Palantir: The Surveillance Company Hiding in Plain Sight

Palantir does not market to consumers. You will not install its app or see its logo at checkout. But it still touches records about millions of people across the US, UK, Australia, and Europe through intelligence agencies, border systems, militaries, health services, and private companies. Most people never consent, never get notified, and never get a way out.

The company took its name from the palantíri, the seeing-stones in Tolkien. That part is blunt.

The Company

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and early PayPal engineers. Its first major backing came from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, in 2005. Palantir says intelligence agencies do not get back-door access to its systems. What matters here is simpler: the company grew inside the US intelligence world from the start.

Its core product, Palantir Gotham, was built to help agencies such as the CIA and NSA combine huge amounts of mismatched data into one searchable view. After 2001, that kind of analysis became central to US counterterror work. Palantir says Gotham helped in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Whether or not you buy the mythology, the pitch stuck.

Palantir listed on the NYSE in September 2020 at a reference price of $10 a share. By early 2025, after a run of US government AI contracts and heavy investor hype, it topped $100 billion in market value.

US Government Integrations

The clearest way to understand Palantir is to look at what it does for the US government.

ICE and deportation targeting. Palantir built the Investigative Case Management system for ICE. It pulls together records from DHS, FBI, DEA, Social Security, state driver's license files, utility data, and more into one view for agents tracking deportation targets. Operation Blizzard in 2025 ran on that infrastructure. Public reporting puts the contracts at more than $95 million since 2014.

NSA and FBI data analysis. Gotham has been used for signals intelligence and domestic investigations. Much of that work is classified, but reporting from outlets such as the Intercept has tied Palantir to SIGINT processing linked with law enforcement records.

DHS border surveillance and CBP. US Customs and Border Protection uses Palantir to work with license plate reader data, traveler records, and financial information. Crossing a US border creates records that can end up inside Palantir systems.

LAPD and predictive policing. Palantir quietly ran a predictive policing pilot with the Los Angeles Police Department from 2012 to 2019 without public debate or city council approval. A Brennan Center investigation exposed it. LAPD then shut it down.

Pentagon and battlefield analytics. Palantir holds multiple Army and Defense Department contracts. Its Maven Smart System processes drone footage and sensor data for targeting. The US Space Force gave Palantir a $36 million contract in 2022. Total Pentagon spending runs far higher across active deals.

The NHS and UK Health Data

In April 2020, at the height of COVID-19, the UK government gave Palantir a £1 contract to build the NHS COVID-19 Data Store. The price was symbolic. The access was not. The platform centralized patient records from NHS trusts, GP surgeries, and public health bodies. Patient groups and privacy lawyers objected to the speed, the data sensitivity, and the lack of open debate.

In 2023, NHS England gave Palantir the NHS Federated Data Platform contract, worth £330 million over seven years. That made Palantir the operator of the central platform linking NHS patient records across England. Patients were not asked.

Australia

Australia has deepened its relationship with Palantir through AUKUS and domestic contracts. The Australian Federal Police, Border Force, and Department of Home Affairs all use its tools. In 2023, Services Australia hired Palantir for welfare analytics aimed at finding suspicious payment patterns.

That matters because Australia already has a recent example of algorithmic harm. The Robodebt scandal sent huge numbers of wrongful debt notices to welfare recipients, caused severe distress, and was later found unlawful by a Royal Commission. Palantir's welfare analytics sit in the same lane: state records, automated flags, weak due process.

Commercial Surveillance: Foundry

Foundry is Palantir's product for companies rather than spy agencies. The marketing talks about operations, logistics, and decision-making. The underlying logic is the same: ingest data, link records, and score patterns.

Carrefour uses Foundry for supply chain and customer analytics. Banks use similar systems for AML and KYC screening. Insurers use them for health data. If your bank checks whether you look suspicious, your records may run through Palantir infrastructure even if you have never heard its name.

That is the shift. Tools built for intelligence work, link analysis, network mapping, behavior scoring, move into routine commercial systems. Your loyalty card can feed the same kind of machine logic once reserved for police and intelligence targets.

Peter Thiel, Israel, and the IDF

Peter Thiel has long backed Israel publicly. Palantir also has longstanding ties to Israeli intelligence and the Israeli Defense Forces. It has held Israeli defense contracts for years. Some Palantir staff also came out of Unit 8200, Israel's signals intelligence unit.

In late 2023, as the war in Gaza intensified, Alex Karp publicly defendedPalantir's work with the Israeli military. In an open letter, he wrote that the company builds tools used by the Western alliance to identify and eliminate terrorists. Later reporting said Palantir technology was used in planning and targeting operations in Gaza.

The larger point is clear even where details are disputed. Palantir supplies tools to the IDF, and Karp has said that is the right thing to do. In military settings, Palantir-style systems turn large pools of signals and records into ranked target lists at scale.

What Data Palantir Has on You

You have probably never interacted with Palantir directly. That is how this works.

If your bank uses Foundry for AML screening, your transactions may have been processed by Palantir. If you crossed into the United States through a port, airport, or land border, your traveler records may have passed through Palantir. If you use the NHS in England, your patient records may sit on a Palantir-run platform. If your border agency uses Gotham, your biometrics and travel history can enter the same pipeline.

Palantir's model is to take records from systems that were never meant to talk to each other and merge them into one profile: name, face, address history, financial pattern, associates, risk score. Most people never see that profile, never correct it, and never know it exists.

How to Reduce Your Exposure

Some exposure is unavoidable when Palantir sits inside a government system you must use. A lot of exposure still comes from commercial systems you can control.

• Use cash at supermarkets and retailers. Loyalty card data is one of the main ways your purchase history enters analytics platforms. Cash leaves less behind.
• Skip loyalty cards. The discount is worth less than the profile it helps build. Carrefour, Tesco, Woolworths, and other chains feed large analytics programs.
• Use Monero for financial transactions where you can. Monero is not traceable like a bank transfer or a transparent blockchain.
• Use a no-log VPN for network activity. ISP records are valuable data. A VPN outside Five Eyes reduces that exposure, though it does not erase it.
• Keep social media light. Social platforms are major ingestion sources. Public posts are easy to scrape. Private posts can still be obtained under legal process.

You cannot opt out when Palantir is built into tax, border, welfare, or health systems. There, the practical move is to cut down the commercial data that can be linked back to your state identity.

What Palantir Says About Itself

Palantir says its tools help governments fight terrorism, secure borders, and manage public health crises. Alex Karp argues that democracies need powerful data systems and that refusing to build them is itself a political choice. On that last point, he is right.

What Palantir leaves out is the lack of meaningful consent for this scale of data fusion, the weak ability to correct errors, the business incentive to keep adding data sources, and the fact that the same architecture serves routine government administration and military targeting.

Palantir is not a rogue company operating outside the law. It works through public contracts. The real question is whether laws that permit this level of state data integration were ever understood by the public that lives under them. The answer looks doubtful.

Facts sourced from company filings, government contract databases, reporting from the Intercept, Guardian, +972 Magazine, and parliamentary records. All contracts are a matter of public record.