Tag: palantir

The New Age Militarists

Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley’s focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping and social media platforms, which he dismisses as “the narrow and the trivial.” 

His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence.

He argues, in fact, that Americans face “a moment of reckoning” in which we must decide “what is this country, and for what do we stand?”

And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands — in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry and designed to preserve America’s “fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries.”

Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is the genuine path to national salvation and he advocates a revival of the concept of “the West” as foundational for future freedom and collective identity. 

As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn’t due to “the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence.”

Count on one thing: Karp’s approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America’s current great power rival.

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The CDC, Palantir and the AI-Healthcare Revolution 

The Pentagon and Silicon Valley are in the midst of cultivating an even closer relationship as the Department of Defense (DoD) and Big Tech companies seek to jointly transform the American healthcare system into one that is “artificial intelligence (AI)-driven.” The alleged advantages of such a system, espoused by the Army itself, Big Tech and Pharma executives as well as intelligence officers, would be unleashed by the rapidly developing power of so-called “predictive medicine,” or “a branch of medicine that aims to identify patients at risk of developing a disease, thereby enabling either prevention or early treatment of that disease.”

This will apparently be achieved via mass interagency data sharing between the DoD, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the private sector. In other words, the military and intelligence communities, as well as the public and private sector elements of the US healthcare system, are working closely with Big Tech to “predict” diseases and treat them before they occur (and even before symptoms are felt) for the purported purpose of improving civilian and military healthcare.

This cross-sector team plans to deliver this transformation of the healthcare system by first utilizing and sharing the DoD’s healthcare dataset, which is the most “comprehensive…in the world.” It seems, however, based on the programs that already utilize this predictive approach and the necessity for “machine learning” in the development of AI technology, that this partnership would also massively expand the breadth of this healthcare dataset through an array of technologies, methods and sources.

Yet, if the actors and institutions involved in lobbying for and implementing this system indicate anything, it appears that another—if not primary—purpose of this push towards a predictive AI-healthcare infrastructure is the resurrection of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)-managed and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)-supported program that Congress officially “shelved” decades ago. That program, Total Information Awareness (TIA), was a post 9/11 “pre-crime” operation which sought to use mass surveillance to stop terrorists before they committed any crimes through collaborative data mining efforts between the public and private sector.

While the “pre-crime” aspect of TIA is the best known component of the program, it also included a component that sought to use public and private health and financial data to “predict” bioterror events and pandemics before they emerge. This was TIA’s “Bio-Surveillance” program, which aimed to develop “necessary information technologies and a resulting prototype capable of detecting the covert release of a biological pathogen automatically, and significantly earlier than traditional approaches.” Its architects argued it would achieve this by “monitoring non-traditional data sources” including “pre-diagnostic medical data” and “behavioral indicators.” While ostensibly created to thwart “bioterror” events, the program also sought to create algorithms for identifying “normal” disease outbreaks, essentially seeking to automate the early detection of either biological attacks or natural pathogen outbreaks, ranging from pandemics to presumably other, less severe disease events.

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AI Drone Swarms And Autonomous Vessels: Palantir Co-Founder Warns How Warfare Is About To Change Forever

Billionaire venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale is urging for a shift in U.S. military strategy, criticizing the costly, failed attempts to rebuild nations like Afghanistan while championing tech-driven solutions.

Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir and investor in Anduril Industries, told podcast host Dave Rubin this week that he envisions a future where autonomous weaponized vessels, AI-powered drones, and microwave-based defense systems replace traditional combat, minimizing risk and maximizing efficiency. Lonsdale argued these innovations can protect American interests without spilling the blood of U.S. troops.

.@JTLonsdale Predicts The Future of Warfare: AI Drone Swarms, Autonomous Vessels, and Microwave Weapons

“We wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. I think we had stupid adventures. I was very for our technology helping fight and kill thousands of terrorists. I was very for… pic.twitter.com/ZADkbRs9ri

— CAPITAL (@capitalnewshq) December 22, 2024

DAVE RUBIN: Do you think technology can solve our [national security] problems? Wars are going to look very, very different from now. Even from what they look like right now.

JOE LONSDALE: This is a big thing. I think we wasted a ton of money in Afghanistan. I think we had stupid adventures. I was very for our technology helping fight and kill thousands of terrorists. I was very for eliminating the bad guys. I was very against putting trillions of dollars into these areas to try to rebuild a broken civilization, which is not our job to do. We should have been building our civilization. I’m very pro-America, but part of being pro-America is fighting these wars without sacrificing American lives and keeping people very scared of us so that we don’t have to fight, and they do what they’re supposed to do. We have a bunch of companies right now that are kind of replacing the way the primes work. And so, for example, in the water, you want to have thousands or tens of thousands of smart and enabled autonomous weaponized vessels of different sorts that coordinate together. That’s what you want. And then, on the land, you know, we sent 31 tanks to Ukraine, and 20 destroyed.

For the same cost or even less, you could have sent 10,000 tiny little vehicles that are smart, have weapons on the fight, and are coordinated. There are all these new ways you can use mass production with advanced manufacturing and AI, and you don’t put American lives at risk. You turn the bad guys, and for much cheaper, you can do it.

Then the other one is really cool, just mentioned, we have the enemy also has, like, you see China where they fly hundreds of thousands of drones. It’s crazy. So we have something called Epirus, which is now deployed. It’s like a force field, but it’s a burst of microwave radiation in a cone. We can turn off hundreds of drones per shot from miles away.

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Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags. These scenes – altogether too familiar today – come enabled by German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, whose software uses AI and big data to help the Israeli military surveil, target and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is also used by ICE, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement to destroy privacy, to attack whistleblowers, and to turn the Orwellian concept of “pre-crime” (identifying and tracking potential subversives before they commit any offense) into a reality.

The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party’s most powerful backers. Already one of the world’s most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a “shadow president,” wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.

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Palantir’s Tiberius, Race, and the Public Health Panopticon

Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” created to produce and allocate COVID-19 vaccines to the American populace, is set to begin rolling out a mass-vaccination campaign in the coming weeks. With the expected approval of its first vaccine candidate just days away, the allocation and distribution aspects of Operation Warp Speed deserve scrutiny, particularly given the critical role one of the most controversial companies in the country will play in that endeavor.

Palantir Technologies, the company founded by Alex Karp, Peter Thiel, and a handful of their associates, has courted controversy for its supporting role in the US military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan as well as its participation in the detention of “illegal” immigrants through their contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and in “predictive policing” law enforcement programs that disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. Equally controversial, but perhaps lesser known, is Palantir’s long-standing and enduring ties to the CIA and intelligence community at large, which was intimately involved in the development of Palantir’s products that now run on the databases of governments and corporations around the world.

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Secretive HHS AI Platform to Predict US Covid-19 Outbreaks Weeks in Advance

Two weeks ago, on September 24, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) published a solicitation for the creation of a new “early warning system” that would “detect and track traces of the [corona]virus in community wastewater, compile the data, [and] conduct predictive analysis” in order to “guide reopening and mitigation strategies, and also serve as leading indicator for local re-emergence events to enable rapid containment.” HHS was seeking a contractor to design the new Covid-19 detection system, hoping, it said, to have this new system operational in at least forty-two US states by the end of year.

The first phase of the proposed project would involve testing and reporting from approximately one hundred wastewater treatment plants across the United States, covering an estimated 10 percent of the population. HHS, per the solicitation, reserves the option to expand the program to include up to 320 wastewater treatment plants, covering around 30 percent of the population. The solicitation claimed that wastewater testing would allow HHS officials to predict new Covid-19 cases five to eleven days before an outbreak.

The initiative appears to be an expansion of a “new public health tool” announced last month by HHS and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) called the National Wastewater Surveillance System. This tool was originally intended to “help public health officials to better understand the extent of COVID-19 infections in communities.” Per the recent HHS solicitation, however, the wastewater surveillance system will now be used to predict outbreaks before they occur and to guide “rapid containment” efforts in “at-risk” communities.

At the core of this new early warning system based on wastewater surveillance is a secretive data platform that HHS launched earlier this year called HHS Protect. HHS describes Protect as “a secure platform for authentication, amalgamation, and sharing of healthcare information” that combines “more than 200 disparate data sources” from federal, state, and local governments as well as the private health-care industry.

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OCTOPUS PROMIS: The Rise Of Thought Crime Technology — We’re Living In Orwell’s 1984

I don’t know if you have been paying attention or not, but a lot of police organizations across the U.S. have been using what are known as “heat lists” or pre-crime databases for years. What is a “heat list,” you may ask?

Well, “heat lists” are basically databases compiled by algorithms of people that police suspect may commit a crime. Yes, you read that right a person who “may” commit a crime. How these lists are generated and what factors determine an individual “may commit a crime” is unknown. A recent article by Tampa Bay Times highlights how this program in Florida terrorized and monitored residents of Pasco County and how the Pasco County Sheriff Department’s program operates.

According to the Times, the Sheriff’s office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence, and arbitrary decisions by police analysts. Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant, or evidence of a specific crime.

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