Built by Palantir. Sanctioned by Trump. Target: You.

When they know everything, they can do anything.

What happened to individual privacy in America?

If you’ve been reading my work, you know I’ve been raising alarms about the national security implications of this administration’s overreach for months, starting with what looked like a politically motivated purge at the NSA. That was the first clue. Now, we’re seeing the broader plan come into focus: a vast federal database powered by Palantir, bringing together the private records of millions of Americans.

Yes, Palantir, the company founded by Peter Thiel, a major Trump donor and MAGA megaphone. The same Palantir that’s been embedded within our intelligence community for years, developing tools to track terrorists and build connections across massive datasets for counterterrorism efforts. Tools that, when used with oversight and restraint, helped save lives. I know because I’m familiar with them, given I spent most of my career in national security. But those same tools, in the wrong hands, can become the backbone of a mass surveillance regime. And that should make all of us, regardless of our political affiliation, uncomfortable.

Palantir didn’t just appear out of nowhere. It has spent nearly two decades embedding itself within the U.S. government, from the Pentagon to the CIA, from the IRS to ICE, which recently awarded the company with a $30 million contract to target and also track the self-deporting of illegal aliens (the company has been on the books for ICE since 2009). Are they tracking all the U.S. Citizens and people legally residing in the United States, too, that ICE is “mistakenly” picking up during their raids? Perhaps Palantir could provide a better data system so the Trump Administration doesn’t lose track of the children being separated from their parents this time around…but I digress. Palantir has been a partner in navigating the post-9/11 security state and, over time, evolved into the go-to contractor for everything from border enforcement to COVID-19 vaccine distribution to battlefield intelligence, securing over $2.7 billion in U.S. government contracts since 2009.

It's one thing to want to help the government fix its legion of data challenges. It's another thing entirely to build a Stephen Miller domestic surveillance state.

Throughout the past week, reporting has surfaced that the Trump Administration has tapped Palantir to build what basically amounts to a national surveillance platform, one that likely links together Americans’ health data, financial transactions, education records, immigration history, and law enforcement files across agencies, into one master system. This is not speculation. This is happening right now under the direction of an administration that is openly working on punishing political enemies, attempting to control dissent, and bypassing legal checks.

Let me put this in plain terms: This is how authoritarian regimes take root–not overnight, but bit by bit under the guise of "efficiency," "safety," or "patriotism." They collect the data, connect the dots, and then target the people.

And here's the twist that should stop everyone in their tracks: Even Trump’s own base is sounding the alarm. MAGA influencers and far-right allies are now openly asking if Trump has turned on them. Longtime loyalists described the Palantir national citizen database plan as Orwellian, questioning why this administration, their administration, is building a database that could be used to track Americans like political enemies.

Nick Fuentes, a far-right Trump-supporting white nationalist, called the association between the Trump administration and Palantir "the ultimate betrayal of his own people” and then went on to called them the “deep state.”

So, if you're a Democrat, Independent, or Republican, understand this: authoritarian surveillance doesn't play favorites. Once a system like this is in place, everyone becomes a potential target.

If you're reading this and thinking it sounds like a conspiracy theory, I get it. I can't believe I'm writing these words either. But as someone who spent years inside the national security world and worked side by side with the agencies now being hollowed out or co-opted, I've seen firsthand how powerful these tools can be and how dangerous they become when political operatives are calling the shots.

Let’s not forget: Peter Thiel’s fingerprints are all over this. Palantir’s rise didn’t happen in a vacuum. It was built with deep connections to U.S. intelligence, quietly expanding its footprint over the last decade. But this moment, this explosion of access and authority, is not accidental. It coincides with Elon Musk’s infiltration of government systems through DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), which I wrote about here. 

Given Musk's abrupt departure, now it looks increasingly like Musk was the frontman, the distraction, opening the backdoor for Thiel to walk in and build the infrastructure for a digital dragnet. 

The questions are urgent:

• What safeguards are in place to prevent abuse of this data?

• Who decides what constitutes a “threat”?

• What happens when this technology is used against political dissidents, journalists, or immigrants?

• What happens when this platform is used to build a loyalty score or a blacklist?

And don’t expect meaningful oversight. There are virtually no federal privacy laws governing how much data contractors like Palantir can aggregate or how that data can be used once it's in government hands. There's no formal limit to how wide this net can be cast.

If this sounds dystopian, it’s because it is.

Palantir’s role in counterterrorism gave them the keys to our most sensitive systems. But counterterrorism is not citizen tracking. You don’t fight extremism by erasing the Fourth Amendment, the cornerstone of American civil liberties. You don’t protect democracy by building a database to watch over every American’s digital life.

And here’s what keeps me up at night: once a system like this is built, it doesn’t go away. It gets expanded. Refined. Integrated. And in the hands of people who see power as the only principle worth protecting, it becomes the perfect weapon. This is the kind of surveillance architecture that, once normalized, becomes impossible to dismantle.

I said it when General Tim Haugh was forced out of the NSA: That was a red alert. He was a career official with decades of experience, pushed out without cause. It was a move designed to consolidate control. Now we see what they were making room for.

So again, I ask: What happened to individual privacy?

The government is building a tool that could know everything about you—your finances, location, health status, education, and opinions. It's being built by a private company with political ties and zero public accountability.

We cannot let this go unchallenged. This is not "government reform." This is not "efficiency." The time to raise hell is now, before the data starts deciding who's loyal enough to be left alone.

And the most chilling part? This isn’t happening in secret. It’s happening in plain sight.

Until next time,

Olivia