Tag: mass surveillance

UK Leads Global Push For Notification Data Requests

Back in 2023, we reported on how US agencies have used push notification metadata on smartphones for surveillance, pressuring tech companies like Apple and Google to hand over user information. Prompted by Senator Ron Wyden’s inquiry, Apple revealed it had been legally barred from disclosing this practice, which raises serious concerns about civil liberties and government overreach.

Cut to today and government demands for user information tied to Apple’s push notification system continued into the first half of 2024, with the United Kingdom submitting 141 requests, despite the nation’s relatively small size, and the United States following with 129.

Germany also obtained data during this period. Singapore, despite making inquiries, received none. These figures come from Apple’s most recent transparency report, shedding light on global government interest in a lesser-known surveillance vector.

Even some privacy apps can be undermined by surveillance at the push notification level. Many apps have to rely on Apple or Google to deliver notifications; services that can expose critical metadata such as which app sent the notification, when it was sent, and how often.

This metadata can be used by governments to infer user activity, and social connections, and even de-anonymize users. It bypasses app-level encryption entirely, exploiting a layer outside the user’s or developer’s control.

Apple’s report outlines what’s at stake with these requests. When someone enables notifications for an app, the system generates a “push token” that links the device and app to a specific Apple account.

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Welcome to the Palantir World Order

How does a company with CIA ties and two steering committee members of the secretive Bilderberg Group as founders end up in the White House?

This question should be on the minds of every free-thinking person regardless of political affiliation or lack thereof. The answer to this question cuts to the heart of understanding the future direction of the American experiment, and the impact it will have on the rest of the world.

Starting in 2019 I began warning that we were witnessing the creation of a Technocratic State, with Big Tech CEOs amassing exorbitant wealth and unfathomable data about the world. This collection of financial wealth and data has allowed these Technocrats to gain power equivalent to many nations, and beyond that of smaller nations. Palantir is a perfect example of the merging of corporate and state power.

Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, long before they were made Steering Committee members of the secretive Bilderberg Group. Karp and Thiel launched Palantir with seed funding from the CIA’s venture capital firm In-Q-Tel. The CIA aimed to use Palantir to relaunch the controversial post-9/11 program known as Total Information Awareness. TIA would be shuttered after public outcry and concerns around surveillance. However, after Thiel and Karp began meeting with intelligence officials they helped Palantir to do privately what the government could not get permission from the American people to do publicly.

Over the last 120 days of the 2nd Trump administration it has become clear that Palantir is on the way to becoming the U.S. government’s new favorite Military Industrial Complex contractor of choice. A quick search reveals numerous headlines detailing the recent rapid rise of Palantir’s stock.

This should come as no surprise given the abundant contracts and projects Palantir is reportedly developing with the U.S. government. Here’s a brief look at the ways in which Palantir is becoming more deeply connected to the MIC.

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‘Trump Flipped On Us’: MAGA Reacts to Potential National Citizen Database

Supporters of President Donald Trump expressed anger and disbelief online following reports that his administration had advanced plans to create a national citizen database with technology firm Palantir.

Newsweek reached out to Palantir for comment.

Why It Matters

The White House has contracted Palantir, a Colorado-based analytics company co-founded by Trump supporter Peter Thiel, to assist in compiling a database of personal information on American citizens, according to unnamed government officials and Palantir employees who spoke with The New York Times. The purported deal follows project talks Palantir had with the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Department of Education.

The reaction from Trump’s supporters reflected growing unease within conservative circles, indicating a rare rupture between the president and key segments of his constituency. The controversy underscores nationwide anxieties around privacy, civil liberties, and the growing influence of technology firms over personal information management.

What To Know

The Palantir deal marks a significant development in government data collection, drawing sharp concern from privacy advocates and Trump’s own core base, otherwise known as “MAGA.” Detractors compared the centralized database effort to surveillance initiatives in authoritarian regimes.

Numerous pro-Trump voices expressed dismay and feelings of betrayal across social media platforms like X.

“People are so quick to suggest that I flipped on Trump…No, no, no…I didn’t flip on Trump. TRUMP FLIPPED ON US. I’m just not willing to continue living in a LIE, and I will tell you the unfortunate TRUTH about it,” The Patriot Voice wrote on X to his 158,000 followers.

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Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.”Ayn Rand

Call it what it is: a panopticon presidency. President Trump’s plan to fuse government power with private surveillance tech to build a centralized, national citizen database is the final step in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence.

This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.

According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.

This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.

What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.

This puts us one more step down the road to China’s dystopian system of social credit scores and Big Brother surveillance.

The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways—with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.

Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.

Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata—cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

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Palantir Co-Founder Joe Lonsdale & Former Exec Refute NYT Report Warning Over Surveillance ‘Master List’

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and former executive Wendy Anderson have hit back against a NY Times report warning that the company is laying the groundwork for government surveillance on steroids through a massive database that would coordinate the private information of US citizens across federal agencies. 

“Palantir’s not a “database”; it’s a platform created by 1000s of the most talented and patriotic Americans to partner with our DoD to stop attacks and defeat bad guys, while protecting liberty & privacy,” Lonsdale posted on X in response to the account “Retard Finder,” that said “The Palantir database idea is retarded.” 

“There are hundreds of similar types of software and efforts in the USA throughout the west; what’s unique about Palantir is that it’s BY FAR the best at stopping bad guys,” Lonsdale continued. 

When asked by a self-described Palantir shareholder whether he’d “personally be comfortable with your personal data being stored in this database if AOC or Ilhan Omar were President,” Lonsdale replied: 

“given the government does operate on sensitive data: I 100% prefer PLTR to be there if sketchy people are in charge, as it has full access rules and audit trails; others don’t.”

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Opinion: The Most Terrifying Company in America Is Probably One You’ve Never Heard Of

Most Americans have never heard of Palantir. That’s by design. It doesn’t make phones or social platforms. It doesn’t beg for your data with bright buttons or discount codes. Rather, it just takes it. Quietly. Legally. Systematically. Palantir is a back-end beast, the silent spine of modern surveillance infrastructure.

Palantir’s influence isn’t hypothetical. It’s operational. From the battlefields of Ukraine to the precincts of Los Angeles, its software guides drone strikes, predicts crime, allocates police resources, and even helps governments decide which children might someday become “threats.” These aren’t sci-fi hypotheticals. They are pilot programs, already integrated, already scaling.

This software—Gotham, Foundry, and now its Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP)—is designed to swallow everything: hospital records, welfare files, license plate scans, school roll calls, immigration logs and even your tweets. It stitches these fragments into something eerily complete—a unified view of you. With each data point, the image sharpens.

If Facebook turned people into products, Palantir turns them into probabilities. You’re not a user. You’re a variable—run through predictive models, flagged for anomalies, and judged in silence.

This is not just surveillance. It’s prediction. And that distinction matters: Surveillance watches. Prediction acts. It assigns probabilities. It flags anomalies. It escalates risk. And it trains bureaucrats and law enforcement to treat those algorithmic suspicions as fact. In short: the software decides, and people follo

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Cities nationwide are quietly deploying facial recognition technology to track your every move

Police in cities across America want to deploy AI-driven facial-recognition technology that’s capable of tracking and identifying every human being who enters public spaces in real time.

Even politicians in some cities are calling for a pause or outright banishment of this technology from ever getting into the hands of cops. But the battle is shaping up to be a big one in cities nationwide, and if I was a betting man I would put my money on the technocrats and the cops. They will likely win out over the few politicians and taxpaying citizens who are concerned about privacy and civil liberties. They almost always do. They have the money and the media propaganda machine on their side.

According to an article in Biometric Update, two-thirds of Milwaukee’s city council says no, they don’t want this technology given to cops. An article in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel says 11 of 15 city alderpersons signed a letter opposing use of the facial recognition technology by the Milwaukee Police Department, citing concerns about bias, ethics and potential overreach.

Below is an excerpt from the article in Biometric Update, and notice the rationale — it’s always the same whenever technocrats are involved: Safety, speed and efficiency.

Milwaukee police currently don’t have a facial recognition system — but they want one, and have tested the technology. They say it makes solving crimes faster, and “can be done with the appropriate parameters in place to ensure that the use will not violate individual civil rights.” They say it would not be, and had never been, used as exclusively as probable cause to arrest someone. They have pledged to engage in public consultation as part of any formal acquisition process.

Nonetheless, the Council’s letter, written “in strong opposition to the deployment of facial recognition technology by the Milwaukee Police Department,” says that “while we understand the desire to enhance public safety and the promises people have made for this emerging technology, we believe these benefits are significantly outweighed by the risks.”

The article goes on to note that the council’s letter “names potential overreach by the administration of President Donald Trump as a risk factor, as well as studies showing that the majority of facial-recognition algorithms are more likely to misidentify people with darker skin, women and the elderly.

How absurdly shortsighted that their major concern is Trump using this technology. This suggests they’d be perfectly fine with facial-recognition being deployed if we just had a different person in the White House, someone with a “D” in front of their name like Gavin Newsom or Kamala Harris.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin has asked the Milwaukee Council to adopt a two-year pause on any new surveillance technology across city services, including police.

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French justice minister calls for abolishing cash

France’s Justice Minister Gerald Darmanin has proposed abolishing cash transactions, arguing that digital payments – including cryptocurrencies – are much easier to trace than physical money and would help authorities combat drug trafficking and other criminal activity.

Restrictions on cash transactions in France and across the EU have already tightened in recent years.

Speaking before a Senate commission on Thursday, Darmanin said that “a large part of daily delinquency and even criminal networks rely on cash,” and declared that “the end of cash would prevent the establishment of drug dealing points.”

Darmanin, who previously oversaw public finances as Minister of Public Action and Accounts, acknowledged that banning physical money wouldn’t eliminate the drug trade, but insisted that “once the money is traceable,” it becomes “more complicated” for both consumers and dealers to escape financial oversight.

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New Orleans Police Secretly Used Prohibited Facial Recognition Surveillance for Years

The New Orleans Police Department (NOPD) secretly received real-time, AI-generated alerts from 200 facial recognition cameras throughout the city for two years, despite a city ordinance barring generalized surveillance of the public.

“Police increasingly use facial recognition software to identify unknown culprits from still images, usually taken by surveillance cameras at or near the scene of a crime,” an exposé by The Washington Post explains. However, “New Orleans police took this technology a step further,” automatically alerting officers with real-time updates of names and locations of possible matches of wanted suspects from a private network of cameras through a mobile app. 

“This is the facial recognition technology nightmare scenario that we have been worried about,” Nathan Freed Wessler, a deputy director for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology project, told the Post. “This is the government giving itself the power to track anyone—for that matter, everyone—as we go about our lives walking around in public.” According to Wessler, New Orleans is the first known instance in which a major American city has used artificial intelligence to identify people through live footage for the purpose of making arrests.

The use of these automatic alerts may have violated a city ordinance meant to protect the public’s privacy from a generalized surveillance tool and prevent wrongful arrests due to software errors. 

Passed in 2022 in response to New Orleans’ post-pandemic crime wave, the Surveillance Technology and Data Protection Ordinance removed a previous prohibition on surveillance technology in criminal investigations to increase public safety. Mayor LaToya Cantrell said at the time that the NOPD needed “every tool available at their disposal” to keep the city’s “residents, businesses and visitors safe.” However, the ordinance stopped short of allowing the NOPD to utilize a “face surveillance system”—defined as “any computer software or application that performs face surveillance”—while limiting data collection to “only the minimum amount of personal information needed to fulfill a narrow well-defined purpose.”  

While violent crime in New Orleans has declined since 2022, so have the crime rates in most major American cities that do not use real-time facial recognition surveillance systems. 

Anne Kirkpatrick, superintendent of the NOPD since September 2023, paused the automatic alerts in April after learning about potential legal problems with using the system. Records obtained by the Post reveal that Kirkpatrick sent an email to Project NOLA, the nonprofit that provides the NOPD with facial recognition services, on April 8 stating “that the automated alerts must be turned off until she is ‘sure that the use of the app meets all the requirements of the law and policies.'” The network of cameras remains in place. 

While automatic pings of potential suspect matches to NOPD officers are paused, Kirkpatrick maintains that facial recognition technology is essential to law enforcement. On May 16, 10 inmates escaped from the New Orleans jail, prompting a manhunt (five inmates remain at large). Facial recognition is credited with the capture of two of the escaped inmates. Kirkpatrick told WVUE, the local Fox affiliate, that such a situation is “the exact reason facial recognition technology is so critical and well within our boundaries of the ordinance here.” Bryan Lagarde, Project NOLA’s executive director, confirmed that NOPD is not currently using real-time, AI-generated alerts but is still utilizing facial recognition technology and footage from 5,000 cameras across New Orleans to track and apprehend the escapees. Lagarde described to WVUE an instance in which officers narrowly missed an inmate by a matter of minutes, insinuating that automated alerts might be necessary to protect public safety, despite the cost to privacy. 

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Proton Threatens to Leave Switzerland Over Proposed Surveillance Law Expansion

Proton, the Swiss tech firm recognized for its privacy-first services like Proton Mail and Proton VPN, has issued a stark warning: if Switzerland enacts a sweeping expansion of its surveillance law, the company will relocate out of the country.

The proposed legal overhaul seeks to broaden data retention mandates, extending them beyond mobile and internet service providers to encompass VPNs, messaging platforms, and social networks. Privacy advocates argue this would obliterate core safeguards around encryption and user anonymity, long considered hallmarks of Switzerland’s digital landscape.

Speaking to Swiss broadcaster RTS, Proton CEO Andy Yen cautioned that the move would not only undermine civil liberties but also tarnish Switzerland’s reputation as a haven for secure, privacy-respecting technology companies.

“This revision attempts to implement something that has been deemed illegal in the EU and the United States. The only country in Europe with a roughly equivalent law is Russia,” Yen said.

Under the proposed changes, companies classified as “derived service providers” would be brought under new monitoring obligations, with requirements to store specific categories of user data and submit to enhanced surveillance protocols. Such measures would force Proton to break from its no-logs policy and compromise encryption standards that its users depend on.

Yen was unequivocal about the company’s position. “I think we would have no choice but to leave Switzerland,” he said. “The law would become almost identical to the one in force today in Russia. It’s an untenable situation. We would be less confidential as a company in Switzerland than Google, based in the United States. So it’s impossible for our business model.”

Although the consultation period ended on May 6, 2025, the backlash against the proposal has been gaining momentum. Swiss political parties, civil society groups, and private firms have expressed deep concern about the implications for digital freedoms. In some regions, including Geneva, officials have invoked the recently recognized right to digital integrity as a constitutional safeguard.

Roussel has been at the forefront of efforts to enshrine digital integrity into law. The principle was formally adopted by Geneva in 2023 and Neuchâtel in 2024, with more than 90 percent public support.

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