The Man Behind Trump’s VP Pick
a look inside the 'Thiel-verse'
The Man Behind Trump’s VP Pick: It’s Worse Than You Think
While J.D. Vance has his own controversies, his close connection to billionaire Peter Thiel, who is poised to have unprecedented influence in a new Trump administration, should deeply unsettle every American who cares about freedom, privacy and reining in the surveillance state.
by Whitney Webb
July 18, 2024
After the recent revelation that Donald Trump had selected J.D. Vance as his Vice President, public attention not only turned toward Vance, but also to the billionaire Peter Thiel. Vance has been one of several prominent Thiel protégés whose profile has risen in recent years, with other protégés of the PayPal co-founder including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Anduril’s Palmer Luckey.
Recent reports have also noted that Thiel first recruited Vance into his circle while Vance was still a student at Yale Law School. Shortly thereafter, Vance joined Thiel’s investment firm Mithril Capital, where he worked for two years before joining Revolution Ventures. Vance played a major role in Revolution’s “Rise of the Rest” seed fund whose major investors included Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and the Walton family of WalMart, who boast long-standing deep ties to the Clinton family. Vance later launched his own venture capital firm Narya Capital in 2020, which was heavily funded by Thiel as well as former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Schmidt, a major Democrat donor, has been the guiding hand behind the Biden administration’s science and technology policy and has dominated the development of the AI policies of the US military and intelligence communities, largely through his leadership of the National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI). As Unlimited Hangout previously reported, the Schmidt-led NSCAI promoted policies like the end of private car ownership and in-person shopping in the United States to advance Americans’ adoption of AI as supposed national security imperative in the lead-up to the Covid-era lockdowns.Both Schmidt and Thiel are key members of the steering committee of the controversial, closed-door and overtly globalist Bilderberg conference. Newsweek once called Schmidt and Thiel the two most influential figures at Bilderberg.
Thiel has donated heavily to Vance’s political career, giving $15 million to Vance’s successful Senate bid in the 2022 election cycle in what was then the largest donation ever given to one Senate candidate. Thiel also joined Vance, a former “Never Trumper,” on a visit to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago where Vance successfully won the former president’s blessing. Thiel also connected Vance to other members of the so-called PayPal mafia, like David Sacks who donated $1 million to Vance and hosted a fundraiser for him. Sacks, along with PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, were allegedly a key factor in Trump’s selection of Vance as Vice President as they ran “a secret lobbying campaign” for Vance that also included media presenter Tucker Carlson.
Thiel had been a major donor to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and served on Trump’s transition team, with other Thiel-linked figures like Trae Stephens dramatically influencing Trump’s Pentagon appointments. Stephens’ influence at the Trump Pentagon also helped develop the military’s relationship with the Thiel-funded company Anduril, which was co-founded by Stephens and Thiel fellow Palmer Luckey. Before Anduril, Luckey develop the Virual Reality system Oculus Rift, which was later sold to Facebook, where Thiel then served on the board. Anduril is now building a “virtual border wall” for the federal government and Trump, who long campaigned on building a physical barrier on the US-Mexico border, abandoned that promise during his first term and now supports the exact solution Anduril is selling.
Anduril’s unmanned drones have also come to play a major role in Ukrainian military operations during the Russia-Ukraine conflict, as have other controversial Thiel-funded companies like Palantir (a CIA contractor) and ClearView AI, which used mainly photos posted on Facebook (another Thiel-backed company) to develop its Orwellian facial recognition database. These companies’ close ties to the Ukrainian military may impact a second Trump administration’s policies as it relates to American support for Ukraine, particularly if Thiel is slated to hold significant influence. Beyond Ukraine, this network of Thiel-funded defense companies are remaking the face of warfare and slowly but surely replacing human decision-making with AI.
While these ties should be unsettling on their own, the potential influence of Thiel on the upcoming Trump administration should concern every American, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, due to Thiel’s efforts to rehabilitate and remake some of the intelligence communities’ most Orwellian and unconstitutional efforts to target domestic dissent.
Thiel Information Awareness
While Peter Thiel has long marketed himself as a libertarian, his track record from PayPal on has revealed him to instead be an architect of the modern surveillance state and a successor to the neoconservative cabal that had once tried (but failed) to do the same. During PayPal’s earliest days, Thiel and his colleagues went around to various government agencies, including intelligence agencies, to see how they could best tailor their product to win government support (and contracts) for their products and services. After leaving PayPal, Thiel would follow a similar path in creating another company, Palantir. Palantir is the engine on which the surveillance state runs and, soon after Vance was announced as Trump’s Vice President, it was reported that Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale as well as Palantir itself were backing a Trump-Vance super PAC called America PAC.
Unlimited Hangout has reported extensively on Thiel and Palantir for several years. As noted in past reports, the company was created to be the privatized version of a post-9/11 surveillance program that had been dreamt up by the Iran-Contra criminals responsible for the unconstitutional Main Core database. During the Reagan administration, the individuals at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal developed a database called Main Core, which firmly placed the US national-security state on its current, tech-fuelled path for crushing dissent. A senior government official with a high-ranking security clearance and service in five presidential administrations told Radar in 2008 that Main Core was “a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.”
Main Core was expressly developed for use in “continuity of government” (COG) protocols by the key Iran-Contra figure Oliver North and his allies that operated an “off the books” intelligence apparatus with direct CIA involvement known as “The Enterprise.” North and his associates used COG and Main Core to compile a list of US dissidents and “potential troublemakers” to be dealt with if the continuity of government protocol was ever invoked. Troublingly, these protocols could be invoked for a variety of reasons, including widespread public, non-violent opposition to a US military intervention abroad, widespread internal dissent, or a vaguely defined moment of “national crisis” or “time of panic.” North would later brush up against the Trump administration, joining former Blackwater founder Erik Prince in an effort to lobby the administration to create an “off the books,” private CIA.
Congressman Jack Brooks attempted to ask Oliver North about the COG protocols during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, but was prevented from doing so.
Main Core utilized the PROMIS software, which was stolen from its owners at Inslaw Inc. by top Reagan and US intelligence officials as well as Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan. Also intimately involved in the PROMIS scandal was media baron and Israeli “super spy” Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and reportedly the man who brought Jeffrey Epstein into the Israeli intelligence orbit. Like PROMIS, Main Core involved both US and Israeli intelligence and was a big data approach to the surveillance of perceived domestic dissidents.
The Iran-Contra and PROMIS scandals were exposed, but were subsequently covered up, largely by the then US attorney general William Barr, who would return to serve in that same position during the Trump administration. The use of Main Core by the federal government persisted and continued to amass data. That data could not be fully tapped into and utilized by the intelligence community until after the events of September 11, 2001, which offered a golden opportunity for the use of such tools against the domestic US population, all under the guise of combating “terrorism.” For example, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 government officials reportedly saw Main Core being accessed by White House computers.
September 11 was also used as an excuse to remove information “firewalls” within the national-security state, expanding “information sharing” among agency databases and, by extension, also expanding the amount of data that could be accessed and analyzed by Main Core and its analogues. As Alan Wade, then serving as the CIA’s chief information officer, pointed out soon after 9/11: “One of the post-September 11 themes is collaboration and information sharing. We’re looking at tools that facilitate communication in ways that we don’t have today.”
In an attempt to build on these two post-9/11 objectives simultaneously, the US national-security state attempted to create a “public-private” surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US. Called Total Information Awareness (TIA), the program sought to develop an “all-seeing” surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon’s DARPA. TIA’s supporters argued that invasive surveillance of the entire US population was necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, bioterrorism events, and even naturally occurring disease outbreaks (such as pandemics) before they could take place.
The architect of TIA, and the man who led it during its relatively brief existence, was John Poindexter, best known for being Reagan’s National Security Advisor during Iran-Contra and being convicted of five felonies in relation to that scandal. Poindexter, during the Iran-Contra hearings, had famously claimed that it was his duty to withhold information from Congress.
In regard to TIA, one of Poindexter’s key allies was the chief information officer of the CIA, Alan Wade. Wade met with Poindexter in relation to TIA numerous times and managed the participation of not just the CIA but all US intelligence agencies that had signed on to add their data as “nodes” to TIA and, in exchange, gained access to its tools. Wade, while at the CIA, had previously partnered with Robert Maxwell’s daughter, Christine Maxwell, on national security software called Chiliad, which had similarities to TIA (as well as Palantir) but fell short of the proposed program’s scope and ambition. Christine had previously been involved in her father’s efforts to market bugged PROMIS software to US national laboratories.
The TIA program, despite the best efforts of Poindexter and his allies such as Wade, was eventually forced to shut down after considerable criticism and public outrage. Though the program was defunded, it later emerged that TIA was never actually shut down, with its various programs having been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the US national security state. While some of those TIA programs went underground, the core panopticon software that TIA had hoped to wield began to be developed by the company now known as Palantir, with considerable help from the CIA and Alan Wade, as well as Poindexter.
At the time it was formally launched in February 2003, the TIA program was immediately controversial, leading it to change its name in May 2003 to Terrorism Information Awareness in an apparent attempt to sound less like an all-encompassing domestic surveillance system and more like a tool specifically aimed at “terrorists.” The TIA program was shuttered by the end of 2003.
The same month as the TIA name change Peter Thiel incorporated Palantir. Thiel, however, had begun creating the software behind Palantir months in advance, though he claims he can’t recall exactly when. Some reports state that Palantir began as an anti-fraud algorithm at Thiel’s PayPal. Thiel, Karp, and other Palantir cofounders claimed for years that the company had been founded in 2004, despite the paperwork of Palantir’s incorporation by Thiel directly contradicting this claim.
Also, in 2003, apparently soon after Thiel formally created Palantir, Iraq War architect and Bush-era neoconservative Richard Perle called Poindexter, saying that he wanted to introduce the architect of TIA to two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Peter Thiel and Alex Karp. According to a report in New York Magazine, Poindexter “was precisely the person” whom Thiel and Karp wanted to meet, mainly because “their new company was similar in ambition to what Poindexter had tried to create at the Pentagon,” that is, TIA. During that meeting, Thiel and Karp sought “to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance,” shaping Palantir into a TIA equivalent.
Soon after Palantir’s incorporation, though the exact timing and details of the investment remain hidden from the public, the CIA’s In-Q-Tel became the company’s first backer, aside from Thiel himself, giving it an estimated $2 million. In-Q-Tel’s stake in Palantir would not be publicly reported until mid-2006. In addition, Alex Karp recently told the New York Times that “the real value of the In-Q-Tel investment was that it gave Palantir access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients.” A key figure in the making of In-Q-Tel investments during this period, including Palantir, was the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade.
After the In-Q-Tel investment, the CIA held the unique position of being Palantir’s only client until 2008. During that period, Palantir’s two top engineers—Aki Jain and Stephen Cohen—traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia every two weeks. Jain recalls making at least two hundred trips to CIA headquarters between 2005 and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts “would test [Palantir’s software] out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jain would fly back to California to tweak it.” As with In-Q-Tel’s decision to invest in Palantir, the CIA’s chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade, played a key role in many of these meetings and subsequently in the “tweaking” of Palantir’s products. It should come as no surprise, then, that there is an overlap between Palantir’s products and the vision that Wade and Poindexter had held for the failed TIA program. The extensive overlap between the two is detailed in previous Unlimited Hangout investigations.
The benefits in repurposing the “public-private” TIA into a completely private entity after TIA was publicly dismantled are obvious. For instance, given that Palantir is a private company as opposed to a government program, the way its software is used by its government and corporate clients benefits from “plausible deniability” and frees Palantir and its software from constraints that would be present if it had remained a public project.
A 2020 New York Times profile on Palantir noted:
The data, which is stored in various cloud services or on clients’ premises, is controlled by the customer, and Palantir says it does not police the use of its products. Nor are the privacy controls foolproof; it is up to the customers to decide who gets to see what and how vigilant they wish to be.
The Social Media Panopticon
Not long after Thiel helped resurrect TIA as Palantir, another post-9/11 DARPA program was also seeking a private sector makeover. Developed by Douglas Gage, a close friend of Poindexter’s and a DARPA program manager, LifeLog sought to “build a database tracking a person’s entire existence” that included an individual’s relationships and communications (phone calls, mail, etc.), their media-consumption habits, their purchases, and much more in order to build a digital record of “everything an individual says, sees, or does.” LifeLog would then take this unstructured data and organize it into “discreet episodes” or snapshots while also “mapping out relationships, memories, events and experiences.”
LifeLog, per Gage and supporters of the program, would create a permanent and searchable electronic diary of a person’s entire life, which DARPA argued could be used to create next-generation “digital assistants” and offer users a “near-perfect digital memory.” Gage insisted, even after the program was shut down, that individuals would have had “complete control of their own data-collection efforts” as they could “decide when to turn the sensors on or off and decide who will share the data.” In the years since then, analogous promises of user control have been made by the tech giants of Silicon Valley, only to be broken repeatedly for profit and to feed the government’s domestic-surveillance apparatus.
The information that LifeLog gleaned from an individual’s every interaction with technology was to be combined with information obtained from a GPS transmitter that tracked and documented the person’s location, audio-visual sensors that recorded what the person saw and said, as well as biomedical monitors that gauged the person’s health. Like TIA, LifeLog was promoted by DARPA as potentially supporting “medical research and the early detection of an emerging epidemic.”
Critics in mainstream media outlets and elsewhere were quick to point out that the program would inevitably be used to build profiles on dissidents as well as suspected terrorists. Combined with TIA’s surveillance of individuals at multiple levels, LifeLog went farther by “adding physical information (like how we feel) and media data (like what we read) to this transactional data.” One critic, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, warned at the time that the programs that DARPA was pursuing, including LifeLog, “have obvious, easy paths to Homeland Security deployments.”
At the time, DARPA publicly insisted that LifeLog and TIA were not connected, despite their obvious parallels, and that LifeLog would not be used for “clandestine surveillance.” However, DARPA’s own documentation on LifeLog noted that the project “will be able . . . to infer the user’s routines, habits and relationships with other people, organizations, places and objects, and to exploit these patterns to ease its task,” which acknowledged its potential use as a tool of mass surveillance.
However, despite its proponents’ best efforts, LifeLog was shuttered just like TIA. Given what had transpired with TIA, some suspected the program would continue under a different name. For example, Lee Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told VICE at the time of LifeLog’s cancellation, that: “It would not surprise me to learn that the government continued to fund research that pushed this area forward without calling it LifeLog.” Along with its critics, one of the would-be researchers working on LifeLog, MIT’s David Karger, was also certain that the DARPA project would continue in a repackaged form. He told Wired that “I am sure such research will continue to be funded under some other title . . . I can’t imagine DARPA ‘dropping out’ of a such a key research area.” The answer to these speculations appears to lie with the company that launched the exact same day that LifeLog was shuttered by the Pentagon: Facebook.
A few months into Facebook’s launch, in June 2004, Facebook co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Sean Parker onto Facebook’s executive team. Parker, previously known for co-founding Napster, later connected Facebook with its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. As discussed, Thiel, at that time, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect at least one controversial DARPA program that had been dismantled the previous year. Notably, Sean Parker, who became Facebook’s first president, also had a history with the CIA, which sought to recruit him at the age of sixteen soon after he had been busted by the FBI for hacking corporate and military databases. Thanks to Parker, in September 2004, Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added its board. Parker maintained close ties to Facebook as well as to Thiel, with Parker being hired as a managing partner of Thiel’s Founders Fund in 2006. Thiel left the Facebook board, which he had joined in 2005, in 2022 to focus on supporting “Trump-aligned candidates,” including J.D. Vance.
Thiel and Facebook co-founder Mosokvitz became involved outside of the social network long after Facebook’s rise to prominence, with Thiel’s Founder Fund becoming a significant investor in Moskovitz’s company Asana in 2012. Thiel’s longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook co-founders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir’s databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community. Facebook data also feeds another Thiel-backed company, Clearview AI.
Notably, even LifeLog’s architect, Douglas Gage, has publicly commented on Facebook’s similarities to the program he had once hoped to lead. In 2015, He told VICE that “Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog at this point.” He tellingly added, “We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information to advertisers and data brokers and without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked,” precisely because it is now a private company and not a project housed at the Pentagon’s DARPA.
Palantir and the Surveillance Agenda under Trump
During the Trump administration, Palantir enjoyed an even more privileged status than it had held under previous administrations, with Palantir gaining many new lucrative contracts, mainly with the military and intelligence, during Trump’s first term. This was likely influenced by Thiel’s presence on Trump’s transition teams and the role of close Thiel associates in choosing key Pentagon appointees.
Not only that, but the broader agenda behind Palantir – the decades-long effort to create a pre-crime, AI-powered surveillance system in the United States – also got significant boosts during Trump’s first term. For instance, Trump’s Attorney General William Barr quietly legalized pre-crime in the United States under the guise of detecting potential mass shooters before they commit any crime. The program, called DEEP, enables the DOJ and FBI to work with “private sector partners” to surveil people of interest that have committed no crime, but are “mobilizing towards violence.” At roughly the same time the program was announced, Barr was also pushing heavily for a government backdoor into consumer apps and devices, particularly those that utilize encryption. He also signed a data access agreement with then-UK Home Secretary Priti Patel that allowed both countries to “demand electronic data on consumers from tech companies based in the other country without legal restrictions.”
Also during the Trump administration, an Israeli intelligence-linked company called Carbyne911 began to be installed throughout the United States in emergency call centers and has since spread throughout the nation. Carbyne911 was heavily funded by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Trae Stephens sits on its advisory board alongside Michael Chertoff (head of DHS under George W. Bush) and Kirstjen Nielsen (head of DHS under Trump). Carbyne was also heavily funded by Jeffrey Epstein and Leslie Wexner and, for much of its early history, was closely associated with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, himself an intimate associate of Epstein.
Carbyne911 and similar companies extract any and all data from consumer smartphones for merely making emergency calls and then use it to “analyze the past and present behavior of their callers, react accordingly, and in time predict future patterns,” with the ultimate goal of smart devices – such as “smart” street lamps – making emergency calls to the authorities, as opposed to human beings.
Data obtained from these software products, which are slated to be adopted nationwide as part of a new national “next generation” 911 system, are shared with the same law enforcement agencies now implementing the Barr-designed “national disruption and early engagement program” to target individuals flagged as potentially violent based on vague criteria. Combined with the “domestic terror” framework released during the Biden administration, the definition of “domestic terrorists” now encompasses those who oppose US government overreach and those who oppose any form of capitalism, including the World Economic Forum-favored “stakeholder capitalism,” and/or “corporate globalization.”
The Trump administration, during this same period, also mulled the creation of a new health-focused agency modeled after DARPA. The proposed “HARPA”, which was promoted extensively to Trump by his son-in-law Jared Kushner and his daughter Ivanka as well as Trump’s close friend and former NBCUniversal president Bob Wright. HARPA’s proposed flagship program – “SAFE HOME” (Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes) – would use “breakthrough technologies with high specificity and sensitivity for early diagnosis of neuropsychiatric violence,” specifically “advanced analytical tools based on artificial intelligence and machine learning.” The program would have cost an estimated $60 million over four years and would use data from Americans’ social media accounts as well as “Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon Echo and Google Home” and other consumer electronic devices. The program would also collect information provided by health-care providers to identify who may be a “threat.”
Bob Wright promoting the HARPA proposal in 2018
Though HARPA was not created under the Trump administration, Trump reportedly reacted “very positively” to the proposal and was “sold on the concept.” In addition, before the proposal was known publicly, Trump had called on Big Tech, and specifically social media to collaborate with the DOJ to create software that stops mass murders before they happen by detecting potential mass shooters before they can act. However, Trump ultimately passed on creating HARPA, which was ultimately created during the Biden administration as ARPA-H, underscoring the bipartisan nature of this agenda.
Are Peter Thiel-Backed Intelligence Contractors “MAGA”?
Despite many Thiel-backed or Thiel-founded companies describing themselves as “America First” and as defenders of “Western values,” a closer examination of those companies suggests this is not the case. One lesser known example of this is Palantir’s early role in developing a way for the US government to target Julian Assange, leaks-based journalism in the public interest, and what it called “The WikiLeaks Threat.” In looking at other Thiel-linked firms, it’s quite clear that at least some are more than willing to target Americans on either side of the political divide on behalf of their biggest client, the so-called “Deep State” that Trump supporters revile. Take, for example, the Thiel-backed Clearview AI – which claims to now be able to identify every person in the world using its advanced facial recognition system. As Unlimited Hangout contributor Stavroula Pabst noted in a recent report:
When asked in an NBC interview about Clearview AI’s possible negative ramifications for society, the company’s CEO, Hoan Ton-That, said ‘[a] lot of peoples’ minds on facial recognition technology were changed around Jan. 6th, when the insurrection happened [at the United States Capitol Building]. It was very instrumental in being able to make identifications quickly.’
As its own CEO stated, Clearview AI was used extensively on January 6th and later boasted of its “potential for identifying rioters at the January 6 attack on the Capitol.” In a 2023 interview, New York Times reporter Kashmir Hill added that, not only was Clearview AI used at the Capitol that day, but also in the days and weeks that followed to identify alleged rioters:
The FBI had photos of all these people because many of them were filming themselves on social media and posting photos online, and they weren’t wearing masks. And so many police departments started running their photos through Clearview AI to identify them.
After the events of January 6th, 2021, Clearview AI reported a 26 percent uptake of its services from law enforcement, having used its role in targeting Trump supporters as a sales pitch.
Clearview AI’s sales pitch that includes its admitted role in arresting those present at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021
Clearview AI is not the only Thiel-linked company willing to target Trump’s base, as Palantir’s co-founder and current CEO Alex Karp is obsessed with his long-time fear that the “far right” is going to murder him for his ethnic background. That fear, per Karp, “propels a lot of the decisions” made at Palantir. “I still can’t believe I haven’t been shot and pushed out the window,” Karp told New York Times reporter Michael Steinberger in 2020. Steinberger added that “if the far right came to power, [Karp] said, he would certainly be among its victims. ‘Who’s the first person who is going to get hung? You make a list, and I will show you who they get first. It’s me. There’s not a box I don’t check.’”
Then, in 2023, Karp stated during an interview at the World Economic Forum annual meeting that “We built PG [proprietary software], which single-handedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe.” Given that the labels “far right” as well as “far left” are often misused to describe those on either side of the political spectrum that do not subscribe to or support official narratives, it’s worth asking if the “far right” Karp claims to have stopped referred to people who actually deserve the label, or right-leaning populism, given populism of any flavor is a threat to Palantir’s benefactors in the corporate world and in the US National Security community.
In addition, Trump supporters that did not subscribe to official narratives around Covid-19-era policies should be aware of Palantir’s role in the Trump administration’s Covid response and also in the Covid vaccination roll-out. During Covid, Palantir developed Tiberius, which was used by HHS to “help the federal government allocate the amount of vaccine each state will receive” and also to “decide where every allocated dose will go – from local doctors’ offices to large medical centers.” Tiberius, and by extension Palantir, collected all the Covid-19 and healthcare data from US government agencies, local and state governments, pharmaceutical firms, vaccine manufacturers and companies contracted to act as vaccine distributers. Palantir was also provided Americans’ sensitive health information by the Trump-era HHS as well as “a wide range of demographic, employment and public health data sets” in order to “help identify high-priority populations” to receive the vaccine first. During Covid, Palantir was also a member of the Covid-19 Health Coalition, whose other members included the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, which was Palantir’s first funder, as well as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Palantir also managed the HHS Protect database, a secretive database that hoarded (and still hoards) information related to the spread of Covid-19 gathered from “more than 225 data sets, including demographic statistics, community-based tests, and a wide range of state-provided data.” At the time, HHS Protect was criticized by several public health experts and epidemiologists, among others, because of the sudden decision by the Trump-era HHS to force US hospitals to provide all data on COVID-19 cases and patient information directly to HHS Protect and, thus, to Palantir. Hospitals were threatened with the loss of Medicare or Medicaid funding if they declined to regularly feed all of their COVID-19 patient data and test results into the HHS Protect database. Palantir declined to provide information on any safeguards it had in place to protect Americans’ health data in any of its HHS-related programs, despite requests to do so from Senators and Congressmen. HHS Protect also later incorporated HHS Vision, an artificial intelligence–driven “predictive” component, which “uses prewritten algorithms to simulate behaviors and forecast possible outcomes.” Aspects of HHS Protect share remarkable similarities with the scrapped TIA sub-program known as “Bio-surveillance.”
Not only that, but a long-time consultant to Palantir, Avril Haines, was a key fixture at the controversial pandemic “simulation” in late 2019 that was tied to previous, intelligence-linked biosecurity events like the 2001 anthrax attacks. Haines, a former CIA deputy director, worked very closely with her superior, John Brennan, at the CIA, including during the time Brennan illegally surveilled Trump associates during the 2016 election cycle and helped propagate and develop the “Russiagate” narrative, which Haines is now conveniently resurrecting. Haines, shortly after participating in Event 201, joined the Biden administration and has been serving as the administration’s top intelligence official – the Director of National Intelligence – since Biden took office in January 2021.
Palantir is also controversial among the America left for its role in using big data to facilitate ICE raids on migrants and its decision to pilot its “predictive policing”, i.e. pre-crime, functionality in low-income, minority communities. Ultimately, Palantir – like many of the other military/intelligence contractors with close ties to Peter Thiel – is a tool of the National Security State, which has been ramping up its “War on Domestic Terror” apparatus that – per government documentation – will target dissent on both left and right and essentially anyone who attempts to stand, or even speak, against government overreach and criminality.
With Thiel, Palantir and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale now pumping millions into the Trump-Vance campaign after the recent VP announcement, it seems almost inevitable that Palantir and the other Thiel-linked military contractors will have even more influence in a second Trump administration than it did during his first term.
Author
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for Mint Press News. She is contributing editor of Unlimited Hangout and author of the book One Nation Under Blackmail.
The Thiel-Verse with Stavroula Pabst
July 24, 2024
Whitney is joined by Unlimited Hangout contributor Stavroula Pabst to discuss Peter Thiel, the man behind Trump’s VP pick J.D. Vance and the CIA-linked architect of key aspects of the technocratic surveillance state.
Podcast available now on all Podcast apps, Rokfin, SoundCloud, Odysee, Podverse.fm.
Links discussed:
“JD Vance owes his entire career to Peter Thiel” @_whitneywebb on X | Thread Reader
The Total Information Awareness Project Lives On | MIT Technology Review
Manufacturing Consent: The Border Fiasco and the “Smart Wall”
Julian Assange – “The goal is an endless war, not a successful war”
AG William Barr Formally Announces Orwellian Pre-Crime Program
Newsweek | Trump Asks Tech Companies to ‘Detect Mass Shooters Before They Strike’
This Biden Proposal Could Make the US a “Digital Dictatorship”
Follow Stavroula:
@stavroulapabst / X
Stavroula Pabst | Substack
CAPITOL RIOTS (Clearview.AI)
Facial recognition may help find Capitol rioters — but it could harm many others, experts say
How Peter Thiel-Linked Tech is Fueling the Ukraine War
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Ah Whitney Webb is a good one. I like that she blasts both sides with ferocity 💡