Today, Explained - Palantir has your info

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

The Trump administration wants to merge all of our data across government agencies. And it's asked a controversial company to help. This episode was produced by Peter Balonon-Rosen, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Andrea Kristinsdottir and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir Technologies. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The data analytics company Palantir has been working with the U.S. government for about 15 years on all sorts of things. This year, ICE is going to pay Palantir $30 million to improve how it targets and surveils undocumented immigrants. And your response to this probably depends to some degree on your politics. But the Trump administration is also expanding Palantir's reach on something that would affect all Americans. The idea is to link together all the data that the government has about us. This is unprecedented. So anyway, Theo von freaks out. This sounds crazy, dude. And confronts JD Vance.

It can tell if your kids are, you know, if your kids gonna have a limp or whatever. He'll be in the Christmas play. Veep is like, it's gonna be okay, but FYI, I also just learned about this. I actually just read about it earlier today or maybe yesterday. Coming up on Today Explained, what's Palantir up to? Whether it's a family member, friend, or furry companion joining your summer road trip, enjoy the peace of mind that comes with Volvo's legendary safety.

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markets. This is Today Explained. I'm Noelle King and here to for the U.S. government has kept your personal data siloed across many different agencies in the interest of protecting your privacy. And good on them because the government actually does have a lot of your data. Here's John Davison of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, or EPIC. It is a long list, and it depends on the ways that you interact with the government. Some of the ones that are quite common would be income information, certainly your contact information, your sources of income,

your charitable donations, all the types of things that many will be familiar with from having filed a tax return before. So the data that's collected to process your taxes and that information is kept separate from the information that the State Department has about your passport and travel records, which is kept separate from social security data, which is kept separate from, you know, information about you if you are an immigrant or if you've come under an investigation at one time or another by law enforcement agency.

Talking about drivers' licenses, banking credit cards, birth and marriage certificates, pension information, home and work addresses, school records, immigration and naturalization records, family court records. The most sensitive personal data of millions of Americans. What happens when you break that down, when you start to pool all of that data together, you consolidate power in a single entity and a single actor,

and that's whoever has access to that system. And so that can then be used to, certainly as we've seen, attack immigrants. It can be used to generate exaggerated claims of fraud, waste, and abuse. It can be used to, in the future, target political opponents. I say in the future, that's already happening in some cases, to target marginalized groups,

ordinary Americans, you name it. Once you build the weapon, there is an enormous range of ways that it can be used to harm the people you dislike or disagree with. Give me some specifics. We've seen this happen where and how. I think one of the most alarming examples of this is the agreement that's been reached between the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security.

The IRS is the latest government entity to cooperate with the Department of Homeland Security over the crackdown on undocumented immigrants. That's right. Immigration is now requesting additional information in home addresses of immigrants from the agency where the immigrants are actually filing and paying their taxes. So the Department of Homeland Security and ICE are conducting really harrowing, stunning enforcement raids and immigration enforcement activities.

And in order to do that, they need a lot of information to identify who they believe are unlawfully present in the country. They went to the IRS and they said, can we have information about non-citizens who are taxpayers still? And the IRS, a lot of the civil servants, the career folks there, put up quite a fight because they understood that it was a really radical departure from the way the IRS has approached privacy and data protection historically and very dubious as a legal matter because there are strict legal safeguards on that information.

But in the end, after a lot of browbeating, the two agencies entered into a memo that permits a certain degree of sharing of information from the IRS, government security. And so there you see information that these taxpayers provided in good faith so that they could pay into the, you know, the funding of the US government. And then it's being taken and turned against them and used for the purposes of deportation and surveillance and immigration enforcement. I know there's some percentage of Americans who will say, all right, you've just given me an example of people who are unlawfully in the United States.

They're breaking the law. I'm not breaking the law. I follow the rules. Why should I be worried about this? First of all, many of the people that have been subject to immigration enforcement, it has developed that they are in fact legally present in the country. He put the handcuffs on me. And then he went to me and said, how did I get into this country? And if I was waiting for court or if I have any case, and I told him I was an American citizen.

And he looked at his other partner, like, you know, smiling, like saying, can you believe this guy? You think, okay, well, this data is being combined, and it's only being used against people who are breaking the law. What do I have to worry about? Well, why should you feel comfortable that it's going to end with the people

that you might dislike or that you might think warrant adverse action by the government? There's just any, any number of ways that that information can be abused once it's all in one place. The government has always had a lot of data on us, but as you said, it has kept it separate across different agencies. Where did that start and why exactly? This country has a long history of being concerned about privacy.

It's baked into the Constitution in the form of a Fourth Amendment. The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated. But it was in the 1960s when computerized systems of records were becoming increasingly common. There was a proposal put forward to construct a national data center that would essentially pool all of that information in a one-stop shopping kind of structure.

Report of the Committee on the Preservation and Use of Economic Data, 1965. Such a federal data center should have the authority to obtain computer tapes and other machine-readable data produced by all federal agencies. That proposal provoked a lot of backlash, a lot of concern. New York Times headline, March 15th, 1967.

Professor warns of robot snooper. Tells senators data bank could destroy privacy. My own personal reaction to the proposal for a national data center was, I suppose, similar to that of most citizens. Intense apprehension at the prospect of still more invasions of personal privacy. I think folks have a sort of instinctive understanding of why they should be afraid of Big Brother.

And that's what was motivating the response to the proposal at the time. Then... Mr. Nixon says emphatically that the White House is in no way involved in the burglary and bugging of the Democratic headquarters, and he'll have no further comment on that matter. In Watergate, there were additional abuses proven that members of the Nixon administration had dipped into systems of personal information to carry out retribution and to target political opponents. And those two things together in 1974 added up to the Privacy Act. There will be hot pursuit of tough laws to prevent illegal invasion of privacy in both

government and private activities. And that was Congress stepping in and saying, we have to limit the ability of agencies to collect information, to transmit the information. It's a system of restrictions that limit the ability to share that data within government. And now we're seeing exactly the type of consolidation and aggregation of data that Congress was afraid about when it passed the law in the first place. Let me ask you a question. Americans are people who think a lot and worry a lot about privacy, and many of us, and I

would actually include myself in this, can't exactly put our finger on why. There's just a sense that if the government has a lot on me, then it might use it. Does a move like what President Trump is trying to do, does it change our relationship to the government in some way? We are talking about a government that is determined to eliminate safeguards that were put in place quite intentionally by Congress to prevent the sort of runaway accumulation of power that is made possible by the runaway

accumulation of personal information. And I think it is something to be quite concerned about because you build the surveillance weapon, you don't necessarily need to know every nefarious way that you're going to use it before you build it. The point is that you've built it, it's available to you. It is a source of tremendous power. And that's what we should be worried about. Even if we can't predict every way today that it's going to be used.

John Davison of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Epic has sued the Trump administration over privacy. The company that the administration has asked to organize all your data, Palantir. Her? Up next. Support for the show comes from Koala. Sounds adorable. Let's see what it is. It's a sofa bed. Koala says they take comfort seriously. Unlike traditional sofa beds, Koala sofa beds don't use uncomfortable metal frames. They come in three sizes, so you can find the perfect fit for your space.

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I'm Noelle King. Joseph Cox is a co-founder of 404 Media and the host of the 404 Media podcast. Palantir can be rather secretive and we call Joseph because he's got sources there and those sources are yapping to Joseph about what's going on on the inside. Palantir at its root is a data analysis company, which sounds very boring, but it does have serious consequences. They specialize in being able to take all sorts of disparate pieces of data, stuff that ordinarily wouldn't be linked together. Maybe it's in strange formats, maybe it's messy, and it brings it all into one interface

or platform and makes it very easy to draw connections, search for different things or drill down onto certain pieces of information as well. You can imagine it's used in banks, for example, to maybe look for fraud. It could be used by health services to look for patterns there as well. They're sort of data agnostic in that way. What has Palantir been doing for the US government to this point? Palantir has been working with the US government for a very, very long time. It goes all the way back to wars in the Middle East and the war on terror, when the US had obviously this

really large problem with IEDs and all of these soldiers were getting blown up and they had all of this data such as where the explosions were happening, the fingerprints of maybe the bomb makers, the materials being used. But this data was rarely spread out and it wasn't really in one place and nobody could really make sense of it. So they started to use Palantir and apparently that was quite impactful for them being able to find out how to combat this problem. Our team spent three days gathering a wide variety of open source data, then integrated them into Palantir to develop a clearer picture of the Afghan insurgency.

Everybody's clamouring for it. All the special forces are using it. Our allies are using it. Our intelligence communities are all using Palantir. The military is begging for it. After then, obviously that's very much a defense and an intelligence agency in a military context, Palantir eventually moved into, you know, local and state law enforcement, essentially working with agencies around the country on that. And of course, most consequentially at the moment, is Palantir's work with immigration

and customs enforcement. What has it been doing with ICE? So Palantir has been working with ICE in some capacity for quite some time. ICE already has these data tools which allows it to bring together different sorts of information about people, social security number, addresses, personal information, all of that sort of thing. Palantir has been contracted for years to work on that tool. What has changed recently is that according to leaks I got from inside Palantir, ICE has become a much more mature partner for the company.

That means they're taking on a much more hands-on role developing this custom solution, which they're calling Immigration OS, which is basically supposed to supercharge what ICE is able to do with the information it has at the moment or what information it's going to have in the future as well. When I first revealed the $30 million extension to this contract, when you go into the procurement records and you read, well, why did Palantir just get $30 million? The record says it was for, quote, complete target analysis of known populations, end quote, which was obviously very ominous. So I started looking into it more, got leaks

from inside Palantir, and it is basically to track the location of people who've been marked for deportation in real time. It is supposed to make ICE's work more efficient, effective, and in the eyes of Palantir, fair and accurate and transparent. They believe, well, if we take the data and we clean it and we present it in a really accessible way, this will actually make it easier and better for ICE to be able to execute its functions in a very fair manner. Now, obviously, I think a lot of people might think that is naive when ICE is doing things which aren't necessarily based on the data itself, such as having masks, people with no identification pulling people off the street. But that is how Palantir sees it internally.

Okay. Okay. Independent of its existing contract with ICE and with other parts of the American government, the Trump administration recently said it was going to partner with Palantir in an effort to make all of our data more accessible and efficient. People seem very unnerved by this announcement. This is real. It's not a sci-fi plot. I fuck with Trump. I really do. But

I don't like the government overstepping his reach to be all in our business. No one is talking about it. So spread the word. I'll do a full breakdown of my sub stack linked to my bios to subscribe for free and follow along for more. And then immediately you saw pushback from supporters from people who really like Palantir saying like, look, these are the good guys. The public perception of Palantir seems to be both divided and quite different from how the company views itself. Palantir isn't generating new data, and this is often something the company will stress. It is instead bridging gaps between existing data. But that is still exceptionally powerful and important when you take data in one context and then you weaponize or leverage it for another. What got me onto covering Palantir journalistically was the clear link between the company's work

and immigration enforcement. And specifically, you have Immigrations and Customs Enforcement driving around, picking up people without identifying themselves, wearing masks. You have flights to El Salvador violating court orders. It's not only the context of the data that has changed, it is the context of the democracy that has changed. And I think that is really key to understand for Palantir's perception. I've read Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, his book, and he very much frames Palantir

as a force for good. We are here to uphold Western democratic values. Judge democracy by the fruits it bears. And we make the mistake at our peril in the West to forget if we do not deliver fruits to our people in the form of a better, fairer, healthier society, a healthier society, we will lose people. I don't know how you square the idea that we are here to uphold Western democratic values while you are providing the technical infrastructure for a government agency that is actively undermining those same values. I can't logically do that in

my head. I can't ethically find the argument and I've sincerely tried to think about it after I've read the leaks I've got from inside Palantir. I've even asked my Palantir sources, what do you think about this cognitive dissonance between upholding Western values and then facilitating the activity of this particular agency and one of the sources said it was absolutely unhinged. Another said, is the classic Palantir doublespeak? They talk about these ideals, but only care as far as the public perception sees it. I don't know if I necessarily agree with that.

That is what my parent is sources saying. But there's absolutely a distance there, which I can't really square that circle. I, against my better judgment, while on vacation, read a very long magazine piece about Alex Karp and found myself really, really curious. This is an interesting man. Tell us what we know about him. Yeah, I would say Alex Karp is pretty different to other tech CEOs. He went to Stanford, clearly reads a lot of sociology and philosophy. He met Peter Thiel, the infamous... He met Peter Thiel, the infamous investor and tech mogul. They co-founded Palantir together. And I really think from the jump, it was about protecting these Western values, be that the

work of the military or other agencies as well. So a country has to have a border, the educational institutions have to work, the military actually has to be scary, you actually can have things function in a way where the outputs are much greater than the inputs. When you read Karp's writings about how he sees the tech industry, he really doesn't like what Silicon Valley has become, which is basically a part of the industry that makes food delivery apps and social networks and Uber clones. In a very derogatory sense, it is my impression when I'm reading his book, he thinks that the

tech industry should be much more closely aligned with the state and specifically the American project. I think the West as a notion and as a principle upon which it is actually again is obviously superior and not acknowledging that because by not acknowledging it or denying it you could pretend you were smarter or better than you were has led to enormous problems in our society. And also for the sake of... So question is, how powerful does Palantir become? If it becomes the company that under the Trump administration takes control of merging all of our data across agencies, what does that do for it? merging all of our data across agencies. What does that do for it? You can almost see a situation where Palantir becomes the technical infrastructure for the

US government and it becomes so deeply embedded into different agencies, they will be nonsensical to sever these Palantir contracts. Karp uses the word dominance when talking about his projects. And I think an important thing to understand about Palantir is that they know tech is imperfect. They know their tech can be imperfect. They know the government policy can be imperfect. And they even admit that there will be mistakes made in immigration enforcement as well.

But they don't think either of those are a reason to stop progress. They think you need to keep going, you need to keep building. This is pretty different to how government operates. I like to believe a government agency will be very, very careful and will really try to minimise damage as much as possible. Which is not to say that Palantir won't do that as well, but it acknowledges that mistakes will be made in this pursuit, but broadly it is to preserve America and the West. No Jolie Meyers edited. Andrea Christensen's daughter and Patrick Boyd are our engineers. Laura Bullard knows far too much. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained.