“AI is turning warfare into an endless, automated corporate activity, where insiders are making millions of dollars from prediction markets while CEOs make billions off of our taxpayer money.”

[Watch or read below]

Are you confused and anxious about why the government seems to be starting a war every weekend?

Are you confused about your taxpayer dollars being used to murder dozens of schoolchildren in order to kill one 80-year-old foreign leader?

If you live in America, you need to understand how the Trump administration and big tech are lying to you about mass surveillance and AI warfare.

For years, I worked in AI defense companies in order to help explain emerging technologies to powerful people, including at the Pentagon. I even worked on the tools that likely allowed Anthropic’s Claude model to be used in operations in Iran and Venezuela. Now I continue doing the same, but for the people: explaining how AI technologies endanger our lives and our democracy.

What you see abroad are not conventional wars, and what you see at home are not civil wars. What you’re looking at is something quite different: military experts call it a 5th Generation War (5GW). This is the “latest, most secretive and difficult to understand form of war,” according to military expert and defense scholar, Armin Krishnan. It exploits AI surveillance and covert operations in order to weaponize data and physical violence against people — both abroad and at home.

These AI wars are wildly unconstitutional, and violate the Geneva Convention, primarily because they turn civilians into targets, and involve cruel and unusual methods of punishment, also known as “irregular” or “unrestricted” tactics. Here are some of the defining characteristics of 5GW, according to Krishnan:

1. “Violence in 5GW is very dispersed or hidden, which makes it difficult to perceive as war…5GW relies on covert or ambiguous means that hide nefarious activities or disguise them as benign or harmless.”

You can see this “dispersed” pattern everywhere. In the United States the government is targeting American neighborhoods under the pretense of law enforcement and peace. In Venezuela, the operation to capture Maduro was framed as a drug bust. Likewise in Gaza, Palantir is working with the Board of Peace, an entity created entirely out of states involving humanitarian crimes, in order to help distribute — and potentially deny —  aid to Palestinians right after Israel enabled mass slaughter on them using their software. Similar patterns are being repeated in the ongoing crisis in Cuba.

2. “5GW bypasses the battlefield and targets society as a whole rather than its military forces [shifting] the emphasis from the control of physical terrain to control the human terrain and the human mind as a target of attack…the objective is to overthrow an existing political order or change the culture in society in accordance with the goals of the oppressor… ”

5GW doesn’t only rely on AI in order to carry out covert operations such as decapitation strikes [Iran] and kidnappings of world leaders [Venezuela] in order to take down their societies. This kind of war also relies on AI to track, monitor, and influence social media in order to shape your perception at home. That means making sure you’re either too scared, tired, or hopeless to speak out — or completely onboard with an operation that furthers violence around the world, and turns it into a spectacle on social media.

5GW war tactics were developed partly by studying terrorist groups like ISIS, which weaponized social media and perception in order to scare their enemies. Now you see the Department of Homeland Security using the same tactics of fear mongering on social media — and also using masked agents — in order to assault Americans.

Both at home and abroad, AI is turning warfare into an endless automated corporate activity, where insiders are making millions of dollars from prediction markets while CEOs make billions off of our taxpayer money. The highest paid CEO last year made nearly $7 billion — that’s the equivalent of $3.3 million an hour — helping the IDF, DoD, and DHS develop crueler and crueler methods of using people’s personal data in order to target them, and in order to influence the world without people noticing. His boss, Peter Thiel, believes waging constant wars and managing constant crises is the best way to keep elites in control.

Now following their vision, the DOD and the IDF have turned weekends — which are supposed to be holy and for the family — into a time of mass slaughter and warmongering abroad. All while you aren’t looking. As you can imagine, this is also a 5GW war tactic.

Congress needs to put an end to these illegal wars that are leading to mass war crimes and the violation of our civil rights — but will they? Recently it was found that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee took nearly 40% of its funds in January from Palantir lobbyists.

In the 18th century, we rebelled against a 7% tax in order to overthrow an oppressive government. In the 60s, we rebelled with protests in music in the face of war crimes in Vietnam, and put an end to a war which had sacrificed millions of Vietnamese people and thousands of Americans.

Where is our rebellion? Well, as you can imagine, these fifth generation wars are achieving their goals. They’re keeping us nihilistic, hopeless, and accustomed to war that will continue to enrich only a few individuals in the world.

We need an anti-war movement more than ever. 5th generation warfare will perpetuate slaughter and evil around the world, and the violence will no doubt return home.

Note for residents of Colorado:

5th generation warfare relies on third party data and intelligence gathered from social media in order to conduct covert tactics. It’s coming to Colorado, especially now that ICE is using third party data in order to track and target American citizens and migrants. Please use this link to sign a letter in support of state-level protections.

Follow Against Machines on Instagram for more.

But that would be the last day Palantir would call Colorado home.

What happens when a community comes together to take a stance on corporate giants, and exerts constant pressure on the media and on the ground?

What happens when intersectional coalitions are formed, and activists come together with faith groups, community groups, neighborhood associations, and unions?

What happens when they host multiple town halls with representatives about the dangers of ICE, Palantir, and Flock technology?

What happens when nearly 20,000 people sign letters in support of AI legislation and form a world-first People’s Caucus on AI ?

What happens when we show up to city council and do the same?

Well, maybe, we all get to see our city become a (slightly) better place for future generations. On Tuesday, after near daily-pressure on Palantir, ICE, and Flock over the past month by many Denver groups — what we nicknamed The Winter of AI — Palantir announced that had moved its headquarters from Denver to Miami. It specifically cited protests and Colorado AI regulation as risks in its accompanying SEC filing, and as the Miami Herald reports: ”Palantir was worried about activist-led protests over the technology company’s contracts that “are or are perceived to be harmful” and “have resulted in public criticism.”

In another major victory following weeks of campaigning and public outrage, the city auditor decided not to approve the Mayor’s proposed contract extension with Flock for automated license plate readers and police drones.

The Colorado State legislature and Denver City Council are now considering multiple important bills to regulate AI and protect people from surveillance, signaling an important shift in political headwinds in favor of the people — no the tech billionaires behind this administration.

As I told the Guardian, “Colorado has rejected the values of Palantir – the values of an economy built on exploitation of people’s data, whether it’s for warfare or for immigration enforcement.” Read more on CBS, Bloomberg, and The Denver Post.

Subscribe now

The full press release with our friends at DAWA, GSUS, and the AFSC:

Palantir Moves From Denver to Miami After Mounting Public Pressure

(Denver, Colorado) — Colorado residents and organizers celebrated a victory after Palantir Technologies quietly announced that the company will be moving their headquarters from Denver to Miami, Florida. This announcement follows over a year of escalating local anti-Palantir protests, organized by groups including Denver Anti-War Action, Denver Against Machines, General Strike, DSA, American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) Denver United and SEIU. The company moved from Palo Alto to Denver in 2020 due to dissatisfaction with the culture of Silicon Valley, similarly following months of protests.

Earlier this month, Congressman Jason Crow and Senator John Hickenlooper caved to public pressure and donated campaign contributions, $59,700 and $51,504 respectively, received from Palantir leaders to local immigrant rights nonprofits.

“Palantir can keep running, but they can’t hide anymore.” said Dain of GSUS Colorado and Denver Against Machines. “We’re more organized than we’ve ever been, not just in Colorado but across the country. This is just the start of our ultimate goal of getting Palantir out of our local and federal government entirely.”

Groups in Denver have hosted public actions, townhalls, whistleblower exposes, strikes, motorcades, all-day pickets, Capitol rallies, candlelight vigils, and targeted political pressure against Palantir. Community advocates primarily criticized the company’s involvement in war crimes abroad, genocide in Gaza and collaboration with DHS and ICE to facilitate mass surveillance, resettlement, and incarceration.

“We celebrate major progress on the path to victory today. We take this as proof that coordinated, collaborative action by the people is the most effective route to bringing about a better world. We won’t stop until Palantir is fully out of Denver and is brought to justice. We look forward to supporting the people of South Florida in the continued fight against this destructive corporation and its billionaire owners.” said Michael Hughes of Denver Anti-War Action.

The movement opposing Palantir’s presence in the state catalyzed the formation of the People’s Caucus on AI. Next month, Denver Anti-War Action and a coalition of Denver organizations will hold a Palantir Week of Pressure from March 9-15 to say “goodbye” to Palantir and ensure the company knows continued operations are unwelcome in this state.

“The pressure Palantir has felt in Denver will be following them around the country. This company works in nearly every U.S. city, and it’s time for Palantir ties to be cut nationwide. Our AFSC Denver office organized an ‘Unwelcome Party’ when they first arrived to the city, and that energy will be found everywhere they go.” Kenny Morris, American Friends Service Committee, an organization supporting the Purge Palantir Campaign

######

About Denver Anti-War Action
Denver Anti-War Action (DAWA) is a local community organization that opposes US imperialism and the military-industrial complex worldwide. Founded in November 2023 in the wake of Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign in Gaza, DAWA has worked closely with the Colorado Palestine Coalition (CPC) and other local organizations to fight the forces that seek to destroy people and nations around the world.

About Against Machines
Denver Against Machines is a movement that aims to build real-world community and literacy around civil rights and technology issues. We focus on education, culture, and advocacy for civil rights in the face of increasing mass surveillance and authoritarianism.

About General Strike US, Colorado
GSUS CO is the Colorado Chapter of the decentralized general strike movement uniting 3.5% or 11 million Americans to engage in and build mutual aid systems. With a goal of long term economic, environmental, social, and political change, we aim to withdraw our labor and spending from the systems that exploit us.

About American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) promotes a world free of violence, inequality, and oppression. Guided by the Quaker belief in the divine light within each person, we nurture the seeds of change and the respect for human life to fundamentally transform our societies and institutions. We work with people and partners worldwide, of all faiths and backgrounds, to meet urgent community needs, challenge injustice, and build peace.

Host: Okay, and you’ve stated that you’ve been trying to blow the whistle on Palantir for over a year now, and we are so glad to be able to offer you a platform to do that. Let’s just start by talking nuts and bolts. Palantir’s website contends that they make products for human-driven analysis of real-world data by building platforms for integrating, managing, and securing data, on top of which they layer applications for fully interactive, human-driven, machine-assisted analysis. What does all this jargon mean? What does Palantir actually do, like, functionally?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Yeah, as you can imagine, describing what Palantir does has been one of the greatest difficulties for people who are trying to understand the company. I think some of that is intentional. A lot of the words you just spat out are marketing jargon. What Palantir does — it affects militaries, it affects commercial companies, it affects civil agencies — so there’s different languages to talk about AI and organizations’ data across all those different industries and sectors. So Palantir, I think, sanitizes a lot of what they do through this sort of corporate slash military speak.

But fundamentally what they do is they help integrate large amounts of data, break down silos in an organization, and build applications on top of that data. The roots of those technologies, however, come from Intelligence Surveillance Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance (ISTAR) technologies. So these are targeting technologies that were originally pioneered by the military, by the Pentagon, by intelligence agencies. These sort of tracking and targeting technologies wield different types of data and investigations of individuals, often involving their personal data, in order to sort of predict their behavior or their location or various different things depending on the context.

But yeah, fundamentally, while Palantir can allow you to wield various different types of data, I think it’s important to remember that it comes from that context of intelligence agencies and militaries using these technologies to target people to kill them or to conduct covert operations. And today we see the same kind of trends. Palantir is helping ICE target people. Palantir is helping the Israeli military target people in Gaza and literally everywhere. It wouldn’t be surprising if they’re involved in Venezuela, in Iran as well. It’s highly likely. So what Palantir does is they take data that other agencies have collected and they synthesize it in a way that can be used for XYZ purpose.

Host: So what Palantir does is they take data that other agencies have collected and they synthesize it in a way that can be used for XYZ purpose.

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Yeah, that’s exactly how it’s been used for the DHS, for example, where medical data is being used to target migrants. So in the enforcement of immigration context in particular, we’re seeing this being Palantir’s primary use, which is to break those silos of data across the government. The problem is we have legal protections, limitations to when the government can do that, how it can properly do that, the notices it has to reveal to the public. And so far, it seems like the conduct of the DHS has been ignoring a lot of these regulations and proceeding with, again, this undemocratic expansion of the surveillance state across multiple different agencies.

Host: Let’s dig a little bit more into their relationship with ICE. What is their relationship with federal immigration enforcement? What are they doing to coordinate or to help out the folks over there in the Fed?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: They’ve pretty much always offered their targeting technologies for immigration enforcement, but the relationship has evolved. When I worked there, they were proud of not being involved in the ERO part of ICE’s operations.

Host: ERO?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: ERO stands for Enforcement and Removal Operations, and it’s kind of the last sort of step that the ICE operation, where somebody’s actually physically removed from their homes, captured, and then potentially funneled into the forced detainment system and the concentration camp system. So Palantir before didn’t actually help with those underground capture operations. Now Palantir is very much actively involved in that part of the job. In fact, Palantir does the full life cycle of operations for ICE, they coordinate the whole operation, that means everything from surveilling to finding targets to gathering the data they need to target track them in their location, and then eventually to capture them, and ship them, as Tom Homan has said, like an Amazon package across the country’s forced detention system.

Host: How far is the Palantir reach as far as data harvesting and collection is concerned?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Again, it’s important to clarify because Palantir will fight you over this. Palantir doesn’t itself collect data. It helps clients collect data. Well, you start there. Look at the clients it helps collect data from. Some of the most sensitive clients, some of the most important data in the world, such as the NHS, the health service in the UK. This data is immensely valuable. And even if Palantir can’t immediately collect it and sell it, it can very likely train its own models using this technology, if not at least develop applications to exploit these data types, and then sell those applications to other clients.

So [Palantir] could learn how to use data in one context, say in a military context, and even though it’s not collecting that data itself, it can then use the same application — not the data but the application — in a commercial context later on. So I think that’s one of the main worries.

The second worry is that Palantir is kind of trying to become this monopoly for access to government contracts for the tech sector. So in order to speed up their government acquisitions and procurement processes, a lot of startups are using Palantir’s tools in order to access high-level restricted government contracts that require accreditation. So Palantir is becoming this weird middleman in which it is kind of coordinating the deployment of a lot of advanced artificial intelligence systems in the government, including Anthropic’s Claude model and Google Gemini [and Grok] And the problem is it has taken advantage of what happened with DOGE, the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, under the premise of making the government more efficient through artificial intelligence. And now all these tech companies are using Palantir to kind of fill roles and responsibilities that used to be done by humans, humans in the government. That’s one of my biggest concerns. We’re replacing our democratic processes, we’re replacing our policing practices, with software, a tool that escapes the democratic accountability that these kinds of decisions and governance structures deserve from the people.

Host: You can’t hold a software application accountable for its actions.

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Yeah, and that’s a huge reason why the government delegates a lot of its responsibilities to private contractors like Palantir, because they can, for example, help the government source and combine different data sets and conduct operations within the black box of Palantir. But also, yeah, its roots seem to come from way back in the day. There were several projects in the Pentagon that were shelved because of their dangers to constitutional rights, including Total Information Awareness (TIA). And just about the time that these government programs were shelved — these projects to try to collect the data of the world and create a map of everything, to target everything — just around that time, Palantir came into being and subsumed a lot of these functions of secretive Pentagon projects as its own responsibility, in a way that, again, escapes the accountability of the public. But that’s exactly what’s important, right? How can we hold software companies accountable? How can we create the developers of these AI models accountable? And right now, Colorado is the only state trying to pass comprehensive statewide regulations on the development of these AI models and how they discriminate on people.

So this is very much an active debate right now in the state. It’s a very urgent debate. We formed the Colorado People’s Caucus on AI in order to represent the people’s opinion on AI as a bunch of major decisions are being made in the state regarding data centers, regarding AI regulation. The ACLU should be releasing a new bill soon. Denver City Council is working on a mass surveillance ordinance. And we need people to stand up in Colorado because we in Colorado could be the first people in America who wakes up to this problem of the way our data is shared and exploited in unconstitutional ways by the government. And we could be the first ones to actually start regulating this and fighting for this just how we fought for gay marriage and for marijuana legislation in the past. We’ve let in the past, we need to lead again here in regards to AI legislation so we can hold these companies accountable.

Host: What can people do to try to keep themselves off the radar, so to speak? Is there privacy anymore?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: That’s a huge question. For someone like me who’s been kind of involved in all these things for so long, I don’t think there’s much privacy left, honestly. I live my life pretty carefree because if I worried about this stuff, I would go crazy. Among the whistleblowers I’ve talked to, [one’s] lawyer started thinking their microwave was talking to them because they were so paranoid about this stuff. But eventually the government has technologies that are so advanced and nation state actors have software that is so powerful that it’s very difficult to promise anyone that their constitutional rights are being protected right now when it comes to data.

But, you know, there are people who are trying to make a difference. For example, I really admire [Meredith] Whittaker from Signal, which is an app that I recommend everybody download here, an encrypted messaging service that just about every activist and even the government uses, because even they understand how much data is being exploited and shared. ICE recently closed a contract with Paragon Solutions, which is an Israeli spyware company, which allows basically the DHS to access anybody’s phones directly and see what’s in them. So really advanced tools are emerging in the arsenal of the Department of Homeland Security, really advanced warfare tools. And right now, unless people stand up and fight for their privacy, they’re just going to have to accept this as sort of the new status quo. And this is the reason why I’m speaking out so much: it’s because I don’t want my grandchildren to live in this world where everything they do will be surveilled, tracked, and analyzed to ensure their best behavior, as Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, says.

I don’t think that matches with the values of our state. I don’t think that matches with the values of our country. I think we’ve just created this world where, you know, billionaires can fool everyone into believing in technologies by crafting this almost like apocalyptic narrative about them, granting them carte blanche to spend recklessly, invest recklessly, and push their software recklessly across the government. Without us even having seen if these things are effective or not. Like, we just saw a bunch of drone systems target a party balloon across the border this week. And they [originally] shut down airspace for 10 days. The FAA had issues with the DoD and border enforcement because they were kind of using these technologies in a reckless way. These very new technologies that promised to be the end-all of warfare conflict or border enforcement, but in reality, they cause mishaps like this, which caused immense disruptions.

In reality, using database lists, simulations, and artificial intelligence to target people leads to massive civilian casualties, leads to reckless violence like what we’ve seen in Gaza and in Ukraine, and also creates also a bunch of martyrs that you have to deal with. When you kill people in a foreign land without abandon, you’re going to see the results of that sort of slaughter in your foreign policy 10 years, 20 years down the road. And I don’t think we’ve settled anything in Gaza or in Palestine using these technologies. In fact, we’ve only reinforced one of the greatest truths about data technologies: that they help a lot with projects of mass resettlement and genocide. IBM, at the birth of these technologies, was helping Nazi Germany through its subsidiaries to track census information of Jews in order to ship them and kill them.

Host: Listeners, if you’re just joining us, you are listening to It’s the Economy on your community radio station, KGNU. We’re having a conversation with former Palantir employee and whistleblower Juan Sebastian Pinto. Juan Sebastian is now a writer and a community organizer. Let’s jump back into our conversation.

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Something that really scares me is we haven’t really dealt with the consequences of what it means to use a company whose primary technology is targeting individuals to do work across different sectors of the government. Palantir right now is working for the IRS. It’s working for the Department of Education. It’s working for Health and Human Services. It’s helping a lot of departments, and it’s helping the Trump administration not only potentially target migrants and sort of these political enemies for deportation, but also any other political enemies. So we have seen Palantir’s tools, for example, used by the federal government to cut grants for anything involving diversity, equity, and inclusion. We’ve seen Palantir software used to enforce administrative orders on gender ideology, meaning thousands of roles eliminated from the government that were not only regarding DEI, but actually doing research incentives around gender equity or diversity, as well as the defunding of a bunch of science and research programs that were related to these themes.

This is a huge problem: when Palantir not only is used to enforce the ideology of the administration on the ground to punish immigrants, but also to enforce the ideology of the administration in its governance functions, in its allocation of resources. So in this way, it’s like a double assault on the ground in the neighborhoods, but it’s also an assault on our governance structures.

The problem is if you want to design an AI application that actually cares for people or accounts for the reality of the world, you need to take into consideration things like gender, equity… all these things. And to imagine that you can just ignore these things while creating a platform really shows that Palantir is ready to use its tools to for whoever wants to pay the highest price and to use the Nuremberg defense: my boss made me do it. To continue exploiting, deporting, killing people today with artificial intelligence technologies.

Host: In your opinion, is Palantir breaking the law is what they’re doing unconstitutional?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: There’s two sides of it. There’s the constitutional rights in which I am 100 percent sure Palantir’s conduct has been immensely illegal. This kind of surveillance just by existing violates our First Amendment rights, our ability to congregate with others or speak freely — just because so much surveillance being there limits who we think we can meet, what we think we can say. But it also violates especially the Fourth Amendment , our freedom from having our data collected without a warrant. The Ninth and the 14th Amendment as well.

A bigger problem for me is sort of the corruption that I see emerging from Palantir’s dealings with the government. And we see a lot of that in the UK with a lot of weird revolving doors between Ministry of Defense officials and Palantir employees. Similar things are happening in the United States right now and journalists aren’t really keeping tabs. Palantir receives a lot of single source contracts. A lot of people in the government are invested in Palantir. There’s a lot of insider information. There’s a lot of Palantir and ex-Palantir employees in the government right now in senior functions. There’s a lot of former interns from Palantir and DOGE that are now continuing to carry on their project in different ways. So to me, this represents a bigger problem of corruption and perhaps a kind of collusion within a bigger network, which is the ecosystem of VC companies that are run around Peter Thiel, which also aim to take various different parts of governance functions and privatize them. We have crypto companies trying to turn our finances into technology [assets]. We also have nuclear companies that are emerging from the tech world which are trying to take over the energy sector. We have satellite companies taking over functions that we used to leave for space agencies.

Host: You talked about investment in Palantir. You mentioned when you came into the studio that some news came out today about Palantir stock. What’s going on with that whole deal?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Yeah, so Michael Burry, who’s better known as the real-life basis of the movie Big Short, is well-known for having predicted the 2008 financial crisis. He has taken a really negative position on Palantir’s business performance and believes the stock is highly, highly overvalued. This is not my sector of expertise, finance, but the revelations that he’s shocking the finance world with are helping undo a lot of the fantasy of what Palantir does. Michael Burry’s claims are that Palantir doesn’t actually own a lot of its technology: that it’s more of a UI wrapper around other people’s technologies. This means it’s just kind of a dashboard built around other tools. And he thinks it’s way overvalued for what it can actually offer the world in terms of actual new novel technology in comparison to other players in the AI field — and susceptible to political windfalls based on what administration’s in charge. Anyway, his bet is very much that the Palantir stock will be decimated by the end of this year. So far it’s proving an interesting challenge for Palantir.

Host: Tell us about the resistance to the AI movement here locally.

Juan Sebastian Pinto: It’s stemming from many different places. What I really appreciate about Palantir is that it really exposes the exploitative nature of all technology companies. When you really try to dissect and understand what the problem is with Palantir, you realize what the problem is with all tech companies, technological infrastructure, with our internet, with the way data is shared and exploited itself. So what Palantir has done to the left is actually incredible. It brought together so many different activists from different parts of the left, whether they care about the environment or immigration or queer rights or labor or education. They’re all coming together and realizing: this is a company that is actually harming all of us with its technologies and is actually undermining the very democracy that we stand upon.

So it’s given a lot of activists a new opportunity to reconnect, to do actions together, to work together. And so we have amazing groups here, Denver Anti-War Action, we have General Strike, we have PSL, all putting together a strategy to bring unions and everyday people in Denver and in Colorado together to realize we are unique here in this state. We actually can do something against one of the biggest problems in America right now. That’s not me saying that. Steve Bannon and Roger Stone on the right, they say Palantir is the biggest problem facing America. So really, we have a historic chance for a coalition that crosses party lines, that crosses issues.

We also have representatives here in Colorado that are trying to make a difference. There are people like Brianna Titone in the state senate who basically pushed for AI regulations despite being opposed by her own party. She had to filibuster her party at midnight to preserve these regulations. We have people at the ACLU presenting a bill here to support AI regulations. We have people like David Seligman, who’s running for AG at the moment. He’s doing a world historic case against Equilibrium AI, suing the company for discrimination using the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which is a world first. So Colorado is really becoming a zone for resistance. There’s people who care about the environment and the data centers. And that’s proven a real way to get people into the fight. When they see a data center coming up in their neighborhood, when they see a floor camera getting put up right around the street, then the problem becomes too hard to ignore.

Host: For our listeners that would like to get involved in the fight, what would you recommend?

Juan Sebastian Pinto: Yeah, if you want to get involved, there’s so many ways to get involved. We at Against Machines are curating a bunch of different events and town halls around this topic. So we’re going to have one on Sunday at 7 to 9 p.m. at Lin Cafetzin, which is a beautiful coffee shop that just opened in Aurora. It’s a radical reading space as well. We are hosting a bunch of events throughout the month, and you can follow that at against.machines on Instagram.

Host: Thank you so much for joining us here on It’s the Economy tonight. We really appreciate your time.

*the subscriber, which only followed my publication, before I removed them:

* This pamphlet letter, a protected creative work, is addressed to the American people out of civic duty and concern and protected under the First Amendment.

Note: this public message would not be possible without the investigative reporting of Ken Klippenstein and 404 Media.

TRANSCRIPT:

I was recently talking to a friend from Venezuela when he was telling me the story of the colectivos.

They were (Nicolás) Maduro’s private police force.

“Society collapses,” he told me, “when you can’t trust a policeman more than a thief.

We are now becoming more and more like Venezuela, with untrained armed officers terrorizing our cities. Like Venezuela, whose people have been subject to drone strikes and advanced warfare technologies, we have also become an experimental ground for AI targeting weapons.

A DHS whistleblower recently revealed to Ken Klippenstein 21 different major ICE operations, resulting in over 6,000 apprehensions since June.

From Operation Abracadabra, a covert effort to develop informants amongst immigrants, to Operation Bench Warmer, which spans the deployment of 2,000 intelligence assets across the country.

These show how aggressively ICE is scouring neighborhoods and developing sources to spy on immigrants.

These advanced warfare tactics fund data, surveillance, and physical violence to enforce a terrorizing assault on American communities.

404 Media recently revealed an AI tool by Palantir, a company based here in Colorado called “ELITE”, which among other things uses data from the Department of Health and Human Health Services to build lists of targets and sources from selected geographic locations.

This includes Medicaid data of those receiving health care in the state of Colorado, regardless of their citizenship status.

Using Palantir, an ICE officer could draw a circle around a neighborhood and get up-to-date information on which targets are most likely to be in their homes, echoing AI technologies that were used to follow people to their homes in Gaza.

The DHS is now looking for ways to use private ad tracking information for up-to-date location of tracking of targeted individuals. ICE is setting up traps to capture protesters and scan their faces, potentially for inclusion in a database of domestic terrorists that could be built by Palantir.

Who is going to protect us?

I am an immigrant I am a writer, I am a protester, I am a whistleblower.

All those categories of people have been targets for these AI weapons and technologies. But since I started speaking out, the list of people that are subject to targeting from these technologies has exploded. It has gone from immigrants and Palestinians to op-rep writers, student protesters, and now basically every American that opposes the Trump regime, stands up against fascism, supports trans rights, as of the passage of NPSM-7.

You may not think so now, but you will be next too.

I’m afraid every day for the safety of my community, and I hope you take strong action on AI legislation and support and encourage other representatives in the state of Colorado to do the same.

Thank you.

Credit to for helping, follow his work!

What kind of AI should everyone be talking about? Is it AI “agents” that will “supercharge” your “enterprise” “productivity”? Or AI agents that build their own social media, where they can pretend to start religions, and hide from humans? Should we be talking about the AI agents that will steal our jobs? Or chatbots that fool our kids into thinking they are in love? Or worse, suicidal?

How about AI agents that help our government wield an invisible war against us?

II.

The most important AI tools in America — the ones everyone should be talking about anytime someone mentions the word AI — are neither agents nor chatbots. They are the complex, militarized tools DHS is building with Palantir and deploying in Minneapolis and cities across the country. These applications are undermining our democratic foundations and serving as engines of political vengeance — determining who is a domestic terrorist, who deserves deportation and punishment, and who is likely to be on their couch when the government barges in through the front door.

But few will tell you that. That is because the AI industry has billions in marketing money to spend, hundreds of millions to lobby, and a tight grip on policy under this administration. They are interested in selling you a story where AI leads to economic and personal salvation — or American re-industrialization — in order to protect their investments and make unimaginable profits. These are the narratives I was forced to push endlessly while working for big tech CEOs.

They do not want you to know what AI looks like in the real world. They do not want you to look at the ruins of Gaza, or the fiberoptic webs of Lyman, Ukraine. They do not want you to read the user guide of Palantir apps used in Minneapolis.

They don’t want you to know that AI is everywhere so that you can train big tech’s machine learning models, so corporations can automate your work, set prices for you, discriminate against you — and potentially allow the government to target you.

They don’t want you to notice that every hour, and all around the world, AI tools made by Silicon Valley are being used to kill and take away people’s rights — and with little accountability, regulatory oversight, or public understanding.

There is some debate about AI models like Claude threatening software engineering jobs — or worse, Grok undressing women and minors — but there is little mainstream discussion regarding the DHS’s AI platforms, which will soon be collecting lists of Trump’s critics from big tech companies, lists of Jewish students at universities such as my alma mater, and potentially, the protected health and social security information of the entire nation.

III.

Following the brutal killing of two citizens of Minneapolis by ICE, the U.S. government was quick to smear the dead and call them terrorists — shamelessly conceding that the “War on Terror” had been flipped against the American people. “Any technology that we build to harm, repress, and annihilate other people can always circle back around and be used to do the same to us,” Irna Landrum, a civil rights advocate, told Tech Policy Press in a podcast after the publication published her important testimony from the ground in Minneapolis: How ICE uses AI to automate authoritarianism.

If you followed the media narrative, the situation in Minneapolis seemed more like the late-stage War in Afghanistan than a typical Minnesota winter. Videos showed green smoke from chemical weapons as ICE stormed neighborhoods, kidnapping people in one of the strongest immigrant communities in the country. New York Times reporter Thomas Gibbons-Neff, who served as a Marine in Afghanistan, made a thorough comparison of the ICE weapons used against Minneapolis residents and battlefield equipment, examining an arrest in the city that was recently ruled unconstitutional by a federal court judge.

As in the final days of Afghanistan, Palantir’s AI tools were in the middle of the action, coordinating the “full lifecycle” of deportation operations for ICE ever since the September roll-out of their new platform, ImmigrationOS. These tools helped ICE code the violent rhetoric of this administration into the real world, helping determine who is deserving of justice and constitutional rights, and who is not.

In the time Palantir has worked for the DHS, immigrants were discriminated against for deportation based on their skin color, and even for protected free speech activities, like an autism awareness tattoo. Palantir’s platform could even be behind an alleged database of “domestic terrorists,” which an ICE agent revealed to a protester as he tried to scan their face with a facial recognition tool, in a video from Maine that has now gone viral.

Within the DHS, the enforcement of ideological prejudice has become Palantir’s trade. Palantir’s “ontology,” which defines what represents what in a digital system (who is a terrorist, who is a suspect, who is a target or a threat) — paired with an administration with a total disregard for truth, equality, or fairness — has created an existential threat to our democracy and rule of law. This “ontology” exerts and automates the worldview of the Trump administration domestically by force, whether it is on-the-ground in operations by ICE and CBP, or bureaucratically through fraud investigations and funding purges.

The department of Health and Human Services is currently using Palantir to enforce executive orders 14151, ”Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” and 14168, “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” These orders led to waves of layoffs and ended $3 billion research from the National Institute of Health, Centers for Disease Control, and National Science Foundation. They also led NASA HQ to direct the removal of any mentions of equity, inclusion, accessibility, indigenous people, environmental justice, underrepresented groups of people, LGBTQ issues, or topics for women from its website.

Although this might seem a minor detail, any fair digital governance system would account for all of these themes and issues in the design of an instrument of responsible statecraft. In a just world, Palantir’s claim to support Western democracy while undermining core principles of such democracies — like the concepts of equity or women’s rights — should lead to questioning and accountability, and regulation. But instead, Palantir’s software continues to help the government grow the list of targets within the sights of AI weapons in America. A list which has expanded dramatically since I’ve started speaking out: from immigrants and Palestinians, to foreign student protesters and op-ed writers, to Americans who are protesting their constitutional rights.

Yet, after messy, militarized operations that pitted the latest, high-tech war tools against the citizens of Minneapolis — the government is making a partial retreat, withdrawing 700 of the approximately 3,000 federal agents from the city while pushing towards the suburbs. Even Palantir is making ludicrous attempts to distance itself from ICE. "If you are critical of ICE, you should be out there protesting for more Palantir,” CEO Alex Karp said in his last earning call.

However, Palantir should be inseparable from the legacy of ICE, especially since it took on the full “lifecycle” of immigration enforcement, and brought its engineers to the front lines. More importantly, ICE should be inseparable from the legacy of AI. As one of the world’s best-funded, most politically-notable, and prolific deployer of AI tools, ICE embodies the ultimate promise behind this technology thus far: empowering and enriching billionaires at the expense of our privacy, security, and human rights.

At what might prove to be a pivotal point in history, Minneapolis showed the administration that community, peaceful resistance, and a particularly disciplined kind of civil disobedience are more powerful than the wanton application of violence, surveillance, and discrimination by ICE, Palantir, and the Trump administration. They proved that, although we still might be under siege by these forces in cities around the country, Americans are ready to challenge the criminals in power: the billionaires and government officials who are propped up by big tech, mass surveillance, incarceration, resettlement, and war.

IV.

As the tech stock market tumbles, more and more people are coming to the same realization that shocked me last year when I left the tech industry. The realization that, although we have trouble articulating the value of AI for our economy and culture, we can easily pinpoint the many harmful, if not existentially-threatening effects AI has across many aspects of all of our lives. In fact, we might have decades of work ahead of us to undo these harms. Tech journalist and author Cory Doctorow refers to AI as the “asbestos” of our time.

Exploitative AI algorithms are the reason people are addicted to their screens, the reason we are losing our ability to focus and think critically. AI is fueling wars and mass resettlement projects that never seem to end. AI surveillance is dismantling our constitutional rights, harming immigrants, destroying our workplaces, our educational experiences, and threatening the value of our labor.

Finally, the data centers that are fueling this economy are polluting our communities and leading to explosive demand for power and water at a time when we contend with historic droughts and irreversible climate change.

Using any social media platform today — from Google to Facebook to Instagram to X to Reddit — feels profoundly unethical, as nearly all have led us into this world — by abusing our data for the training of AI models, helping ICE and the IDF target people, and furthering the aims of a genocidal project in Palestine. The DHS is now exploring ways to use the ad-tech behind these social platforms to help track the location of targets and support investigations.

In Denver, we have been closely watching events unfold in Minneapolis and preparing for the worst: another prolonged assault on a sanctuary city by ICE using advanced military strategies, weapons, and AI targeting tools. We also have to prepare for strange, militarized operations, such as an example Landrum shared in her interview with Tech Policy Press: where ICE agents lured protesters by honking repeatedly (a signal used by protesters to indicate an ICE raid) in order to trap them and scan their faces for a database.

We are also fighting AI surveillance across various other fronts. There are major decisions regarding AI legislation, data centers, and Flock cameras and drones across the state this month — and we’ve taken up the fight with union organizers, journalists, activists, researchers, and those who are ready to make a difference.

The winter of AI has begun, and we are launching and supporting various projects to help uncover the hidden architectures of AI exploitation.

We have joined The People’s Caucus on AI, a citizen-led initiative to push for AI legislation in Colorado as the state debates the first comprehensive statewide regulations on AI in the country. So far, we have helped send over 18,000 letters to representatives in support of AI regulation, and we have been busy planning town halls and events throughout the month as deliberations are made in the state senate. Last week, we held a packed town hall on ICE, Palantir, and Flock with former state senator Tim Hernandez and David Seligman, candidate for attorney general in Colorado, who just filed a first-in-the-nation lawsuit against an AI company for discrimination under the Fair Credit Reporting Act.

Ziggurat, this publication, has been established as a nonprofit design and education studio to challenge the abuses of big tech and AI surveillance. Subscribe and stay tuned for more in-depth articles, new contributors, educational materials, and research collaborations with think tanks and advocates. We will adopt the subscriber-led, deep-dive approach that has fueled some of the best new media outlets today, such as Equator Mag and 404 Media.

Against Machines, our movement to challenge tech-fascism and the exploitation of people by big tech and AI, is growing. Over the past few months, we have been hosting creative showcases, literary exchanges, and town halls with local politicians — building offline community and literacy tech and civil rights issues. This month, we will be campaigning for People’s Caucus on AI in support of the ACLU as they push to strengthen AI regulations in Colorado at a pivotal time.

That brings us to Offline Underground, our upcoming physical-only magazine, calendar, and project to build an offline network of organizations and individuals challenging big tech. We aim to connect intersectional elements of the tech resistance from across political divides: climate activists, union organizers, veterans, artists, luddites, hacktivists, concerned parents and teachers — or anyone who is simply fed up with giving their tax money to surveillance tech billionaires. Offline Underground will also share the ideas of Brooklyn’s Strother School of Radical Attention, and join the national attention activism moment.

You can get a copy of the calendar and magazine FOR FREE at any of our Against Machines events and town halls, and receive it in your physical inbox with a paid subscription to Ziggurat. Subscribers will start receiving their first copies next week.

Subscribe now

We are currently facing opposition with hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money, and our message runs contrary to that of dangerous and litigious people. Our operations are entirely reader funded, so please consider supporting us with a subscription or through a custom donation via our “Founder” subscription tier.

The best to help us today, however, is simply by sharing this newsletter far and wide and helping us grow our community.

We are starting Offline Underground Denver and New York. Contact hi@zig.art if you want to bring any of these initiatives to your city.

In related but separate news, I’m happy to announce that I’ve joined PauseAI —an international movement supporting AI legislation — as Denver Group Lead.

Interested in organizing? Send me a message.

* This pamphlet letter, a protected creative work, is addressed to the American people out of civic duty and concern and protected under the First Amendment.

Note: French and Spanish translations of this essay are available since publishing:
Leer en español ou lisez-le en français.

I. Manifest Destiny

It was a hot morning in June when I woke up, poorly rested, to the sound of a garbage truck outside my window and a message from a reporter at the New York Times.

“Hi there, are you around at 5 pm est today?”

It had been four months since I started ​speaking out about the dangers of military AI technology, and my experience at the surveillance company Palantir, leading to the loss of my job, a barrage of media requests, and many sleepless nights. I scheduled the call and went on with my morning.

A surprise would await me when I checked social media. The Times had just published an interview with Peter Thiel — one of the wealthiest men in the world and a Palantir co-founder — where he questioned the value of humanity, defended Palantir’s work, and tried to guess who the Antichrist could be. “In our world, it’s far more likely to be Greta Thunberg,” he told interviewer Ross Douthat.

Immediately, I started thinking about how I could challenge these narratives in my op-ed, or avoid them altogether. I wanted to explain to the Times audience​, clearly and without fear-mongering, how AI targeting technologies work, and to​ encourage people to protect themselves from AI surveillance by supporting state and local regulations. But most importantly, I wanted to illustrate the link between Palantir tools used by ICE and those used by the IDF in Gaza: ISTAR technology (short for Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance) AI tools that harvest and weaponize people’s data in war.

​At the reporter’s request, I had spent the last few weeks doing the risky work of gathering multiple former Palantir employees ready to speak out on the record, as well as some of the world’s top experts in AI war and disinformation ready to corroborate our claims​. But that plan would collapse later that afternoon​, when, in my call,​ I was politely informed​ that the group op-ed would not be moving forward any time soon.

“We don’t think the story is big enough yet,” my contact at the Times told me after weeks of discussions. “We want to wait until more people speak out.”

In the weeks following, as our conversations dwindled and nobody else came forward, the newspaper of record would continue platforming Palantir executives, granting extensive interviews to COO Shyam Sankar, a notorious China warmonger, and eventually, CEO Alex Karp. In an unsettling appearance at the Times’ DealBook Summit, he insulted their journalists, defended extrajudicial drone strikes, and called his critics “far right or far left idiots.”  Nonetheless, the Times editorial board is now advocating for increased defense spending as they continue to amplify the violent worldviews of these men —  meaning many more millions for Palantir — and doing so while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff suggests that we’ll see more military force used in American neighborhoods and as the Department of Defense calls artificial intelligence "America’s next manifest destiny.”

My disappointment soon turned to alarm in the weeks that followed, as I witnessed how Americans became increasingly subjected to the watchful eye of AI surveillance and drones in cities across the country —  including Denver, LA, and Chicago — with minimal understanding of how these systems work, often in secret and without democratic consent. As Francesca Bria, honorary professor at University College London, shows in her project Authoritarian Stack, a deep network of oligarchs, capital, and digital systems is capturing our democratic infrastructure under the banner of AI and automation. The failures of traditional media, and our elected representatives, in challenging the narratives of Silicon Valley companies and executives have led us to this point.

It would take some time for me to realize, however, that there is a more significant undercurrent linking the legacy of Palantir and the New York Times, one that also involves the story of Jeffrey Epstein​ and his key role in the early development of the surveillance economy we all live under today. These connections have to do with the big business of mass-surveillance and hybrid warfare, as well as the way our media and data ecosystems dictate which narratives last, and which are forgotten; who gets celebrated and who gets cancelled; and eventually, who gets to live, and who gets to die.

II. Kill Chains & Hybrid Operations

I was once a storyteller in the AI industry. This role, uncommon when I started, is now considered one of the hottest in the AI jobs market, and involves using writing, design, and multimedia to explain and sell emerging technology. In this capacity at Palantir, my job introduced me to something I will never forget: the crude “art” of diagramming ISTAR systems, known as AI “kill chains.” These technical drawings, made with OV-1 diagrams in the Pentagon, convey how ISTAR tools — such as drones, satellites, ground stations, and command centers — come together to make decisions, including determining who to kill, and how to kill, using artificial intelligence.

What I figured out while making these diagrams, however, was that drones and physical weapons only tell part of the story. When armies rely so much on data and automation, establishing all-encompassing surveillance dragnets soon becomes the utmost priority. The effort to map the world through satellites, drones, and information — in order to find targets and predict outcomes — eventually leads to the surveillance and mapping of what the military calls the “cognitive domain.” This entails charting public opinion, social media, influence, and reputation as a battlefield in itself. As digital warfare experts P. W. Singer and Emerson Brooking put it in their book, LikeWar:

“Power” on this battlefield is thus measured not by physical strength or high-tech hardware, but by the command of attention. The result is a contest of psychological and algorithmic manipulation… Your online attention and actions are thus both targets and ammunition in an unending series of skirmishes.

As a result, the internet has become a place where real wars with deadly consequences are carried out. Today, a tweet can determine a drone strike target, and kill civilians, halfway around the world. It can also empty an entire city, as Trump did in June when he cast Tehran into evacuation chaos after threatening airstrikes that never came. Now that the internet is a war zone, success largely depends on one’s ability to wield the power of information to mislead, misinform, or scare one’s enemies.

As a big-data platform with connections to the CIA and foreign intelligence operations, Palantir has likely been central to the waging of this kind of warfare: where nation-states try to win not only using conventional weapons, but by weaponizing data and influence for covert “hybrid” operations. Palantir’s executives understand this more than anyone. “The primary way to create peace in this world is to scare our adversaries when they wake up, when they go to bed, while they’re seeing their mistress,” Alex Karp has said. “The most effective way for social change is: humiliate your enemy and make them poor.”

What Karp refers to here are ways of “dealing” with someone without necessarily putting a bullet in their head; types of hybrid operations which are opened up by the possibility of exploiting personal data for combined intelligence and war operations. The vast amounts of data that we feed into the internet — about our lives, our location, our relationships, and our plans — can be used against us in ways we might not yet imagine. It is in the interest of many defense-tech companies like Palantir to help their clients figure out crueler and crueler ways to do so.

Projects with “irregular” components characteristic of hybrid operations include a Palantir proposal with HBGary to help Bank of America discredit journalist Glen Greenwald, as well as more complex intelligence and law enforcement operations like Operation Irish Goodbye, where ICE planned to capture immigrants voluntarily leaving through the Southern border to go home during the holidays.

Another example of hybrid operations featuring Palantir’s tools includes Operation Grim Reaper in 2024, where pagers were used to remotely bomb alleged Hezbollah operatives in Syria and Lebanon. The operation involved exploding phones that ​killed 32 people and injured over 3,000 ​others across Lebanon and Syria — including in their family homes​. Two children would die and over 500 people would be left with severe eye injuries. “Such attacks could constitute war crimes of murder, attacking civilians, and launching indiscriminate attacks, in addition to violating the right to life​,” UN experts said​ at the time. “It is also a war crime to commit violence intended to spread terror among civilians… A climate of fear now pervades everyday life in Lebanon.”

The weaponization of data through ISTAR — whether it is used to conduct direct “kinetic” drone strikes or compound “hybrid” attacks —  is often indistinguishable from terrorism.

III. The Shadow of the Valley

I first got a sense of that terror last spring, not long after I helped author and publish a dissent letter with 13 other Palantir alumni. I was lying on the grass near the icy shore of a mountain, not far from Palantir’s headquarters in Denver, when I thought I heard the hum of a drone among the crackling ice.

My blood rushed with panic. I closed my eyes and imagined myself killed in an instant.

The feeling soon became familiar. I started watching my back constantly, turning my phone off when meeting friends. The recent and mysterious death of OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji could have been enough to spook someone in a situation like mine: where they were questioning one of the largest AI companies in the world. But unlike OpenAI, Palantir’s CEO publicly talks about killing people, and has fantasized about poisoning critics using covert methods such as fentanyl-laced drone strikes. Palantir’s executives are also vocal about wanting to flex the definition of terrorism to include their enemies, as Palantir’s Defense chief Mike Gallagher did on Fox News when he called for the feminist group Code Pink to be classified as domestic terrorists.

My experience, nonetheless, pales in comparison to migrants, foreign students, or others already trapped under AI surveillance. As reporter Mohammed R. Mhawish wrote in his soul-crushing retelling of the exploitation of surveillance in Gaza for New York Magazine:

“The campaign of mass killing, of severing communities, of making homes unlivable… operated, too, through a system of watching, knowing, and collecting us: drones that hovered endlessly overhead, quadcopters that dipped near windows and entered houses, facial-recognition scans at checkpoints, movements followed through phone tracking, calls that broke with static before an air strike. The Israeli army was using artificial intelligence to generate kill lists, monitoring our social-media accounts, and storing in bulk the audio of our phone calls.”

American companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Palantir have contributed to this oppression by hosting and exploiting surveillance data for the IDF, leading to the development of gruesome applications like Where’s Daddy —  a tool which allegedly follows Hamas targets to their family homes in order to deal maximum damage through drone strikes.

At first, my main reason for speaking out was the moral injury of seeing what was happening in Gaza. This would not last long. It would take less than a few months after that spring day in the mountains for the mayor of Denver to undemocratically re-sign a contract, rejected unanimously by city council, to bring self-launching Flock police drones into the city. In a pilot in October, Denver Police flew over a dozen Skydio drones within a three-block radius of my house.

The surveillance regime that Silicon Valley has cast upon Gaza now extends far beyond the Middle East, as ISTAR tools become commonplace in our country. Yet the origin of this world we live in is not to be found either in Palo Alto or Tel Aviv — but ​the island of Little St. James.

As Reason, The San Francisco Standard and DropSite News report, Jeffrey Epstein was a key power-player standing between Silicon Valley and Israel a decade ago, and connected Peter Thiel to former Israeli prime minister-turned-businessman Ehud Barak. Leaked emails show Epstein played a crucial role in raising big money for American and Israeli cyberweapons companies​ — including $40 million for Thiel’s VC firm, Valar Ventures.  These investments would help spur a surveillance industry​ that, years later, has pushed AI targeting technology beyond warfare uses and towards civilian and corporate contexts. “I’ve been surprised how many corporations are looking for a new military-like perspective on management,” Epstein wrote to Barak. “A corporation is not dissimilar from defense forces.”

“No tech company surfaces more often — or draws more interest from Israeli figures — than Palantir,” the SF Standard reports.

More leaks and reporting by the Intercept also revealed that, around the same time Epstein, Thiel, and Barak were in contact, New York Times reporter Landon Thomas Jr. was also in communication with Epstein. He tipped off the convicted child sex offender regarding an investigation by another journalist, and failed to investigate offers from Epstein of compromising information, and picture evidence, of Trump’s relationships to younger women. This manipulating and gatekeeping of stories, revealed over a decade later, shows how narratives that protect the rich and powerful are woven behind the scenes.

From our perspective today, the New York Times and Palantir’s software are representative, respectively, of the mediation of “truth” in the ages of mass media and information technology. Through their “investigations” and gatekeeping of information, they embody attempts to own facts and arbiter justice, to be the system of record for the most important institutions and decision-makers in the world. Just as Palantir’s software can set algorithmic thresholds to define who is a target, and justify their killing, the New York Times sets the narratives that allow this killing to continue — to absolve genocide, justify war, define “terrorism,” and perpetuate international aggression. Nonetheless, as both continue to enable genocide in Palestine, or stoke fire for war with Venezuela, people are wising up to the ways in which these corporations weaponize information to protect, and enrich, those in power.

IV. Criminalizing Surveillance Resistance

It’s rush hour in Denver, and I’m using my last quarter-tank of gas to drive to the ICE GEO Detention Center in Aurora. It’s now October, and I can barely see the road ahead as a storm picks up and my eyes sting from super-glue fumes, the result of a last-minute attempt to fix my only pair of glasses. I don’t have cash to buy new ones, or sort the emergency lights that light the cabin, but these are the least of my concerns.

I am late to give a short speech in front of ICE, and I am the Antichrist.

That is, at least, what Peter Thiel would want you to (laughably) believe. Seizing on momentum from his New York Times interview, Thiel held four private lectures on the subject in San Francisco, fanning the flames of his religious conspiracy until everyone from the Washington Post to South Park was talking about it. In these talks, Thiel argued that the Antichrist would be a young person who, like me, is under 33, advocates for AI regulation, and identifies as a Luddite: someone who wants to hold technology owners responsible for the harms they cause.

As Professor Elke Schwarz writes in Opinio Juris, this attempt to demonize opponents of AI aims to build a “spiritual narrative” that bolsters the wealth of investors. “To create belief in a technology is to sacralize the capacity of a startup to deliver this quasi divine technology and this, in turn serves to elevate the valuation of such a company,” she writes.

Since I couldn’t work with the New York Times on a retort, I worked with The Guardian to release an op-ed explaining ISTAR technology and condemning ICE for their unconstitutional surveillance. This threat, however, demanded much more than words. I soon stopped focusing on media and writing, and worked to build deeper roots with organizing networks in Denver and New York that had long been challenging Palantir, Silicon Valley, and our corrupted defense-industrial complex. In Denver, I helped lead a small and peaceful march towards Palantir’s HQ in support of Palestine and in opposition to ICE surveillance. There, we were followed by drones and dozens of police (at least one per protester) to find a wall of tactical units in full militarized gear and equipment protecting the surveillance giant — an incredible show of force and expense of city funds. In contrast, a similar protest in Seattle with around a thousand people would draw no police response.

In August, I would testify at the Colorado State Senate in defense of the first comprehensive statewide regulations of AI in the country.

Now, the situation has reached fever pitch. Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered the FBI to create a list of domestic terrorists that includes people standing up against fascism and immigration enforcement. That means that opposing the main force that is bringing unconstitutional surveillance technology in our country, ICE, can now land your name in an FBI watchlist — effectively criminalizing the fight against surveillance in America. The memo also aims to establish a “cash reward system” for information, meaning the FBI could soon pay off my own neighbors to put me and other organizers on a watchlist, allowing the government to start using their surveillance tools — potentially including Flock and Palantir — against us.

While I suspected this kind of retaliation since I’ve started speaking out against Palantir in February, this is now also the reality of hundreds of thousands of activists opposing fascism, unconstitutional raids, and immigration enforcement across the country. The same ISTAR surveillance weapons that led to the arrest of student protestors, the deportation of immigrants to foreign concentration camps, and to a ruthless regime of slaughter and surveillance in Gaza, now threaten untold millions of Americans. Bondi’s memo, which has not been reported on by the New York Times, is “a declaration of war on just about anyone who isn’t MAGA” according to Ken Klippenstein, the independent journalist who broke the story.

Upon arriving the gates of the ICE GEO Detention Center in October, I came across a crowd of neighbors standing between the facility walls and a wooded creek across the street. On some days, a friend told me, one could see the shadows of inmates’ hands as they felt out for those of their loved ones outside.

In a matter of moments, I was called to share a few words at the footsteps of the ICE facility.

V. 5th Generation War

I’m publishing this essay the week after Venezuela’s President, Nicolás Maduro, was kidnapped by American forces, and after the first bombing of a South American city by the USA in history, a world I’d never think I’d live to see. There is an overwhelming sense of confusion amongst almost everyone now, including many journalists — something which is likely by design. As we have seen, we have moved to forms of warfare that are not understood by the public, which heavily rely on AI surveillance, narrative control and deception, the exploitation of social media, and the design of increasingly unusual, and cruel, methods of punishment and killing.

The invasion of Venezuela is a perfect example of this kind of warfare, which has also been termed Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) by military experts. According to Professor Armin Krishnan in his book Fifth Generation Warfare: Dominating the Human Domain, 5GW is the latest, most secretive, and difficult to understand form of war. Daniel Abbot’s Handbook of 5GW defines it as “an emerging theory of warfare premised upon manipulation of multiple economic, political, social and military forces in multiple domains.” This manipulation involves the oversight of all fighting domains — land, air, maritime, space, cyber, and cognitive —  through what is termed a “common operating picture.” This unified view is made possible by Pentagon projects including Project Maven (which pioneered AI targeting), Joint All-Domain Command and Control (or JADC2, which connects sensors from across the armed forces) and software built by Palantir and a constellation of defense primes and tech startups.

We can see in the invasion of Venezuela some hallmarks of 5GW, as offered by Krishnan:

• Fifth generation warfare bypasses the battlefield and targets society as a whole, rather than its military forces.

• Violence in 5GW is very dispersed or hidden, which makes it difficult to perceive as war.

• Fifth generation warfare relies on covert or ambiguous means that hide nefarious activities or disguise them as benign or harmless.

• The objective of 5GW is to overthrow an existing political order or change the culture in a society in accordance with the goals of the aggressor.

According to Krishnan, 5GW “shifts the emphasis from the control of physical terrain to the control of the human terrain and the human mind as a target of attack.” This means that the capture of President Maduro, under the cover of law enforcement, is only the beginning of the operation. The real battle begins afterwards, in the campaign to legitimize the kidnapping, manufacture consent for similar interventions in the future, and to pull one of two reactions from you, the witness: increased favor, or fear, of the administration.

The worse after effect of 5GW is that it turns everyone, at home and abroad, into a subject of war.

The outsized role of social media in the Venezuela incident is clear. In war-room pictures released by the White House, we can see Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and others monitoring an OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) account on X. In the aftermath of the presidential kidnapping, official government accounts blasted propaganda parading the image of Maduro and remixing press conference clips with music. These hype-videos have far more in common with what I see Palantir and its officers posting on social media than anything I’ve ever seen from official government accounts. The objective is clear: to drive fear, awe, and uncertainty to mask the next move.

In the world of hybrid warfare, however, it takes two to tango: the government and the media. After the assault in Venezuela, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal constantly failed to mention the dozens of bystanders harmed or killed in the invasion of Venezuela, including a 78-year old woman killed after her public housing complex was shredded by American bombs. They are creating the same conditions that allowed victims in the Gaza conflict to receive sub-human treatment in the media, enabling their easy slaughter and oblivion, and allowing Americans to quickly forget the consequences of interventionism. The New York Times provided even more critical assistance: it refused to report on the incursion when it was tipped-off ahead of time, providing cover for the administration’s illegal acts, potentially enabling war crimes while violating its own ethical code to stand for the truth no matter the circumstances.

When the media fails to do its job, or to question modern military forces and events through the lens of contemporary doctrines like 5GW, it reflects a misunderstanding of how war is waged today, and serves as little more than an accomplice.

It has now become increasingly clear that we have two paths before us as a country. The first, where we continue allowing truth and “facts” to be guarded and weaponized by media and technology elites. The second, where we wake up and break free from their control. When we re-establish our constitutional rights, start legislating AI seriously, and bring justice to the billionaires behind the weaponization of AI surveillance for profit and control.

My organizing work showed me, that after months speaking to reporters and isolating myself, I was not alone. People who I encountered, young and old, wealthy or not, and from any background, are starting to realize that our fractured attention, our sense of uncertainty, our political divisions — as much as the worst humanitarian crimes today — are all made possible thanks to tech billionaires that use the internet, and our personal devices and social media platforms, to harvest and exploit our information, behaviors, and beliefs. They are realizing that social media is part of a bigger weapon (ISTAR) where people’s everyday movements, relationships, and communications can eventually be turned against them — something that explains why executives in Meta, OpenAI, and Palantir recently joined the Army as officers.

We are also waking up to the fact that it hasn’t always been this way: this sea change in our relationship to technology has happened in less than twenty years, and has been led by a very small group of Silicon Valley executives that have unchecked power in influencing both government, and our personal lives, today.

Organizations and movements around the country are responding to this realization, and taking different angles of approach. They are emerging from high schools, college clubs, local moms meet-ups, discussion groups, research labs, neighborhood associations, and tech-worker coalitions in cities around the country. They include Appstinence, Delete Day, Screen Time Action Network, The Strother School of Radical Attention, Lamp Club, Ludd Club, Landline Kids, Design it for Us, Reconnect, No Tech for Apartheid, No Flock, Louis Rossmann’s Clippy movement, the Center for Humane Technology, AI Now and a de-centralized, but highly organized, data center “rebellion” that is happening in local communities nationwide.

While there might be a long road ahead to untangle big tech’s webs of influence and control, there is hope. As Singer and Brooking put it in LikeWar:

These new wars are not won by missiles and bombs, but by those able to shape the story lines that frame our understanding, to provoke the responses that impel us to action, to connect with us at the most personal level, to build a sense of fellowship, and to organize to do it all on a global scale, again and again.

Epilogue: The Antichrist Responds to the Antichrist Lectures

The following is an abridged version of the speech I gave in October, at the ICE GEO Detention Center in Aurora.

My name is Juan Sebastian Pinto, and I am a writer, organizer, and a former employee of the surveillance company Palantir, based here in Denver, which is currently providing its AI services to ICE, enabling the humanitarian crimes that are committed here.

Allow me to re-frame that: Palantir helps the government break up families in the city it calls home, with your tax-payer money.

It took me a long time to get here. My early story is not unlike that of Eric Sanchez Goitia, who was imprisoned here and later deported to Venezuela. Like me, Eric came here legally around the age of 11 and built his entire life and family in Colorado. He fled the instability, deep poverty and crime of his home country of Venezuela, partly enabled by brutal US sanctions. Now he is separated from his wife, Desiree, and his community, thanks to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security. Now, Trump is threatening his country with covert-operations, assassinations, and war.

In his story, I see my beliefs and aspirations as an immigrant shattered. I see the destruction of the American dream as many millions have conceived of it.

There is a reason there is a war on immigrants. Immigrants understand freedom. They seek it. They will go to the greatest lengths to achieve it. But when the government is wielding surveillance technology, social media, and the DHS to make everyone’s life paranoid, hateful, and divided — it has declared war not only on us — but on all of its people, and is acting no different to the terrorists it claims to oppose.

For a long time now, intelligence agencies, academics, and companies like Palantir have recognized that social media threats and snuff films can be used as weapons of war — tactics originally pioneered by ISIS and MS13* — but now that weapon is pointed at us. Not only is the DHS and administration using social media to track people, but also to push racist memes, AI-produced images, and explicit threats in support of white supremacy. Countless drone strike clips and AI-generated images shared on social media — depicting and mocking humanitarian crimes from Yemen to the Caribbean — aim to stir outrage, desensitize us, manufacture consent for war, and sow fear among neighbors.

That’s why we need our representatives to stand up and make Colorado the leading voice in support of AI regulation. We have to help our entire nation defend its constitution — and just like we pushed pioneering legislation many times before — we must push the envelope of civil rights to protect our country from AI surveillance and ICE.

I did not read my speech well, nor could I make out all the words in the rain. There was an air of anguish, amplified by the storm, that I could not get through. But then I took some time to look at the faces of everyone around me. The antichrist was nowhere to be found among us. There was, instead, a tight band of climate, peace, and labor activists and concerned neighbors; carpenters, electricians, tech workers, artists and musicians; fathers and grandmothers who came every week to support their friends and family inside the walls. People with whom I’ve been chased in protests with drones and militarized police. People who have shut down the streets of Denver to say no to surveillance and economies of exploitation, war, and internment.

They were not people who believed — as Palantir CEO Alex Karp said recently — that “patriotism will make you rich.” They know that loving this country, its people, its constitution and our freedoms does not come cheaply. That sometimes it costs everything, your money, your reputation, maybe even your life.

Thank you for reading

Ziggurat will keep on casting a light on the threats that big tech and AI pose for our constitution and human rights. Through education and advocacy, we are fighting for a world where we will not be continually alienated and misinformed, or worse, flung into dangerous wars that could devastate future generations.

We all deserve better, and we all deserve to know what is happening, especially when the media seems to be, intentionally or unwittingly, conspiring with big tech and billionaires to make us accept mass surveillance and constant war. Today, I am working with Colorado advocates in support of peace and in defense of the country’s first comprehensive regulations on AI, and with activists in cities around the country to help fight the invading threat of police drones and data centers through education and civic engagement.

We are stepping on the toes of multi-billionaires, millions of dollars of lobbying, and possibly, the administration’s authoritarian objectives. That’s why we must stand together. If you have made it this far and found this information useful, this essay is more than just an opinion piece, it is an invitation to start a conversation and take action. If you are tired of being a passive observer, or target for influence, in these wars — I encourage you to subscribe, share this message, and reach out. We have power in numbers, persistence, and community — and there is much more to come.

I also encourage you to follow our national movement, Against Machines, and to stay tuned for a new project: Offline Underground, a print-only publication and event guide which aims to connect movements battling big tech across the country — available via paid subscription here, and coming for free to a subway station near you.

*For the early roots of social media warfare as used by ISIS and MS13, I highly recommend reading LikeWar by Emerson and Brooking.

** This pamphlet letter, a protected creative work, media critique, and essay, is addressed to the American people out of civic duty and concern and protected under the First Amendment.

One day I woke up to realize the AI tech I used to market was likely being used to police the free speech of students, to deport and disappear people, and to kill journalists. I realized that everything I had been told about the benefits and dangers of AI was based on hype, deception, and a willful blindness to its effects on vulnerable people around the world.

AI is ALREADY being used to kill and to take away people's civil rights every day. People like Neri Alvarado, a baker who was deported to CECOT for an autism awareness tattoo  — you can watch my interview on the subject of his deportation for France24 —  or the journalists and paramedics killed over the past few days at Nasser Hospital in Gaza, where they were recovering the bodies of victims when executed by "double tap" precision strikes.

Subscribe now

I also realized that many of my representatives, like William Lindstedt, Michael Carter, Judy Amabile, Lisa Frizell were working tirelessly to dismantle the first-in-the nation consumer protections from AI discrimination, propped up by millions of dollars of lobbying and caving into pressure by Governor Jared Polis and Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, who in turn caved into pressure from venture capital.

What could an individual do when faced with these realizations? I decided to speak out. After reading the groundbreaking paper by Heidy Khlaaf, Sarah Myers West, and Meredith Whittaker called Mind the Gap: Foundation Models and the Covert Proliferation of Military Intelligence, Surveillance, and Targeting — everything clicked: while we have spent years worried about singularity and labor replacement, a more dangerous AI-born threat is leading to perverse violations of human rights around the world today.

It was the very technology which they described, ISTAR, which I was in charge of illustrating while working for Palantir Technologies, and which I have decided to explain for The Guardian this weekend in my defense of Colorado's AI Sunshine Act, for which I testified, and which was dismantled at the State Senate in favor of a five month delay of Colorado’s AI regulations.

Colorado has a chance to make history and lead the nation by taking a step in the right direction — but the next five months will determine whether politicians pick the side of the people, or succumb to the hundreds of millions of dollars Big Tech is accumulating to kill state regulations.

Subscribe now

For years I worked at multiple AI companies from Denver, including Palantir Technologies, where my job was to illustrate in detail how AI decision-making platforms work to stakeholders including the Pentagon, Health Agencies, and top automotive companies. What I discovered horrified me. The public does not have sufficient understanding about how these platforms make decisions that affect their lives, and how they circumvent and violate basic democratic processes.

AI platforms can be understood as unregulated and invisible architectures that affect all of our lives — even in lethal ways — and Colorado has a historic chance to be the first state to recognize their role in discriminatory and illegal practices. With the speed of development of AI technologies, failure to pass the AI Sunshine Act this week — supported by ACLU Colorado, Colorado AFL-CIO, and the Center for Democracy and Technology (summary below) — will leave my neighbors, and by extension, all Americans, with little hope to counter the exploitation of their data by corporations and authoritarian governments.

The world is currently experiencing a mass-awakening regarding the risks of AI, as well as the fraudulent nature of the narratives which have pushed these tools into every corner of our lives. At this point, most of us have first or secondhand experience with executives who have rallied under the banner of “AI transformation” in order to further surveillance on customers and employees, and have seen how AI is used to establish greater regimes of control for profit.

As the world comes to terms with the reality that AI tools are not panacea to a broken economy and administration, but instead, serve to prop this economy and pursue the enemies of the administration, Governor Polis of Colorado, along with lawmakers known as the “Opportunity Caucus,” are about to dismantle the FIRST IN THE NATION protections for consumers from discrimination by AI. Not only would this destroy Colorado’s historic opportunity to be a world-leader in AI governance, but it would take away the rights of people in Colorado. The recent bill supported by Governor Polis would strip the right of individuals to sue AI businesses that violate the Colorado’s Colorado Consumer Protection Act — meant to protect consumers against deceptive and unfair practices.

Nonetheless, even as every-day Americans arrive at the realization that AI is doing more harm than good, our leaders continue to acquiesce to venture capital, and feed into fraudulent and outdated narratives regarding the usefulness of AI tools. Few people stand in their way. But among them, one politician in Colorado stands out: State Representative Brianna Titone. She has led efforts to protect consumers, defending the pioneering bills she has sponsored through relentless and coordinated attacks that have sought to circumvent democracy and placate big business.

This week — as the Colorado State Legislature meets to debate AI legislation — she joins rights organizations and supporters in the senate to fight the relentless lobbying of big-business, as Denver joins cities around the world in historic, coordinated marches against Big Tech.

Above, you can find an interview with Brianna Titone which I recorded last week at the footsteps of Colorado’s Capitol, and below, you can find a summary of the AI Sunshine Act.

Opening the Algorithmic Black Box: How the AI Sunshine Act Will Ensure Transparency and Accountability When Algorithms Impact Our Lives 

Via Towards Justice

Corporations increasingly use hidden algorithmic decision systems (ADSs) to determine who gets hired or promoted, how much tenants pay for rent, who receives medical care, and more. While ADSs can be powerful tools that streamline and support business operations, they can also be unreliable and prone to errors and bias. Coloradans are experiencing real harm every day from the use of such systems, but they often do not know—much less have any recourse—when companies use ADSs to reject them using incorrect, biased, or illegally obtained information.

Coloradans should have a right to know when and how ADSs impact their lives. Colorado businesses and public agencies should have a right to information about the risk that errors and bias in the ADS systems they deploy could violate the law. And ADS developers should be incentivized to proactively combat such errors and bias. 

The 2025 AI Sunshine Act does that, while simplifying current law and reducing obligations on Colorado businesses and public agencies. The bill would:

1. Ensure that Coloradans know when and how ADSs impact key decisions in their lives, including whether they are interviewed for a job, chosen for housing, get a loan, or are accepted into college, and how much they pay for rent and insurance.  

2. Allow Coloradans to access and correct any inaccurate personal data used by hidden ADS to inform major decisions about their lives.

3. Require ADS developers to provide deployers with information about the risk that their ADS could lead to violations of Colorado’s civil rights and consumer protection laws, empowering deployers to efficiently utilize human review to prevent such violations.

4. Make developers jointly responsible with deployers when an ADS leads to a violation of existing law — unless the developer can demonstrate that the deployer misused the system — ensuring that Colorado businesses are not left holding the bag when unreliable or biased algorithms violate the law.

These are bare minimum protections that can be implemented to protect Coloradans and ensure that corporations don’t continue to use these life-altering technologies in the dark.  As hidden ADSs increasingly impact Coloradans’ lives, there must be an opportunity to understand their role and ensure that existing laws can be brought to bear on these systems that, until now, have operated in a black box beyond public scrutiny. 

Subscribe now

Back in February, I published my first Substack essay warning about the dangers of military AI technologies in our commercial and personal lives. In it, I criticized my former employer, Palantir Technologies, and compared the destruction of Gaza to Guernica in 1937. The piece — which I struggled to write for more than a year — led to appearances on NPR’s All Things Considered and a short documentary with More Perfect Union. In my latest interview with Hard Reset (see a clip below), I go at depth regarding why I decided to speak out.

I suspect the reason my words resonated is that they connected war crimes abroad with abuses here at home. Palantir has been instrumental in the proliferation of “signature strike” technologies, that is, killing applications that take into account tons of private information — such as location, SIM card usage, social media activity, etc. — combined with AI to deduce the whereabouts and life-patterns of targets. These signature targeting technologies, also known as ISTAR: Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance systems — are in the same category as those used in the streets of Gaza, where they have led to countless civilian deaths. They are now being employed to detain or deport people here at home.

Today, DHS is using AI to track and target protected free-speech activities like op-eds and tattoos, and Palantir is building apps such as ImmigrationOS for ICE which would handle the full “lifecycle” of mass resettlement, including the separation of families, and the mobilization of human bodies as livestock to places like CECOT and “Alligator Alcatraz.”  

Despite the lack of media coverage regarding ISTAR weapons that link together all of these abuses —  from Gaza to LA  — the Army has implicitly acknowledged the usefulness of tech platforms by Meta, Palantir, and OpenAI for the development of these tools. Product executives at these three companies were recently elevated to the ranks of lieutenant colonels in the new Army Executive Detachment 201 at Trump’s Army parade (sponsored by Palantir). The first company, Meta, enables the generation of vast amounts of information regarding people from around the world, their connections, beliefs, and activities through tools like Instagram, Facebook, and Whatsapp. Then, in military or intelligence contexts, platforms like Palantir and OpenAI help interpret and act upon this data, combined with data from many other public and open-source datasets, leading to the rapid automation of targeting processes.  

Meanwhile, the fight for civil rights in the face of AI technologies is flailing at the federal and state level, with big tech and government players conspiring to ensure we have no protections. The recent budget bill, signed by Donald Trump just this hour, contained a sneaky and unconstitutional clause endorsed by companies like Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI that would have prevented states from setting their own AI regulations for TEN years. Luckily, a bipartisan push from lawmakers was able to remove it from the final version at the last minute of deliberation — but we were far too close to killing the few state-level protections we have. Earlier this month and in the middle of the night, a group of Democrats in Colorado’s senate tried to stall the state’s first-in-the-nation artificial intelligence consumer protections from taking effect. In the end, the chamber passed the bill, but the state has failed to pass protections for AI whistleblowers, and both the governor and mayor of Denver are now looking to delay the implementation of consumer protections until 2027.

As I had warned in Westword, Colorado has become the center of a battle over the future of democracy and AI. Now, the DOJ lawsuits against the City of Denver and State of Colorado over our sanctuary policies, if successful, would allow ICE and Palantir’s AI targeting tech to be used against my neighbors with impunity — in the very city the company claims to call home, and with our taxpayer money.

In this whirlwind of developments, the field of AI ethics and the media have also failed us. Most researchers, including academics with deep corporate ties, have been so farsighted and obsessed with the threats of AGI or ASI — the points where AI can think as well as humans and then go far beyond our capabilities — that they have missed the immediate risks of AI, the visible consequences, and sight of its first victims. Nascent AI technologies like ISTAR could be far more dangerous than any imagined, distant vision of singularity, especially when designed and wielded by authoritarian governments, wealthy individuals, and organizations whose main objective is profit and control. While this discussion is eclipsed by AI hype, our culture is rich with explorations of this topic. As readers have reminded me, it’s a central theme in works like Minority Report, Person of Interest, Eagle Eye, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and Dune. 

These stories have escaped the realm of fantasy into our world, and this is the reason I have decided to speak out. Palantir is pushing self-described “Germanic” and military values into the core of our democratic and decision making processes. The company is not only threatening our First and Fourth Amendment rights, but in work with the Trump administration, it is about to undo one of America’s greatest contributions to world history: its legacy as the dismantler of Nazi Germany, technological fascism, and its project of mechanized mass resettlement, concentration camps, and human rights abuses. With its most noteworthy client today, ICE, it will introduce advanced AI warfare tactics in our backyards — do so with a budget larger than many world militaries — all thanks to passage of the “Big Beautiful Bill,” signed today, on America’s birthday.

We now risk establishing an economy of perpetual mass resettlement and human rights abuses that will enrich companies like Palantir. This will follow in the footsteps of Gaza, where an economy of occupation has led to a highly profitable economy of genocide, according to the latest report by the UN’s Special Rapporteur in the Palestine territories, which calls for the prosecution of executives involved in companies supporting the IDF.

Without much support from researchers, policymakers, and corporations — the American people have to take a stance and reject the encroachment of these weaponized AI technologies themselves. They have to stand up ICE, Palantir, and the Trump administration, and declare independence from the influence of oppressive and violent AI technologies in government, law enforcement, and war.

How? My conversation with Ariella Steinhorn of Hard Reset begins to explore that territory, an abridged clip of which you can watch at the top of this post. Below you can find a short summary of some ways we could start crawling out of this mess:

1. Journalists, policy-makers, and individuals should recognize ISTAR weapons as one of the most prescient risks in AI today, and bring scrutiny to tech companies that have taken part in their development and proliferation — from Gaza to LA.

2. We have to bring back a focus to privacy legislation. Doing so means increasing public awareness of the abuses tech companies have enabled over the past 20 years, and helping others realize how much their life has been shaped by technologies that feed on their data, influence their behavior, and infringe their First and Fourth Amendment rights.

3. We have to remember that civil disobedience and the right to revolution are core American values, especially when faced with highly oppressive government institutions. That means celebrating individuals who have stood up to ICE and its project of mass citizen surveillance and intimidation, people like former representative Luis Gutiérrez, student protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, NYC comptroller Brad Lander, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, Senator Alex Padilla, Representative LaMonica McIver, and LA Mayor Karen Bass.

4. We have to support movements to de-platform or create alternatives to monopolistic social media companies which are increasingly participating in defense operations, such as Meta. That means encouraging youth movements ditching smart-phones and re-establishing a healthy relationship with technology.

5. As suggested by the UN’s Special Rapporteur: bring accountability to companies that participate in the weaponization of personal data. Gaza should be the last conflict where ISTAR tech enables such careless slaughter of civilians, and our international community and criminal courts should respond appropriately to prevent future abuses such as these.

For the broader discussion, including more conversations about literature, civil disobedience, and the fragile and self-mythologizing masculinity of AI founders, watch the full interview at Hard Reset.

Subscribe now

The war in Gaza is reverberating back home. Yesterday, in a hate crime that shocked many of my neighbors in Boulder, Mohamed Soliman set fire to a group marching in support of Israeli hostages, injuring 12 people in a region long-haunted by mass violence. Meanwhile, the Department of Justice is suing Denver and Colorado over their sanctuary policies, opening the door for ICE to use Palantir’s AI-powered targeting tech — a critical component of the Israeli offensive in Gaza — against my neighbors.

ImmigrationOS marks the beginning of a new project of mass-resettlement enabled by aggressive data capture and signature tracking, but now in our own backyards. Here’s a great article from Jewish Voices for Peace on the consequences of this “Imperial Boomerang.”

Terrorists and war profiteers — the people behind bombing and surveillance technologies — have something in common: they think violence is the only answer to the world’s problems. They are, in a sense, part of the same system, contributing to the same cycles of violence, fear, and human suffering that have shaped much of our generation. We cannot use recent incidents of terrorism to justify more surveillance, more violence, and more war — but unless we change course, these forces might soon be in control.

I had hoped to move beyond covering Palantir to discussing bigger issues regarding AI ethics and governance by algorithm, but last Friday, the New York Times published a new report: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans. In light of the renewed conversation, and because Palantir has failed to fulfill its democratic duty by ignoring questions from journalists and failing to guarantee that it won’t use its software unconstitutionally, I’m republishing an op-ed from Westword from back in March, as well as a talk I gave outside of Palantir’s Headquarters in Denver early in May (which I had only a few hours to prepare for, after being asked to speak that morning.)

In both cases, I covered many important issues regarding AI, governance by algorithm, and the future of democracy. These conversations have to happen somewhere, so we can find a solution to these problems by peaceful — not violent — means.

Watch my talk outside Palantir’s HQ below:

Note how most attendees are masked to protect their identity. To far-right readers who will inevitably comment on my speaking at a pro-Palestine event, I direct you to this video. The pro-Palestine movement should be praised for being the first to bring these threats to both democracy and life to our attention, no doubt because Palestinians have been among most devastated by these technologies to date.

While we are living through these dark ages of artificial intelligence, our government continues to enable these abuses, and is failing to protect our civil rights from emerging AI surveillance and targeting technologies across the private and public sector. The data-integrating actions of DOGE are in violation of the Privacy Act of 1974, opening up the possibility of political targeting, discrimination by algorithm, and yet-unknown cybersecurity risks which we have not addressed as a democracy. 

Congress has passed and is reviewing a budget bill containing an unconstitutional clause that would prevent states from setting their own AI regulations for TEN YEARS, and recently in Colorado, a group of Democrats in Colorado’s Senate tried to stall the rollout of the state’s landmark AI consumer protections. The bill ultimately passed, but the state has failed to enact proposed safeguards for AI whistleblowers. Now, both the mayor and governor are seeking to further delay consumer protections. As I warned in the article below, Colorado would become ground zero in the fight over the future of democracy and artificial intelligence. 

Colorado Is at the Center of a Fight for Democracy and the Future of AI

First published on Denver Westword

When asked to describe his “lower purpose," CEO Alex Karp of Palantir Technologies, the Denver-based big data and AI analytics company, said, “I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us.” 

His February 21 statement — part of a promotional book tour in support of his New York Times bestseller, The Technological Republic — echoed calls for violence against the enemies of the nation and company, which he excitedly expressed during Palantir’s January earnings call. Coming from the leader of a firm that supports the Army, FBI and Space Force with critical targeting infrastructure, these remarks are highly disturbing and run afoul of the principles of tolerance, freedom and democracy of our state. 

Days later, on February 25 — just as Donald Trump posted a gruesome, AI-generated movie of Gaza with Trump Hotels and golden idols of the president — Karp’s executive partner, Shyam Sankar, COO of Palantir Technologies, publicly targeted and condemned an ABC reporter for a piece she hadn’t even published yet, supposedly critical of Karp. Sankar accompanied his post with a more favorable headline in the Wall Street Journal, adorned by a signature of Donald Trump and a congratulatory message that read: “Alex, Great!” 

The admiration is mutual, Sankar confirmed: “It is true that Alex is wildly supportive of Elon Musk and DOGE and very happy with the direction of Trump’s foreign policy.”

Like Elon Musk, whose net worth has increased nearly 80 percent since Trump was elected, the founders and officers of Palantir — including Peter Thiel, a prominent J.D. Vance and Trump donor — stand not only to profit immensely from the chaos sown across our democratic systems of governance by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, but also from the escalation of war-mongering rhetoric, the spread of fear in the media, and the coming wave of techno-fascism in America. They have used the state of Colorado to set the stage for an ultimate marriage between the federal government and the tech sector — “a union of the state and software industry,” as Karp writes in his book — in a new “Manhattan Project” that stands to benefit the richest people on earth.

Palantir is not the company I thought I joined in 2021 — believing, as Karp recently put it in the WSJ, that its mission was “to support Western liberal democracy and its strategic allies." Now, Europe and its people are increasingly viewing the United States as an adversary, thanks to the work of an administration in which Palantir is taking an increasingly important role. With the recent appointment of Gregory Barbaccia, a former intelligence officer and ten-year veteran of Palantir Technologies as Chief Information Officer under the Trump administration, and the upcoming appointment of another Palantir vet, Clark Minor, to lead data for Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services, Palantir is excellently positioned to shape the application of critical big data and IT infrastructure across whole government departments, all under an unbridled nationalist administration that has abandoned guardrails for the ethical development of AI. 

In the past few weeks, Musk threatened to imprison journalists, the administration ordered the collection of biometric data on immigrant children, and allies like Ukraine have been sidelined and humiliated at diplomatic tables — highlighting the need for close attention to this expanding collaboration. Meanwhile, executive powers are being expanded through a barrage of executive orders, and allusions to monarchy are prevalent in the communications of Trump and his allies — challenging the ultimate rule of law and constitutional rights.

Subscribe now

More recently, fascist gestures and proposals of extending presidential term limits contributed to the concerning narratives at CPAC, and Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, removed distinguished military leaders at the Joint Chiefs of Staff for discriminatory reasons — replacing them with unqualified loyalists. As chaos unfolds, critical scientific research programs are left massively defunded, leading to disaray in the scientific community and serious international health and humanitarian crises. Trump just announced mass layoffs at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, threatening an agency with strong roots in Colorado ahead of imminent weather events and just three months before the Atlantic hurricane season is set to start.

These are not “Western” values, let alone the American values that pushed us even further ahead of Europe, the values that sought to preserve the U.S. as an egalitarian democracy, and which represent freedom for the people from tyrannical rule. These are especially not the values that represent our state of Colorado — which still has the chance of building an alternative to the greedy and domineering culture of Silicon Valley. However, they are the ones that Palantir has chosen to endorse through repeated violent rhetoric and support of the administration.

My understanding has been immensely helped by the fact that I’ve had a seat “behind the curtain.” Following the coronavirus pandemic, I spent a year and a half working as a writer and graphic designer at Palantir Technologies in its headquarters in Denver. As an English major, I thought I might have had little to contribute in the grand scheme of things. But, as reviewers of The Technological Republic and many former employees have recently realized, the key behind Palantir’s success — and its ability to build an elite, loyal following of engineers and advocates — might owe as much to its technical prowess as to its effective marshaling of language and cult-like shibboleths.

As John Ganz recently pointed out in a scathing review of The Technological Republic, Karp, in both his Ph.D. dissertation thesis — curiously titled "Aggression in the Lifeworld: Expanding Parsons' Concept of Aggression Through the Description of the Relationship Between Jargon, Aggression, and Culture" — and in his recent writing in The Technological Republic, shows expertise in the “kind of propagandistic jargon that abjures rational discussion and plays on the aggressive feelings of the crowd.” In essence, deploying language manipulatively to confuse and rile up followers and opponents. The Palantir CEO has even gone so far as to describe the company’s culture as “Germanic.”

There might still be some time to change course. While the officers of Palantir and the administration were spreading hateful rhetoric on social media last week, 21 members of DOGE resigned in protest, issuing a public letter in support of democracy. “We swore to serve the American people and uphold our oath to the Constitution across presidential administrations, however, it has become clear that we can no longer honor those commitments,” the staffers wrote in a joint resignation letter, a copy of which was obtained by the Associated Press. That same day, I shared a protest letter calling out Palantir leadership for flagrant violations of its Code of Conduct — authored with the support and feedback of more than fifteen initial supporters — with the Palantir Alumni Slack group, the same group in which DOGE was recently caught recruiting. We are now collecting signatures and I encourage any Palantir alumni to reach out in support in order to finalize and publish the message, a call for tech workers in Silicon Valley to not be afraid to speak out and act against actions they perceive as violating the principles of democracy, egalitarianism and human rights. [Note: this letter was later published by NPR, although it’s notable that Google later removed our original document from the internet for violating its TOS.] 

All of these concerning events have placed Colorado — the home of Palantir Technologies — at the center of a fight not only for our democracy, but over the exploitation enabled by the mass adoption of AI technologies across society and warfare. In a state where Mexican and American families have been linked for generations, Palantir and other companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Dell have equipped Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol with the “military-grade digital tools they need to commit atrocities along the southern border and the interior.” Now they are ready to profit in a program of mass incarceration and deportation of a historical scale that could devastate thousands of our neighbors and their families.

One of the only truly provocative challenges to this administration and its actions has come from the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston. He suggested in a Denverite interview that Denver police, as well as citizens, could band together to prevent federal immigration authorities from deporting undocumented immigrants rather than compromise our national values; he's been called to testify before a congressional committee this week because of those comments. Governor Jared Polis and other state officials should join in support of Johnston. Further, they need to refuse to support DOGE and its continual funding, protect individuals who speak out against the exploitative practices of corporations and nationalist politicians, and help bring accountability to companies like Palantir.

We as a state need to live up to the legacy of Governor Ralph Lawrence Carr. An important historical figure to remember, Carr defied other state governors and challenged the federal government during World War II, calling out Japanese internment as unconstitutional and offering respectful asylum and dignity for those deported from the West Coast to Camp Amache — a monument threatened by Trump’s anti-DEI budget cuts.

There was a time when I thought that exploring and communicating the furthest reaches of big data technologies could help me deliver solutions for people’s everyday problems, and help shape society for the better. Over time, however, I increasingly felt as if I was participating in a massive lie — to businesses, the public, and even to myself. Now I feel like I could have been heralding the cusp of something much bigger: mass exploitation, inequality and death on a scale never seen before.

This is an effort to prevent that. As a freelance journalist, an immigrant and a citizen with Ecuadorian, American and Russian-Ukrainian heritage — whose great-grandparents crossed through the “Golden Gates” of Ellis Island and the Port of Philadelphia — I don’t want to live in a country where you have to be worried about voicing these fears, or about challenging those in power in support of democracy. This is not the America I sought to immigrate to, but more akin to totalitarian governments I experienced many times growing up in Ecuador. I am speaking out without fear — as I don’t believe we are there yet.

On the afternoon of April 26, 1937, the small Basque town of Guernica was subjected to a devastating aerial assault that would change the course of history. Wolfram von Richthofen and Vincenzo Velardi, commanders of the German and Italian air forces, respectively, saw an opportunity to test the destructive power of behind-the-lines airplane maneuvers. Inspired in part by the aerial doctrine of Giulio Douhet, an Italian army officer who foresaw the power of targeted bombardment in his 1921 book “The Command of the Air,” they turned Guernica into the first instance of deliberate mass bombing of a civilian population.

The casualties that day in the city —  hundreds of civilians dead and 85% of the town’s buildings destroyed — would pale in comparison to bombing raids across Europe and the Pacific in the following years. Nonetheless, the destruction of Guernica would foreshadow the sharpened brutality of modern warfare. It marked a turning point where the line between combatants and civilians blurred, and the act of killing became more distant and dehumanized under the auspices of new technologies. The event would soon dominate headlines and inspire one of the greatest anti-war works of art in history, Pablo Picasso’s monumental painting, Guernica, inspired by his partner at the time, the prominent anti-fascist activist Dora Maar.  

Gaza, one of the most extensive testing grounds of AI-enabled air doctrine to date, is today’s equivalent of Guernica in 1937. Over the past year of conflict, it has become the latest testing ground of breakthrough warfare technologies on a confined, civilian population — and a warning for more atrocities to come. The Israeli Defense Forces’ use of American bombs and AI-powered kill lists generated, supported, and hosted by American AI software companies has inflicted catastrophic civilian casualties, with estimates suggesting up to 75% of victims being non-combatants. Lavender, an error-prone, AI-powered kill list platform used to drive many of the killings, has been strongly linked to (if not inspired by) the American big-data company Palantir. Intelligence agents for the IDF have anonymously revealed that the system deemed 100 civilian casualties an acceptable level of collateral damage when targeting senior Hamas leaders.

Yet, instead of reckoning with AI’s role in enabling humanitarian crimes, the public conversation on the subject of AI has largely revolved around sensationalized stories driven by deceptive marketing narratives and exaggerated claims. Stories which, in part, I helped shape. Stories which are now being leveraged against the American people, in the rapid adoption of evolving AI technologies across the public and private sector — all upon an audience that still doesn’t understand the full implications of big-data technologies and their consequences. 

I know because — for a year and a half after the pandemic — I worked at Palantir Technologies  from their new headquarters in Denver, Colorado. There I marketed their core software offerings — Gotham, Foundry, and Apollo — while also developing written materials and diagrams regarding the AI kill chain: the semi-autonomous network of people, processes, and machines (including drones) involved in executing targets in modern warfare. These technologies, which Palantir co-developed with the Pentagon in Project Maven, sought to become the “spark that kindles the flame front of artificial intelligence across the rest of the Department" according to Lt. Gen. of the United States Air Force Jack Shanahan. 

But this was only the beginning. While helping my team explain the advantages of AI warfare to US defense departments, I would also simultaneously help sell AI technologies to Fortune 100 companies, civilian government agencies, and even foreign governments in a range of applications, from healthcare to sales.

For a time, I truly felt — as Palantir CEO Alex Karp recently put it — that the Palantir “degree” was the best degree I could get. That I would mostly participate in creating efficient and needed solutions to the world’s most complicated problems. However, over the course of bringing dozens of applications to market, I would soon come to a dark personal realization: The core idea underlying most commercial AI analytics applications today — and the philosophy underlying the kill chain framework in the military — is that   through continual surveillance, data analysis, and machine learning  we can achieve a simulated version of the world, where a nation, army, or corporation can gain competitive advantage only by knowing everything about targets and delivering results autonomously before their adversaries. 

Building these competing simulations, of a factory, a battleground, a connected vehicle fleet  —  often called “digital twins”  — is not only the business of Palantir, but of established technology players like IBM, Oracle and hundreds of new startups alike. They are all furiously staking their market share of data applications across every industry and world government, unleashing a paranoid process of comprehensive digitalization and simulation, while establishing surveillance infrastructures and “moats” of proprietary knowledge, information, and control in every market and in every corner of our lives.

In fact, the phases of the AI kill chain used to execute targets in warfare, as described in the Targeting Manual of the US Air Force  —  to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess  —  are generally analogous to the steps many tech companies use to help deploy data surveillance and AI models on (or for) their customers.

In AI-enabled military operations today, the first phases of the kill chain — finding and fixing — focus on data collection and sensor input to identify and categorize subjects as targets, threats, or non-targets. This process relies on a vast network of open-source and classified data and AI models, alongside information collected from drones, satellites, vehicles, intelligence and personnel. 

Similarly, businesses deploy invasive surveillance networks, analyzing location data, loyalty programs, third-party data, social media activity and other sources to construct detailed consumer profiles. This type of categorization, known as "fixing" in a military context, allows corporations to mark individuals for targeted action.

Tracking, the next phase, involves maintaining continuous awareness of a target. From a military standpoint, this means using advanced surveillance systems to follow a target's movements and ensure precise situational awareness in real-time. In business, this often involves constant monitoring of consumer behavior through algorithms, cookies, trackers, and manipulative engagement practices designed to predict and influence future actions. 

The final stages — engagement and assessment — translate to execution and process-refinement. While the military context usually implies delivering payloads and measuring their lethality, businesses aim to control consumer behavior, driving product adoption and dependency. Both systems operate as iterative loops, refining their effectiveness through continuous feedback, machine learning and improvement — whether to achieve tactical dominance or commercial control.

The result: a technological revolution with military roots —  implemented from the top down by companies like Palantir — which, in practice, serve the interests of Fortune 500 companies, the United States military and intelligence complex, and world governments like Saudi Arabia and Israel. At every stage of the process of data integration, analysis,  execution, and learning described above, there are serious data quality, bias, copyright, privacy, and ethical issues, many of which have been catalogued by the AI Risk Repository at MIT, and thoroughly mapped by scholars including Kate Crawford. As she writes in in her 2021 Book, Atlas of AI:

“The military past and present of artificial intelligence have shaped the practices of surveillance, data extraction, and risk assessment we see today. The deep interconnections between the tech sector and the military are now being reined in to fit a strong nationalist agenda.”

This statement holds true of the marketing I created at Palantir, and similar work they continue to publish to this day — such as the cinematic, Michael-Bay-style ad that aired over the holidays in the Army vs. Navy game where Donald Trump and Elon Musk were in attendance. These communications mask the real-world consequences of AI technologies, stoking the fire of public confusion and with a sleek, dystopian cloak, taking advantage of marketing showmanship and military jargon to veil the real implications and consequences of AI technologies. They also leverage the learned helplessness and confusion of the public, leading us to believe that there is no other alternative to staying competitive as an economy or as a nation than relentlessly advancing, deploying, and selling AI applications.

The genocide and destruction in Gaza that we have witnessed and continue to witness is not only the latest demonstration of this doctrine of terror, but also proof of what authors and researchers on killing machines — such as Andrew Cockburn and Jathan Sadowski — have long warned about: that the material realities of AI technology in autonomous warfare do not match their promises of efficiency, humanitarianism, or competitive advantage. Nor do they fundamentally address the real systemic problems that plague our world.

Despite what AI marketing might have you believe, AI isn’t new or shiny—it’s pervasive and deeply ingrained in our lives. It’s embedded in everything, including social media platforms,  wayfinding apps, dating apps, cars and even our appliances. Despite turning consumer sentiment, AI has already shaped the tools we use, the decisions made around us, and the invisible processes influencing our world. We’re already hooked on it, our attention spans shredded by its grip, and our collective health and  sanity frayed by its creeping influence. 

AI has evolved as a tool to allow us to make decisions stripped of humanity, with life-and-death consequences easily justified by dashboards and reports, and obfuscated by complexity and automation.

My career trajectory reflected the widespread commercialization of military AI and surveillance infrastructure technologies that has transformed our economy, politics, and way of life over the past few years.  Following Donald Trump’s repeal of the Order on Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of AI — and his announcement of a $500 billion, data infrastructure investment fund led by Oracle and  OpenAI — I want to help others outside of the industry understand what “AI infrastructure” is all about. To know what is at stake in a world where "citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting,” as Larry Ellison, co-founder and executive chairman of Oracle, put it recently.

Subscribe now

Since leaving Palantir, I came to understand what the real-life consequences of the AI kill chain diagrams I illustrated looked like: bodies of children and civilians strewn across the rubble of hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. I also saw several automakers I helped “modernize” come to be questioned by the senate for sharing private vehicle data with law enforcement without police warrants. Now I fear Palantir’s involvement in ICE deportations could help scale one of the most terrifying and ambitious projects of mass resettlement in human history. 

I believe Palantir has been acting against its own Code of Conduct in its support of the IDF’s actions in Gaza and will continue to do so in supporting the U.S. Government, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in its deportation efforts. In particular, Sections B and C of Part I: Protecting Privacy and Civil Liberties —  to Protect the Vulnerable and Respect Human Decency. Now, I want to test Alexander Karp and Palantir’s assurances that freedom of speech and civil liberties are important in order to widen discussion and awareness of unjust AI exploitation, and support and organize efforts that educate and advocate for people’s rights in an increasingly simulated and automated world.

Throughout the past year, after finally finding my way out of the industry, I continued to see militarized AI technologies leveraged here at home, on campus protesters in Columbia and Yale — including my friends — as they advocated for institutional divestment from weapons manufacturers and software companies working with the Israeli military. I know people whose families have been kidnapped by the IDF, and friends of my friends have even been shot in public just for wearing the Palestinian keffiyeh. 

Meanwhile, Peter Thiel, founder and chairman of Palantir, refuses to address the role of his firm and its military technologies in enabling the genocide in Gaza, as attested to by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the independent experts of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories. This has already led to institutional divestment, notably from Norwegian asset manager Storebrand, in fears the investment could put the firm at risk of violating local and international humanitarian law.

As a writer and designer, I believe that accessible critical discussions of the risks of AI need to expand and take over our media  —  as well as the promotion of outright resistance, deplatforming, and exploration of what it means to have a counterculture in the age of artificial intelligence. In my personal capacity, I’m working in hopes to unravel the harm I’ve done and to further a conversation that can escape the chokehold of nationalist and accelerationist rhetoric. Already, we have seen some of the most downtrodden populations subjected to the extreme technologies of surveillance, simulation, and targeting —  the elderly, the people of Gaza, and through Palantir’s involvement in ICE deportations: immigrants in North America. 

Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and OpenAI are now reportedly in talks to form a consortium to bid on defense contracts, meanwhile, Google has abandoned its pledge of not using its technology for weapons and surveillance systems. Next, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp — along with many other tech leaders and their political and business allies — will argue that we should become a “technological republic” and that it’s time we welcome the intervention of Silicon Valley startups into many more of our government and public institutions. Along with many other tech companies vying for a piece of the action, they stand ready to transform many of our democratic systems, government functions, and decision-making with largely unproven technologies reined in by few restrictions and controlled by the most powerful individuals in the world. 

With the recent appointment of Gregory Barbaccia as the federal Chief Information Officer under the Trump Administration, a former intelligence officer and 10-year veteran of Palantir Technologies, and the upcoming appointment of another Palantir vet, Clark Minor, to lead data for Robert F Kennedy Jr.’s Department of Health and Human Services  — policy and oversight for all of the federal government’s technology platforms will soon be heavily shaped and informed by these ideas and enabled by the repeal of AI guardrails.

What concerns me most today: seeing a new technocratic “broligarchy” take shape in Washington, D.C., watching Alex Karp describe the culture of Palantir as “Germanic” in a recent interview, and seeing him blatantly use violent, war-hungry rhetoric in support of his company and the kill chain doctrine. I also see the blueprints of Palantir’s strategic approach to business — sending young, “forward-deployed” engineers to fix and reconfigure systems — reflected in the work of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has been caught recruiting Palantir alumni in private chats. Seeing Elon Musk himself perform something eerily close to a Nazi salute in excitement at the inauguration , only to see these developments unfold in the weeks after, have convinced me that this interlinked, big-tech movement is blatantly un-American and a threat to our peace and democracy. That it’s critical to share my experience in the hope that it will encourage wider awareness of the existential problems we face together as a country. 

Professor Simon Prince of the University of Bath, author of several foundational deep learning textbooks, has argued that optimistic visions of AI should be met with caution and critical reflection, and that negative applications of AI would likely precede beneficial ones. He has appealed to scientists, researchers, engineers and communicators to take responsibility over the technologies they are bringing to market. Like Kate Crawford, Prince has warned of misleading claims, the risks of mass unemployment and un-skilling, and the need to hold AI companies responsible for their actions. He has also predicted a potential period of chaos before we have a chance to completely reorganize society under better principles.

First AI came to exploit the most helpless — but next: digital footprints and big data could be used to enforce abortion laws, directly threatening the rights of all women in this country. 

The 1937 bombing of Guernica demonstrated the potential of air power to strike directly at an enemy’s civilian centers, bypassing traditional front lines, and  leaving behind a trail of civilian casualties and suffering in its wake. Over the course of the past century, this doctrine evolved into the modern strategic bombing doctrine of the AI-powered kill chain, a doctrine which was extensively tested by the Israeli Defense Forces in their deployment of Palantir, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI, Amazon, among other data and surveillance platforms and services, to unleash the near-total destruction of the city as it stands today. 

If we let these companies redesign and reshape every industry and function of government —  according to their blueprint of data surveillance, modeling, and automation — then soon everyone will have a position in an AI kill chain. As builders of new systems, trainers of models, as users and executioners — but also as silent enablers, data points, or targets. We will all contribute to, and then become subject of, the decisions made by automated surveillance networks developed by corporate interests under a nationalist government. 

As the conflict in Gaza shows signs of winding down, yet never reaching a resolution, no other use case of AI should be in the public spotlight more than that which was deployed there over the past year to devastating effect: that of killing human beings. Not only because of the destruction it has caused, and the big ethical questions it has surfaced, but because understanding the topic of the AI kill chain can help everyone understand the undemocratic revolution which has taken place over the past few years. One which tech companies have unleashed by turning the whole world into a system that can be modeled and automated — and you into a target.

Gaza today. Source: x.com

NB: This pamphlet letter, a protected creative work and essay, is addressed to the American people out of civic duty and concern and protected under the First Amendment. It is also addressed to my former employer, Palantir CEO Alexander Karp, two fellow alumni of the University of Pennsylvania, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and the person that binds them all together: Palantir Chairman and PayPal Co-Founder, Peter Thiel. Thank you for revealing your intentions so honestly over the past few weeks, and thank you for your continued advocacy of free speech.

The people all said to Samuel, “Pray to the Lord your God for your servants so that we will not die, for we have added to all our other sins the evil of asking for a king.”

— 1 Samuel 12:19

Subscribe now