“They don’t really need blackmail anymore. I argue at the end of my book that Palantir, Peter Thiel’s company, is the new Jeffrey Epstein. If they want to blackmail you or learn anything about you, they just access what Palantir has already collected: your search history, communications, financial data, tweets you’ve liked, everything. In the surveillance era, Epstein becomes obsolete.”
“The disturbing thing about Palantir is that it’s fundamentally about pre-crime. They were pioneers of predictive policing, often piloting their programs in low-income, minority neighborhoods, deciding who might commit a crime before it happens. That kind of model can lead to administrative detention, as we've seen elsewhere.”
“Trump, in his first term, proposed a program to stop mass shootings using similar logic: monitoring Americans’ social media for early signs of neuropsychiatric illness, flagged by algorithm, which could lead to house arrest, mandatory therapy, or worse.”
“Many social media companies, like Facebook, have long-standing ties to Thiel, who helped set up Palantir while Facebook was taking shape. Facebook closely resembles Lifelog, a discontinued DARPA project, while Palantir is effectively a private-sector version of another DARPA initiative. Total Information Awareness, which was defunded by Congress for overreach. But once moved to the private sector, it faced little resistance. That’s how Palantir came to be.”
Whitney Webb, interviewed by Briahna Joy Gray on Bad Faith (August 1, 2025)
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