt crew. Parker, beforehand recognized for co-founding Napster, later related Fb with its first outdoors investor, Peter Thiel. As mentioned, Thiel, at the moment, in coordination with the CIA, was actively making an attempt to resurrect a minimum of one controversial DARPA program that had been dismantled the earlier yr. Notably, Sean Parker, who turned Fb’s first president, additionally had a historical past with the CIA, which sought to recruit him on the age of sixteen quickly after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking company and army databases. Because of Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 value of Fb shares and was added its board. Parker maintained shut ties to Fb in addition to to Thiel, with Parker being employed as a managing associate of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006. Thiel left the Fb board, which he had joined in 2005, in 2022 to give attention to supporting “Trump-aligned candidates,” together with J.D. Vance.
Thiel and Fb co-founder Mosokvitz turned concerned outdoors of the social community lengthy after Fb’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund changing into a vital investor in Moskovitz’s firm Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Fb co-founders extends to his firm Palantir, as the info that Fb customers make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for US police departments, the army, and the intelligence neighborhood. Fb information additionally feeds one other Thiel-backed firm, Clearview AI.
Notably, even LifeLog’s architect, Douglas Gage, has publicly commented on Fb’s similarities to this system he had as soon as hoped to steer. In 2015, He instructed VICE that “Fb is the true face of pseudo-LifeLog at this level.” He tellingly added, “We’ve ended up offering the identical form of detailed private info to advertisers and information brokers and with out arousing the form of opposition that LifeLog provoked,” exactly as a result of it’s now a personal firm and never a mission housed on the Pentagon’s DARPA.
Palantir and the Surveillance Agenda beneath Trump
Through the Trump administration, Palantir loved an much more privileged standing than it had held beneath earlier administrations, with Palantir gaining many new profitable contracts, primarily with the army and intelligence, throughout Trump’s first time period. This was seemingly influenced by Thiel’s presence on Trump’s transition groups and the function of shut Thiel associates in selecting key Pentagon appointees.
Not solely that, however the broader agenda behind Palantir – the decades-long effort to create a pre-crime, AI-powered surveillance system in america – additionally obtained vital boosts throughout Trump’s first time period. As an illustration, Trump’s Lawyer Common William Barr quietly legalized pre-crime in america beneath the guise of detecting potential mass shooters earlier than they commit any crime. This system, referred to as DEEP, allows the DOJ and FBI to work with “non-public sector companions” to surveil individuals of curiosity which have dedicated no crime, however are “mobilizing in direction of violence.” At roughly the identical time this system was introduced, Barr was additionally pushing closely for a authorities backdoor into client apps and gadgets, significantly people who make the most of encryption. He additionally signed an information entry settlement with then-UK House Secretary Priti Patel that allowed each international locations to “demand digital information on shoppers from tech corporations based mostly within the different nation with out authorized restrictions.”
Additionally through the Trump administration, an Israeli intelligence-linked firm referred to as Carbyne911 started to be put in all through america in emergency name facilities and has since unfold all through the nation. Carbyne911 was closely funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Trae Stephens sits on its advisory board alongside Michael Chertoff (head of DHS beneath George W. Bush) and Kirstjen Nielsen (head of DHS beneath Trump). Carbyne was additionally closely funded by Jeffrey Epstein and Leslie Wexner and, for a lot of its early historical past, was carefully related to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, himself an intimate affiliate of Epstein.
How the CIA, Mossad and “the Epstein Community” are Exploiting Mass Shootings to Create an Orwellian Nightmare
Israel’s Mossad and notorious Unit 8200 are partnering with the CIA and US tech companies to create an Orwellian pre-crime nightmare.
Carbyne911 and comparable corporations extract any and all information from client smartphones for merely making emergency calls after which use it to “analyze the previous and current habits of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns,” with the final word objective of sensible gadgets – reminiscent of “sensible” road lamps – making emergency calls to the authorities, versus human beings.
Information obtained from these software program merchandise, that are slated to be adopted nationwide as a part of a brand new nationwide “subsequent technology” 911 system, are shared with the identical regulation enforcement companies now implementing the Barr-designed “nationwide disruption and early engagement program” to focus on people flagged as doubtlessly violent based mostly on obscure standards. Mixed with the “home terror” framework launched through the Biden administration, the definition of “home terrorists” now encompasses those that oppose US authorities overreach and those that oppose any type of capitalism, together with the World Financial Discussion board-favored “stakeholder capitalism,” and/or “company globalization.”
The Trump administration, throughout this identical interval, additionally mulled the creation of a brand new health-focused company modeled after DARPA. The proposed “HARPA”, which was promoted extensively to Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka in addition to Trump’s shut pal and former NBCUniversal president Bob Wright. HARPA’s proposed flagship program – “SAFE HOME” (Stopping Aberrant Deadly Occasions by Serving to Overcome Psychological Extremes) – would use “breakthrough applied sciences with excessive specificity and sensitivity for early prognosis of neuropsychiatric violence,” particularly “superior analytical instruments based mostly on synthetic intelligence and machine studying.” This system would have price an estimated $60 million over 4 years and would use information from Individuals’ social media accounts in addition to “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google House” and different client digital gadgets. This system would additionally acquire info supplied by health-care suppliers to establish who could also be a “risk.”
Although HARPA was not created beneath the Trump administration, Trump reportedly reacted “very positively” to the proposal and was “offered on the idea.” As well as, earlier than the proposal was recognized publicly, Trump had referred to as on Huge Tech, and particularly social media to collaborate with the DOJ to create software program that stops mass murders earlier than they occur by detecting potential mass shooters earlier than they will act. Nonetheless, Trump finally handed on creating HARPA, which was finally created through the Biden administration as ARPA-H, underscoring the bipartisan nature of this agenda.
Are Peter Thiel-Backed Intelligence Contractors “MAGA”?
Regardless of many Thiel-backed or Thiel-founded corporations describing themselves as “America First” and as defenders of “Western values,” a better examination of these corporations suggests this isn’t the case. One lesser recognized instance of that is Palantir’s early function in creating a method for the US authorities to focus on Julian Assange, leaks-based journalism within the public curiosity, and what it referred to as “The WikiLeaks Risk.” In taking a look at different Thiel-linked companies, it’s fairly clear that a minimum of some are greater than keen to focus on Individuals on both aspect of the political divide on behalf of their greatest shopper, the so-called “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile. Take, for instance, the Thiel-backed Clearview AI – which claims to now be capable of establish each particular person on the earth utilizing its superior facial recognition system. As Limitless Hangout contributor Stavroula Pabst famous in a current report:
When requested in an NBC interview about Clearview AI’s potential destructive ramifications for society, the corporate’s CEO, Hoan Ton-That, mentioned ‘[a] lot of peoples’ minds on facial recognition know-how have been modified round Jan. sixth, when the riot occurred [at the United States Capitol Building]. It was very instrumental in with the ability to make identifications shortly.’
As its personal CEO said, Clearview AI was used extensively on January sixth and later boasted of its “potential for figuring out rioters on the January 6 assault on the Capitol.” In a 2023 interview, New York Instances reporter Kashmir Hill added that, not solely was Clearview AI used on the Capitol that day, but in addition within the days and weeks that adopted to establish alleged rioters:
The FBI had images of all these individuals as a result of a lot of them have been filming themselves on social media and posting images on-line, they usually weren’t carrying masks. And so many police departments began working their images by means of Clearview AI to establish them.
After the occasions of January 6th, 2021, Clearview AI reported a 26 p.c uptake of its providers from regulation enforcement, having used its function in focusing on Trump supporters as a gross sales pitch.
Clearview AI is just not the one Thiel-linked firm keen to focus on Trump’s base, as Palantir’s co-founder and present CEO Alex Karp is obsessed along with his long-time concern that the “far proper” goes to homicide him for his ethnic background. That concern, per Karp, “propels lots of the selections” made at Palantir. “I nonetheless can’t imagine I haven’t been shot and pushed out the window,” Karp instructed New York Instances reporter Michael Steinberger in 2020. Steinberger added that “if the far proper got here to energy, [Karp] mentioned, he will surely be amongst its victims. ‘Who’s the primary particular person who’s going to get hung? You make a listing, and I’ll present you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a field I don’t examine.’”
Then, in 2023, Karp said throughout an interview on the World Financial Discussion board annual assembly that “We constructed PG [proprietary software], which single-handedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe.” On condition that the labels “far proper” in addition to “far left” are sometimes misused to explain these on both aspect of the political spectrum that don’t subscribe to or assist official narratives, it’s value asking if the “far proper” Karp claims to have stopped referred to individuals who truly deserve the label, or right-leaning populism, given populism of any taste is a risk to Palantir’s benefactors within the company world and within the US Nationwide Safety neighborhood.
As well as, Trump supporters that didn’t subscribe to official narratives round Covid-19-era insurance policies ought to concentrate on Palantir’s function within the Trump administration’s Covid response and likewise within the Covid vaccination roll-out. Throughout Covid, Palantir developed Tiberius, which was utilized by HHS to “assist the federal authorities allocate the quantity of vaccine every state will obtain” and likewise to “resolve the place each allotted dose will go – from native docs’ places of work to massive medical facilities.” Tiberius, and by extension Palantir, collected all of the Covid-19 and healthcare information from US authorities companies, native and state governments, pharmaceutical companies, vaccine producers and firms contracted to behave as vaccine distributers. Palantir was additionally supplied Individuals’ delicate well being info by the Trump-era HHS in addition to “a variety of demographic, employment and public well being information units” in an effort to “assist establish high-priority populations” to obtain the vaccine first. Throughout Covid, Palantir was additionally a member of the Covid-19 Well being Coalition, whose different members included the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, which was Palantir’s first funder, in addition to Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Palantir additionally managed the HHS Shield database, a secretive database that hoarded (and nonetheless hoards) info associated to the unfold of Covid-19 gathered from “greater than 225 information units, together with demographic statistics, community-based checks, and a variety of state-provided information.” On the time, HHS Shield was criticized by a number of public well being consultants and epidemiologists, amongst others, due to the sudden resolution by the Trump-era HHS to pressure US hospitals to supply all information on COVID-19 circumstances and affected person info on to HHS Shield and, thus, to Palantir. Hospitals have been threatened with the lack of Medicare or Medicaid funding in the event that they declined to often feed all of their COVID-19 affected person information and take a look at outcomes into the HHS Shield database. Palantir declined to supply info on any safeguards it had in place to guard Individuals’ well being information in any of its HHS-related applications, regardless of requests to take action from Senators and Congressmen. HHS Shield additionally later included HHS Imaginative and prescient, an synthetic intelligence–pushed “predictive” part, which “makes use of prewritten algorithms to simulate behaviors and forecast potential outcomes.” Facets of HHS Shield share exceptional similarities with the scrapped TIA sub-program generally known as “Bio-surveillance.”
Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Well being Panopticon
The controversial information mining agency, whose historical past and rise has lengthy been inextricably linked with the CIA and the nationwide safety state, will now use its software program to establish and prioritize the identical minority teams that it has lengthy oppressed on behalf of the US army and US intelligence.
Not solely that, however a long-time advisor to Palantir, Avril Haines, was a key fixture on the controversial pandemic “simulation” in late 2019 that was tied to earlier, intelligence-linked biosecurity occasions like the 2001 anthrax assaults. Haines, a former CIA deputy director, labored very carefully along with her superior, John Brennan, on the CIA, together with through the time Brennan illegally surveilled Trump associates through the 2016 election cycle and helped propagate and develop the “Russiagate” narrative, which Haines is now conveniently resurrecting. Haines, shortly after taking part in Occasion 201, joined the Biden administration and has been serving because the administration’s prime intelligence official – the Director of Nationwide Intelligence – since Biden took workplace in January 2021.
Palantir can also be controversial among the many America left for its function in utilizing large information to facilitate ICE raids on migrants and its resolution to pilot its “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, performance in low-income, minority communities. In the end, Palantir – like lots of the different army/intelligence contractors with shut ties to Peter Thiel – is a instrument of the Nationwide Safety State, which has been ramping up its “Conflict on Home Terror” equipment that – per authorities documentation – will goal dissent on each left and proper and basically anybody who makes an attempt to face, and even communicate, towards authorities overreach and criminality.
With Thiel, Palantir and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale now pumping hundreds of thousands into the Trump-Vance marketing campaign after the current VP announcement, it appears virtually inevitable that Palantir and the opposite Thiel-linked army contractors could have much more affect in a second Trump administration than it did throughout his first time period.
