Surveillance State— A Guest Post By Jerrad Christian
- Jerrad Christian
- 1 day ago
- 3 min read
Future Crimes Are About to Become More Than Science Fiction
Palantir isn’t a name most Americans think about, but it’s quietly one of the most powerful surveillance tools the U.S. government has ever had. It was born in 2003 out of CIA venture funding through In-Q-Tel, built for war zones, and designed to stitch together everything from battlefield intelligence to financial records into a single, searchable profile. The company calls its platforms Gotham, Foundry, Apollo, and AIP, but they’re all just different eyes of the same face.
Peter Thiel co-founded it, and that alone should set off alarms. Thiel isn’t shy about his politics. He’s said he no longer believes “freedom and democracy are compatible” and that women getting the vote hurt capitalism. He’s poured millions into candidates and causes that would centralize power, strip back democratic guardrails, and harden the lines between the powerful and everyone else. When a man with that worldview builds the plumbing of modern surveillance, you have to ask: who will it serve when the chips are down?
Palantir’s original mission was counterterrorism, helping U.S. forces track insurgents and IED networks in Iraq and Afghanistan. But once a system like that exists, it doesn’t stay in one lane. Now it’s wired into ICE, local police departments, and federal agencies across the country. It can fuse together GPS pings, license plate scans, phone records, court filings, tax returns, medical data, and social media activity into one record. In the right hands, it can solve a cold case. In the wrong hands, and there are always wrong hands— it can mark someone as a threat before they’ve done anything at all.
The danger isn’t just that the technology works, it’s that it works silently. There’s no public debate before a city police department switches it on, no consent before your information becomes part of its network. You can live your life, break no laws, and still be mapped, analyzed, and categorized because your phone was in the wrong place or your number was in the wrong group chat.
And now, the surveillance state is looking to merge the physical world with the digital one through laws that would force users to identify themselves online. Across the U.S., proposals are popping up that would require government ID to use social media, post in forums, or even create basic accounts. On paper, they sell this as a way to stop bots and harassment. In reality, it’s a dream come true for companies like Palantir. If they can connect your legal identity to your digital footprint, the surveillance web becomes complete— everything you’ve ever said, clicked, or read, tied directly to your name.
The Tea app is a perfect cautionary tale. It was a social network to protect women, then it exposed user data and made it easy to link accounts back to real identities, exposing government issued IDs with addresses online. For activists, whistleblowers, or anyone challenging authority, that kind of exposure is dangerous. In a world where dissent is already monitored, stripping anonymity is like handing the state a roadmap to every person who’s ever disagreed with it.
Germany is currently running this play. In some states, police use Palantir’s Gotham to link databases, phone IDs, and social posts in seconds. Courts there have begun pushing back, ruling it unconstitutional to scoop up data on people with no suspicion of a crime. The United States hasn’t drawn that line, and given Thiel’s open contempt for democratic constraints, don’t expect the company to pull back on its own.
The sales pitch is always the same: it’s for safety. But “safety” in this context is just another word for control. Control doesn’t care if you’ve done something wrong— it only cares that it can reach you, catalog you, and predict you. And once we normalize a system that watches everyone, the watchers stop needing reasons.
That’s the risk when a man like Peter Thiel builds the eyes of the state. It’s not that they’ll only be used against bad guys. It’s that, in time, the definition of bad guy becomes whoever stands in the way of "progress.”
