the coming incompetent surveillance state
The Trump administration wants defense contractor Palantir to create a Big Brother with DOGE and AI. It's going to be a disaster.
After decades of trying to convince their voters that the evil Marxist Globalist Cabal of the New World Order was trying to create a government-spanning machine to spy on them, watching their every move in real time as to best oppress them, the GOP will be building exactly that. Well, more like completing it between PRISM and financial data it can access thanks to the Patriot Act to cheers of MAGA voters very excited that it will finally be used the way they approve of, to carry out a little ethnic cleansing instead of things like tracking militia, domestic terrorist, and white supremacist activity.
Now, something like this could obviously be used as a tool of oppression against any and every critic at a moment’s notice and we can certainly spend some time thinking about how historically, autocracies with such far-reaching capabilities frequently turn on their supporters should they fail to show enough zeal or complain too much about Dear Leader, but that’s not the immediate, pressing issue.
No, believe it or not, the bigger issue is that this tracking database combining a lot of data from across government agencies is bound to create chaos and end up getting a lot of innocent people disappeared by ICE or thrown in jail on charges that are clearly false. The problem won’t be completely trumped up charges — which would be fitting for this administration — but something far worse: inevitable technical issues.
As far as the data will say, you may be a money laundering for a cartel while in reality, the closest you’ve been to an actual Mexican drug cartel is binge watching Ozark. Or it may implicate you in tax fraud as an algorithm detects weird movements of money between your bank accounts even though those accounts are not yours, nor are you affiliated with said bank or made any wire transfers in a decade.
Okay, but how could this all happen? The Trump administration is recruiting the shady data analysis company Palantir ran by J.R.R. Tolkien obsessed Peter Thiel, who named it after one of the all-seeing crystal balls of Middle Earth. It’s been around since 2003, has done a lot of database creation for the military and law enforcement, and it seems like on paper, they have experience with this sort of thing.
Yes, sure, Thiel may believe that democracy is an outdated concept and we should all become serfs in his AI-powered cyberpunk dystopia plagiarized from the novel Snow Crash and the anime Ghost In The Shell by Curtis Yarvin, but he knows how to hire the kind of people who understand how this kind of data works, right? And yeah, he might just call this new tool Eye of Sauron when it’s done, but surely the fascism will come in with a 99.999% accuracy and uptime guarantee.
a task infinitely easier said than done
If you actually work with tools that either integrate or collect vast amounts of data from many different sources, you know that it’s an absolutely Herculean task and the signals coming from Palantir on how they feel about this project and plan to tackle its sheer scope on a halfway acceptable deadline for the MAGAverse are major red flags.
The root of the problem is that Palantir’s main tool called Foundry is no different than any other tool used to set up a process of ingesting data from a data source and it will be up to a team of people they call FDEs, or Forward Deployed Engineers, or combine and make sense of all this data. This tool is not particularly liked by data professionals who see nothing special in it other than not being too slow while processing terabytes of inputs. Which in an age of cloud databases and message brokers, is not a feat that one would consider impressive by any means.
So, with the decidedly mid tooling, these FDEs will need to create the database which can track everyone in America. The data will come from dozens of agencies which are tracking many different things for many different reasons, with different data, which is accumulated for different, if not opposing reasons, updated in different parts and with different schedules, based on a web of internal bureaucracy, obscure laws, and intra-agency politics. Oh, and you’ll also need lots of tribal insider knowledge from agency experts. Many of whom DOGE fired in the early days, so good luck with that.
If you want a real challenge, sit down in front of a regulator who asks you to build near real time systems to scrape data from multiple states and organize it for them so they can find actionable insights for either enforcement or trend analysis, and then ask the panel to explain their agency terminology and processes. Even if English is your native language, you will leave the first five meetings doubting that fact. (It wasn’t mine so it was an extra fun experience for me.)
Now do that with 441 agencies — because that’s how many there are — and then boil it all down to a database design a dozen of them want to use to do whatever horrible things they have in mind. Which will change as they and their bosses and the political appointees and lawmakers, keep getting ideas. The scope of this project is so absurd and its intent clearly so unethical, abusive, and disconcerting, former employees have been speaking out against the very idea.
Given what they’ve written about how Palantir operates, it appears that the plan to at least deliver something, is to force all the employees they’ve been burning out to put in a whole lot of overtime and use AI as a shortcut to help glue all these disparate data sets together. Which is both on brand for an administration that uses AI to invent fake anti-vaccine studies, set tariffs, and solve the JFK assassination, and horrible as a tool prone to hallucinations and not understanding numbers is absolutely certain to create a sprawling mess of incorrect, outright fake, or corrupted data.
rearranging the deck chairs on the data titanic
All right, let’s recap. A shady company hostile to reporters, working with agencies that are demanding ever more sensitive data on Americans and an administration happy to hand them terabytes of random information on everyone in the U.S., seems to want to use AI along with a typical data ingestion tool they’ve cobbled together over the years to give an increasingly authoritarian government a way to track and go after people it doesn’t like in as close to real time as they can manage.
Thousands of experts who could have guided them have been fired, and based on the statements made by DOGE henchmen and cheerleaders who did all of that firing, they absolutely do not have the slightest clue of what these agency-specific databases do, why, and how, while DOGE feels very happy to pretend otherwise on social media and Fox News.
The best case scenario is Palantir spending a year with DOGE trying to ingest and use AI to massage all this data they can until a combined results look somewhat plausible at first glance, while taking every shortcut in the process. And remember, that data is being tallied and combined to be used in some way against immigrants and citizens.
Remember the threatening emails telling native born citizens they have to self-deport as quickly as possible or ICE will come do it for them? This was just one tiny attempt at an immigration enforcement system using scraped government data to flag targets and they effectively had to shut it down right away. Just imagine this happening every day for years on end to the point where children Americans born and living abroad get angry warnings to leave the U.S. immediately, posting them on social media with a mix of confusion and amusement.
I also have exactly zero trust they would take the honorable paths and either refuse to do the work in the first place, or force a vote in Congress on the parameters in which such a database could function, and what citizens could do to appeal being flagged in the software which will consume the results, as well as what data could be used when updating the system and how this will be audited.
The takeaway here is that yes, we wouldn’t be dealing with a secret police notified of our every stray breath with real time alert, but with weaponized incompetence where any stray shred of data of almost certainly dubious origin and accuracy could be used against us at a moment’s notice. If that doesn’t sound scary, it really should. Malice is still malice, and it’s at its most dangerous when it’s deployed indiscriminately and zero regard for consequences.