Image by Paul Campbell.

In Oregon, DHS and ICE agents launch Operation Black Rose, a planned surveillance operation using “target packages” to identify immigrants, citizens, and neighborhoods for attack. In Gaza, Israel launches a military strike, ostensibly aimed at a Hamas commander, killing 26 people in the process. What do these targeted assaults have in common?

Major tech companies are facilitating the brutal assaults by ICE in the United States and the humanitarian catastrophe and rising death toll in Gaza. This is made possible by the hoovering up of massive amounts of our personal data and using it to make predictions about behavior or identifying targets to strike. The tactics and AI-powered targeting technologies have invaded our homes, our places of work, and our neighborhoods.

A January 30 New York Times article titled “How ICE Already Knows Who Minneapolis Protesters Are,” discussed a combination of facial recognition, monitoring social media, and “other tech tools” that allows ICE agents to identify and track undocumented immigrants and citizens who are protesting, and to identify them by name during interactions. The agents use facial recognition programs including apps that create a data base of images scraped from Facebook, YouTube, Venmo, and millions of other websites, and an app called Mobile Fortify, used by ICE on government-issued phones to gather biometric data. Since 2011, agents have also been working with a database built by Palantir, an ominous data mining industry valued at over $300 billion, founded by Peter Thiel, with ties to the CIA. The NYT article noted, Palantir’s data base “combines government and commercial data to identify real-time locations for individuals they are pursuing.”

The company received a $30 million contract from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to create a system backed by artificial intelligence, to identify individuals for deportation. ICE works with Palantir using a database that integrates information to assist agents in identifying noncitizens. ICE operates ELITE, a geospatial Palantir tool that allows ICE to determine which neighborhoods to invade. “The tool lets ICE populate a map with potential deportation targets, bring up dossiers on each person, and view an address ‘confidence score’ based on data sourced from the Department of Health and Human Services and other government agencies.”

DHS has acquired several social media monitoring tools that can “delve into people’s cell phones.” According to the NYT, “Paragon, an Israeli technology company, lets people take control of phones or remotely hack into them to read messages or track locations.” This allows ICE to monitor a city neighborhood and track the locations and owners of the phones over time without a warrant. The ties between Israel and US immigration enforcement agencies have been fostered since 2001 with “joint delegations, trainings, and technology exchanges.” Algorithmic tactics developed for identifying targets in Gaza are now found throughout the US which has led ICE to function “more like a military unit than an immigration enforcement body.”

Working with US intelligence, Palantir has been essential to the Israeli military and the genocide in Gaza, particularly since the signing of a strategic partnership with the Israeli Defense Ministry in 2024. Palantir first opened an office in Tel Aviv in 2015. The Israeli military is proud of their ability to surveil every Palestinian in the West Bank and Gaza and to target individuals based on AI, much of it supplied by Palantir and with the assistance of Microsoft cloud servers. They provide the military and intelligence communities with “advanced and powerful targeting capabilities” using classified intelligence reports. According to Edward Snowden, much of this came from the US National Security Agency that “provided Israel with raw, unredacted phone and e-mail communications between Palestinian Americans in the US and their relatives in the occupied territories.” Israel’s Unit 8200 uses this NSA information to target thousands of Palestinians for killing, often using US-made weapons.

Palantir has infiltrated the US government, imbedding in the Department of Defense, Medicare, the IRS, NIH, CDC, police departments, and now extending their reach into the health care system, managing 21% of US hospital beds as well as the UK’s National Health Service. This particular relationship raises the specter of increasing state surveillance and the sharing of medical data with ICE for so-called immigration enforcement.

Opposition to Palantir is rising, from worker protests to public demonstrations, calling out the complicity of the US and Israeli governments and big tech companies they rely on. The Purge Palestine campaign is fighting back against the growing surveillance state and the Palantir Payroll identifies the relationships between Palantir and leadership in Washington and calls out congresspeople who have accepted donations from the company. When it comes to the power of the super-wealthy class, 85% of Palantir employee donations since 2006 come from five moneyed men from both sides of the aisle.

Palantir is the behemoth, proudly in the forefront of data mining, surveillance, and automation tools that are used against the most vulnerable among us here and abroad. This company is the dystopian driver where big tech can track every citizen and noncitizen, and militarized national and local enforcement agencies are able to snatch, detain, or kill anyone of us without accountability.

Big Brother is watching you.

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