Despite over a decade of leaks and exposures, the U.S. security state and its private contractors still pretend that mass surveillance of the American people is a conspiracy theory.
At the All-In Summit this past week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp insisted his company has never spied on Americans, even claiming Palantir was turned away by the FBI and NSA because it “defends privacy and civil liberties” too strongly. That narrative—of Palantir as a quirky, libertarian outfit that checks government power—has always been part of the company’s branding and has always been a ruse designed only to trick the most gullible people.
As disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden proved in 2017, Palantir’s Gotham operating system filtered the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE data, vacuuming up the private communications of millions of Americans into the ultimate system for turnkey tyranny. Those embarrassing revelations did not help the public image of a company whose reputation had already tanked in 2011 after reports of their corporate conspiracy to surveil and disrupt the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald.
While Americans remain deeply skeptical of the federal government’s surveillance powers, Palantir has nonetheless become one of the country’s most profitable firms, winning billion-dollar contracts off its supposedly “unmatched” technology and collecting endorsements from self-styled anti-establishment pundits like Bari Weiss.
Weiss’s outlet The Free Press—and even her non-accredited “University” in Austin—count Palantir executives as founding donors. He is “one of the most important builders in America and in the West,” Weiss gushed in a glowing interview with Karp, adding that Palantir’s central mission is “stopping terror attacks around the world.”
But far from being a “counter-elite” defending freedom against the establishment, Alex Karp and Palantir embody the establishment itself, having built its ultimate apparatus for surveillance and control.
Palantir is merely the resurrection of Total Information Awareness, the deep-state project conceived by disgraced national security adviser and Iran-Contra criminal John Poindexter in 2002—a program Congress deemed too authoritarian to exist. Poindexter, like his Iran-Contra co-conspirator Oliver North, was a lifelong operative of the U.S. security state; both believed that the greatest threats to American hegemony abroad came not from foreign enemies but from antiwar activists at home. As North bluntly explained to the Iran-Contra Select Committee: “We didn’t lose the war in Vietnam, we lost the war right here” in America.
Their worldview did not die with the Cold War; it merely migrated into Silicon Valley, where executives like Karp disguise it in pseudo-libertarian branding but repeat the same security-state dogmas, receiving millions from the CIA’s arm In-Q-Tel to accomplish the deep state’s goals.
Alex Karp is a natural successor to deep state bureaucrats like North and Pointdexter, adopting their skepticism toward democratic forces and believing that the “central danger,” to national security “comes from universities,” and students “who are not believers in our principles as a nation,” i.e., students who oppose unconditional support for Israel’s wars. Palantir, which has the ability to monitor and make “dossiers,” on those activists, is the wet dream of any deep state official looking to control and police the first-amendment-protected activities of American citizens, a Constitutional safeguard which has always been a nuisance for foreign policy hawks.
If it were just that, Palantir’s vast spying power would already be concerning. But Palantir is not merely another U.S.-based contractor; it is fused with the priorities of Israel’s own security state and functions as part of the Israel lobby inside the United States. Its chief executives—Karp, Joe Lonsdale, and former Rep. Mike Gallagher—have more than just an affinity for Israel. They are ideological fanatics who openly conflate Israel’s enemies with our own.
To that effect, Karp—who, like this author, was inculcated since birth to support the foreign government of Israel—has described college protesters on U.S. campuses as an “infection inside society.” Given the vast surveillance powers Palantir now wields, Americans should be asking how Karp and his colleagues plan to “cure” the supposed “infection” of young people using too much free speech to criticize Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Palantir, which supplies Israel with AI targeting tools to mass murder Palestinian women, children, and even some Americans in Gaza, has demonstrated near total deference to their Israeli clients. When asked about Israel’s use of Palantir’s products to target innocents in Gaza (which includes American citizens), Palantir executive Peter Thiel explained that his preference is to “defer to Israel.”
Palantir’s troubling loyalty to Israel is not an isolated case but part of a broader pattern linking Silicon Valley’s surveillance infrastructure to the Israeli state.
Another behemoth of the surveillance industry is Oracle, led by the world’s richest man and a major donor to pro-Israel causes, Larry Ellison. The Ellisons—who own their own island in Hawaii to ensure the ultimate form of privacy—are among the NSA’s largest mass surveillance contractors. In a 2013 CBS interview, Ellison scoffed, “Who’s ever heard of this information being misused by the government,” calling the agency’s unconstitutional mass data collection programs “essential.” He added that he would oppose them only “if the government used it to do political targeting. If the Democrats used it to go after Republicans. If the Republicans used it to go after Democrats. In other words, if we stop looking for terrorists and we started looking for people, on the other side of the aisle,” precisely what happened under President Joe Biden. Yet Oracle has not hesitated to keep cashing in on lucrative surveillance contracts.
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Oracle, like Palantir, aligns itself outright with the priorities of the Israeli government. Its Israeli-born CEO Safra Catz even told employees, “if you’re not for America or Israel, don’t work here.” But America and Israel do not always share the same interests. Sometimes they overlap, like during the Cold War, but often and increasingly, they do not, illustrated by Israel’s recent bombing of U.S. ally and host of the largest U.S. forward base in the Middle East, Qatar. Oracle erases that difference and pretends American and Israeli interests are one and the same.
The Ellisons have not been shy about their plans to harness their vast wealth and technological empire toward advancing the interests of a foreign government. As researcher Jack Poulson revealed just yesterday, the Ellisons helped coordinate an Israeli cybersabotage campaign and fund anti-BDS blacklists that target American activists, working closely with Israeli intelligence officials and private intelligence firms like Black Cube—the same Israeli company used to harass Harvey Weinstein’s accusers and critics of Israel—to do it. Meanwhile, the family has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an overt effort to bend American mass media into a more reliably pro-Israel posture.
Despite their denials and deceptions, Palantir and Oracle form the backbone of an unconstitutional mass surveillance regime that collapses the line between American and Israeli power. The danger of dual loyalty would only be hypothetical if their executives did not openly profess fealty to a foreign government. That Alex Karp and Larry Ellison are now embedded in the American security state should raise the question of why the public tolerates big tech elites, arguably as loyal to Israel as to the United States, holding the keys to the most powerful spying systems ever built.
