Surveillance on Notes from the Rabbit Hole

How This Blog's Palantir Investigation Predicted Congressional Alarm

Thu, 19 Jun 2025 18:25:57 -0400

How This Blog’s Palantir Investigation Predicted Congressional Alarm

On June 17, 2025, ten Democratic lawmakers led by Senator Ron Wyden and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sent a formal letter to Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp, demanding answers about the company’s expanding federal contracts and what they described as a government-wide “mega-database” containing sensitive American taxpayer information.

The letter raised serious concerns about potential Privacy Act violations and the creation of surveillance infrastructure that could be used to “spy on and target political enemies.” It cited over $113 million in new federal contracts under the current administration and warned that Palantir employees embedded at the IRS were helping create “a single, searchable database” of taxpayer records that would likely be shared throughout the government.

The Quiet Revolution: How AI Is Reshaping the Most Human Moments of Aging

Thu, 12 Jun 2025 08:30:00 -0400

Foster Vance sits in his apartment at Fellowship Square Mesa, dealing with a loss that has shaken more than his emotional equilibrium. Since his wife died in February, the 82-year-old resident has struggled with something he never anticipated: his physical balance.

“I recently lost my wife in February, so my balance of having somebody in the apartment disappeared,” Vance explains. “I haven’t fallen in a year and a half, and I do not want to fall.”

The Mythic Convergence: How Two Tolkien-Named Defense Companies Found Each Other

Fri, 06 Jun 2025 14:30:00 -0400

Reader’s Warning: Like Tolkien’s own work, this analysis requires some time and determination to get through. Pour yourself a coffee (or second breakfast), settle in for the long haul, and prepare for a deep dive into how Silicon Valley’s most powerful defense companies turned Middle-earth mythology into modern reality. The tale is worth the journey—I promise.

When Palantir Technologies and Anduril Industries announced their partnership in December 2024, most news outlets focused on the strategic implications for defense technology. But buried in The Register’s coverage was a line that made Tolkien fans do a double-take: “the irony that companies named after artifacts from The Lord of the Rings were joining forces in reality.”

The Silicon Panopticon: Palantir's Militarization of AI and the Erosion of Digital Liberty

Thu, 17 Apr 2025 10:15:02 -0400

The Silicon Panopticon: Palantir’s Militarization of AI and the Erosion of Digital Liberty

In the dystopian fiction many of us grew up reading, surveillance states weren’t built by governments alone—they were constructed through public-private partnerships with corporations eager to profit from omniscience. Today, that fiction has materialized in the form of Palantir Technologies, a company whose very name—drawn from the corrupting “seeing stones” of Tolkien’s Middle Earth—betrays its function: to watch, to know, and to enable action based on that knowledge.