Palantir was born from the lessons of 9/11. Its technology now powers a new era of surveillance
The company was built around the idea that connecting fragmented intelligence could help prevent another terrorist attack. Today, its technology is being used across government agencies, including ICE, as advances in AI make it possible to analyze vast quantities of personal data with unprecedented speed.
Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, U.S. intelligence and investigative agencies realized they had a problem. They had gathered plenty of indications about al-Qaeda and the plans of its leader, Osama bin Laden, perhaps even enough information to prevent the attacks, but the intelligence was scattered across different agencies and databases.
It was out of the need to solve this problem that Peter Thiel, Alex Karp and others founded Palantir, a company that sought to use AI to help agencies such as the CIA and FBI extract insights from information scattered across large databases. This was the pitch the company made to the CIA in its early days: by consolidating and processing information from different databases, its technology might have made it possible to prevent 9/11.
1 View gallery
Agents from the U.S. immigration agency (ICE) questioning a suspect.
(Photo: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton)
But like any technology that expands the government's power, Palantir's did not remain confined to the national security field. Its use spread to other agencies and missions, and in recent months the company has found itself at the center of a public controversy over the use of its technology by immigration authorities.
According to reports, Palantir provides the technological backbone for a sophisticated data system operated by ICE. The system draws on dozens of databases containing information on 20 million people, access to which the agency received under an executive order from Donald Trump.
Using Palantir, ICE can enrich the data, identify patterns and connections, and build detailed profiles of individuals and the networks linking them. According to a report by 404 Media, Palantir's technology allows the agency to locate people within minutes, rather than hours or even days.
The story of the U.S. government's relationship with Palantir is, in miniature, the story of the post-9/11 world: how authorities leveraged a genuine security need to build an increasingly sophisticated apparatus for data collection and surveillance, and how technologies developed for national security can eventually be deployed for very different purposes.
The starting point was October 26, 2001, when President George W. Bush signed the Patriot Act. Passed amid an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty and justified on national security grounds, the law granted the government broad powers to conduct surveillance and wiretapping, carry out searches without prior notice, and collect communications data.
Although the law was presented primarily as a tool for national security and counterterrorism, some of its powers were subsequently used for other purposes, including investigations into drug trafficking and copyright infringement, as well as the collection of information on visitors to Las Vegas.
At the same time, the government used its expanded surveillance powers to build a data collection and intelligence apparatus on a scale previously unseen in the Western world. The system was exposed in 2013 through disclosures by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.
The revelations triggered an unprecedented public outcry over the scope of government surveillance. But the controversy has since faded, even as the government continues to obtain data from technology companies. One of the most prominent examples is the PRISM program, under which the NSA can collect communications content from technology companies when the surveillance target is a foreign national outside the United States.
In recent years, the rapid advance of large language models has added a new dimension to the government's surveillance capabilities. The ability to rapidly analyze enormous quantities of information can make existing data-collection systems far more powerful by allowing authorities to identify patterns, connections and individuals across vast datasets.
Palantir is perhaps the government's most prominent technology supplier in this area, but it is not alone. Other major technology companies, including Google, OpenAI and SpaceX, also have contracts with the U.S. government.
