June 14, 2025
Palantir combines government databases to build complete citizen profiles
Palantir fuses government databases with social media for comprehensive surveillance profiles.
🤖AI Governance✊Civil Rights📰Media Literacy
Palantir's Gotham and Foundry platforms integrate government databases, social media monitoring, financial records, and location tracking to create comprehensive surveillance profiles.
Harvard's Shoshana Zuboff warns this represents "the fusion scenario"—merger of surveillance capitalism with state power.
Palantir’s Gotham and Foundry platforms ingest social media monitoring, financial records, location-tracking data, and government databases to assemble individual surveillance profiles without consent.
Palantir systems process billions of data points per second to update threat scores and behavioral profiles in real time.
Secret “threat scores” generated by Palantir’s predictive models can influence employment decisions, security clearances, and other life-changing outcomes via background-check companies.
Research indicates 89% of major data brokers sell personal information that can feed into government surveillance systems like Palantir’s.
Civil liberties groups report that Palantir’s data collection often occurs without warrants or judicial oversight, circumventing traditional constitutional protections.
Palantir embeds its employees directly within federal and local agencies, blurring the line between corporate contractors and government operatives.
🤖AI Governance✊Civil Rights📰Media Literacy
People, bills, and sources
Shoshana Zuboff
Scholar of surveillance capitalism
What You Can Do
1
Track intelligence and surveillance-related legislation at congress.gov to follow any bills or amendments that would expand or limit private-sector involvement in surveillance.
2
Contact your U.S. representatives and senators (via senate.gov and house.gov) to ask for transparency requirements, judicial oversight, and clear warrant standards whenever private data is accessed by government agencies.
3
Use aclu.org and eff.org to learn about your digital-privacy rights, download guides on how to request records under the Freedom of Information Act, and find model letters for demanding accountability.
4
Monitor federal contract awards and rule changes in the Federal Register (federalregister.gov) to see when new surveillance tools or data-sharing agreements are approved.
5
Submit public comments and attend oversight hearings of the House and Senate intelligence committees to demand open debate on the use of corporate-managed surveillance infrastructure.