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As Donald Trump and his administration pursue crippling austerity measures across the country, they’re plunging millions of dollars into the president’s pet projects. And that includes reportedly giving hundreds of millions of dollars to a company that’s expanding the government’s ability to spy on its own citizens.
The New York Times has a new report on the administration awarding contracts to the controversial tech company Palantir, which is apparently helping Trump develop a database of Americans’ private information, scraped from various government agencies, that could theoretically be used to track or persecute them.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said. Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status. Mr. Trump could potentially use such information to advance his political agenda by policing immigrants and punishing critics, Democratic lawmakers and critics have said.
The White House did not respond to the Times’ request for comment, and Palantir declined to comment on its work with the Trump administration. It pointed to a company blog post that said organizations that license its products “define what can and cannot be done with their data; they control the Palantir accounts.”
The Times’ report aligns with concerns about surveillance and the weaponization of federal data highlighted by Rachel Maddow during a recent episode featuring Times reporter Julia Angwin.
Palantir is one of several private companies that have capitalized on Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. The company has been tapped as a key player in Trump’s mass deportation plans, and earlier this year, Palantir CEO Alex Karp gave investors a pretty grim summary of what the company’s full slate of work for the Trump administration could entail.
As the outlet Mother Jones reported:
‘I’m very happy to have you along for the journey,’ the CEO said. ‘We are crushing it. We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.’ ‘Palantir is here to disrupt,’ he continued. ‘And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them.’ (Palantir did not respond to a request for comment.)
Needless to say, putting American data in the hands of a company whose CEO boasts about his company’s capacity to kill and intimidate doesn’t inspire confidence that the data will be handled responsibly.
On that note, I’ve been laser-focused on the government’s surveillance capabilities in the age of artificial intelligence, particularly under the Trump administration. To learn more about the technologies that enable the sort of surveillance Trump and Palantir could soon unleash on Americans, check out my interview with surveillance and privacy expert Albert Fox Cahn from 2023.