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You need a higher purpose. And I also think you often need a lower purpose. Like the higher purpose for me kind of what's the lower purpose? Well, I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentinyl laced urine spraying on analysts who tried to screw us. But the higher pri purpose for me was to get this nation to be the preeminent power in the world because whatever faults we have, they're nothing like anyone else's.
In the spring of 2014, a former prime minister was spending his retirement shopping around for willing investors in a budding technology startup of which he would soon become chairman. Reporty Homeland Security, as it was called back then, specializes in emergency response, geoloccation, and video live streaming.
Around the time it was rebranded to Carbine in early 2018, it became the first ever Israeli company to join the portfolio of Founders Fund, a venture capital firm launched by Palanteer chairman and co-founder Peter Teal, seeking to modernize 911 Communications throughout the United States. Carbine was recently bought by a US public safety firm for a price north of $600 million.
Coming a long way from its incubation stage in 2014 when its primary investors were Israeli Prime Minister Aud Barack and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Mr. Teal, do you have any comments about Palunteer's surveillance of the American people, sir? or any of your connections to Jeffrey Epstein. People are rather concerned.
In 2023, the New York Times reported scheduling records that showed Peter Teal meeting with Epstein on at least three separate occasions in 2014, the same year that Carbine happened to be looking for investors. After spending a little over a year in prison for soliciting a minor for sex in Palm Beach, Florida, Epstein began to fashion himself as somewhat of a tech investor, calling himself at one point a science philanthropist and throwing his vast wealth behind projects spanning from a eugenics ranch where he planned to seed the human race with his DNA to efforts
to identify a mysterious particle that might trigger the feeling that someone is watching you. I I don't even know what that's supposed to mean. According to a more recent report by Reason magazine, though, leaked emails exchanged by Aud Barack indicated that Epstein was also becoming increasingly interested in surveillance technology, specifically the kind that governments use.
Judging by their correspondence, Epstein appeared to be leveraging his connection with Barack to secure meetings with top tech executives. at one point suggesting the former Israeli official spent some real time with Peter Teal, even offering to set up a dinner between the two. As the leaked messages show, Barack emailed a separate business partner shortly after where he talked about having a first date with Teal and a mysterious third unnamed individual.
While we don't know exactly what happened at that meeting, further emails indicate that Epstein had pitched Carbine to Valor Ventures shortly after. another Peter Tealbacked venture capital firm.
While Valor didn't invest in Carbine, on account of the startup being too premature, they did say that they appreciated what Carbine was doing and hoped to re-engage in the future. 2 years later is when Teal's founders fund gave Carbine $15 million. Now, of course, Teal has never quite admitted to knowing the full extent of Epstein's criminal activity, telling Joe Rogan last year that he was merely described to him as one of the smartest tax people in the world.
When you were introduced to him, what how was he described to you? Um, he was described as uh one of the smartest tax people in the world. Interesting. And uh and I I probably probably was my moral weakness that I Well, how could you have known back then? He had never been arrested. No, this was this was post this 2014. It was post arrest.
Oh, so it was arrest was the first arrest, right? It was like 20078. Okay. But regardless of whatever tax advice Epstein was offering, Tal's Valor Ventures received a generous sum of $40 million from the convicted pedophile between 2016 and 2017. An investment that is now ballooned to $170 million and is still controlled by Epstein's estate to this very day.
Guess that was some really good advice, huh? You don't exactly need to stretch your imagination to wonder why a man so obsessed with surveillance and who reportedly engaged heavily in blackmail operations would want to ally himself with the co-founder of a data analytics giant such as Palunteer, a company that asserts itself both here at home and thousands of miles away on the battlefield.
But in order to understand Palanteer's place in the world of surveillance and modern warfare, we need to start at the beginning. Why was it created? What makes it so formidable? And what's up with that weird Tao Watiti impersonator who runs it? Today, we'll be exploring one of Peter Teal's most lucrative investments yet.
Perhaps his most eccentric and dangerous friend and of course his desire to produce software that dominates. After all, it's Peter Teal's world. We're just living in it. At Palunteer, we are on the side of workingclass Americans. We support people who go to the military. We save their lives. We bring them home safer. Our AI actually makes workers more wealthy, more valuable.
And the 10 to 15 million people that love me despite what's written, half of them made a lot of money on us. And you know what they're like? They're like people like me who think, you know what, we have to do better. Of course, we have to do better. I don't know about you, but I love free trials.
If there's ever a movie on Hulu that I don't have a subscription for and I want to watch the movie, I'll get the free trial and then I'll forget that I subscribed. So, I end up getting charged, which is not a fun time because I'm a dumb idiot, I guess. But with so many subscription services out there, it can be really easy to forget what it is you're actually paying for. And that's where today's sponsor comes in.
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Huge thanks again to Rocket Money for saving us money and for sponsoring this video. Now it's back to the video. You know what I mean? Palanteer's results are out. It's a big beat and a raise for Palanteer. Again, I think you could print this press release off, frame it, and put it in the Lou.
They are leading when it comes to AI revolution. Paler, we're working with new nuclear companies here. Palunteer. Palanteer. Palunteer. Palunteer. Palunteer. Palunteer. Palunteer. Palunteer. Palunteer. In order to understand how we got here, we're going to need to start about here. It was a moment of high drama as the former national security adviser, a US Navy admiral, appeared before the committee.
But as to specifics of the Iran operation, Po Dexter said he could not answer because of the possibility of criminal prosecution. I must decline to answer that question at this time because of my constitutional rights under the fifth amendment. This is John Po Dexter. He's a bit of a kooky guy.
If you've ever watched American Dad, you might already be familiar with the Iran Contra scandal in which Ronald Reagan was caught selling weapons to the Ayatollah in Iran and giving the cash to brutal anti-communist mercenaries fighting in Nicaragua. Now, I would say that's a story for another day, but it isn't because I'm not really much of a history channel.
But the thing to know for the sake of our story today is that John Po Dexter, Reagan's national security adviser, wound up sentenced to jail for his involvement in the affair. According to his conviction, it was Po Dexter's job to lie to Congress on Reagan's behalf. A task he did so well that he was found guilty on five counts.
But of course, because we're talking about a powerful government official, you already know Point Dextra didn't spend any time behind bars. instead having his extremely short six-month sentence reversed on appeal in 1991. But that's just his backstory. And I think you could sense by now that John Po Dexter wasn't finished. As New York Magazine's Sharon Weinberger reported in 2020, Po Dexter received a call in 2003 from one Richard Pearl, a fellow veteran of the Reagan administration who that year had been working close alongside the cabinet of George W.
Bush to manufacture consent for war in Iraq. Yeah, lots of awesome guys involved in this story. See, Pearl knew that Po Dexter was up to something. A project he liked to call total information awareness, which the magazine points out was about as spooky as the name implied.
See, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, government officials were working overtime to expand national security for the sake of thwarting the next terror attack, even if it meant trampling on the civil liberties of average law-abiding citizens. Investigative journalist Whitney Webb describes what those in the Bush administration had been building during those years.
As she wrote, "Total information awareness was Po Dextter's idea for a public private surveillance program so invasive that Congress defunded it just months after its creation due to concerns it would completely eliminate the right to privacy in the US. TIA sought to develop an allseeing surveillance apparatus managed by the Pentagon's DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which has provided the military with technological assistance for the past 60 years.
Webb makes sure to note that one of Po Dextter's closest allies for this project was a man named Alan Wade, who happened to be the chief information officer at the CIA. Wade was so interested in national security software, in fact, that he not only met with Point Dexter dozens of times to hammer out the details of TIA, he was also involved in a similar project by the name of Chilead, which he worked on alongside Christine Maxwell, sister of convicted sex trafficker Galain Maxwell, and daughter of suspected international super spy Robert Maxwell. Small world, I guess, but we're getting off into the weeds a bit. What's important to know
for now is that Alan Wade, Richard Pearl, and John Boextter were all lobbying at heart for the TIA program, even changing its name to terrorist information awareness to make it sound less scary to the public. But it wasn't enough to quiet its critics.
And the program was forced to shut down amid public backlash from groups like the ACLU. But that didn't mean it was over. On the contrary, Whitney Webb asserts that the program never actually shut down. instead its various programs had been covertly divided among the web of military and intelligence agencies that make up the national security state.
She expanded on this more in an interview with Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist Chris Hedges. Originally it was a public private partnership housed within DARPA and then by making it this private sector uh enterprise um you know a lot of the concerns about it uh disappeared and bec and this is arguably because by moving into the private sector uh they were able to accomplish a lot more than they than they could have uh by being affiliated directly with the public sector even though they contract uh with the public sector. What's interesting is that the same month TIA changed its name in an attempt to save the program, Peter
Teal Incorporated Palunteer, named after the powerful allseeing crystal ball from JRR Tolken's Lord of the Rings, a littleknown book series that he's famously been pretty obsessed with. Teal's biographer Max Chevkin wrote that the name had to do with Palunteer's software being capable of doing both good and evil, much like Tolken's Palanteer. And as one former employee told Wired, it's a really powerful tool.
And when it's in the wrong hands, it can be really dangerous. And I think people should be really scared about it. And I've got to admit, hearing such an ominous warning like that is really crazy when you learn that around the office Palanteer's employees are called hobbits and their headquarters, the Shire.
God, we are ruled by the evilst nerds on the planet. Though it should also be noted that as current affairs contributor Alex Scopic pointed out, a palunteer is far from a good and awesome thing to have in your possession. Drawing on Tolken is Scopic wrote, "Almost everyone who lays a hand on a palunteer is cursed and driven to their destruction by the experience.
First, there's the wizard Saramon, who was once a wise ally of the elves and his fellow wizard Gandalf, but eventually becomes corrupted and raises his own army of orcs, becoming a kind of mini Sauron. Then there's Den Denith Denithor, sorry, I didn't read the books, the human ruler of the kingdom of Gondor.
Like Saramod, he gets his hands on a palunteer and decides to start dabbling in mass surveillance. But his fate is a little different. He's so terrified by visions of Mordor and its armies that he becomes a pathetic, cowardly figure, refusing to join in the fight against Sauron before eventually going completely insane and burning himself to death on a py.
Finally, there's the hobbit Pippen, who gets hold of Sauron's palunteer after his death and is almost driven insane by it before Gandalf rescues him. In all three cases, the palunteer is a cursed and treacherous thing. And yet, Peter Teal apparently read all this and thought it would be cool to own one.
And it seems Teal wasn't the only guy to think such a powerful and potentially dangerous panopticon was cool. So did Richard Pearl, who had called up Point Dexter for the purpose of arranging a meeting with Palunteer's co-founders back in 2003. After all, as written by Weinberger, the new company was similar in ambition to what Po Dexter had tried to create at the Pentagon.
Likewise, the founders of Palunteer hoped to pick the brain of the man now widely viewed as the godfather of modern surveillance. Before long, Palanteer received a $2 million investment from Inqutel, the venture capital arm of the CIA, a relationship forged in part by the CIA's very own Alan Wade.
Though the exact timing and nature of such an investment remains largely hidden from the public, web reports, "We know the CIA remained Palanteer's only client until 2008, which didn't exactly do much to quell speculation that Palanteer began as a CIA cutout with Teal himself even joking during a Reddit AMA years later that the CIA is a front for Palunteer." But I'd say the following quote out of the New York Times is a far less filtered admission.
The real value of the InQel investment was that it gave access to the CIA analysts who were its intended clients. That's according to their current CEO and co-founder, a man by the name of Alex Karp. When we began talking annoying each other 10 years ago, hopefully I'm annoying you as much as 10 years ago. Uh it or more.
uh when when when I made a you know this Alexander Karp is to put it mildly a pretty odd choice to lead a $430 billion defense contractor and one of the 20 most valuable companies in the United States. Born in New York City in 1967 and raised in Philadelphia, Karp and his younger brother Ben were brought up in a progressive household by their father Robert, a clinical pediatrician, and their mother Leah, an artist.
Both Leah and Robert were very much involved in the activist scene of Mount Ary, Pennsylvania. Bringing their children along to labor rights demonstrations and other political protests. According to author Michael Steinberger, Ben's own research into the Karp family tree has led him to believe that they may be descendants of communist philosopher Carl Marx.
In his recent biography of Karp, the philosopher in the valley, Steinberger paints a vivid picture of the CEO's upbringing. Pulling from extensive interviews conducted with friends and family, not to mention the ample time he spent with Karp himself. One of the reasons Alex always pushed himself was because he believed his parents had not lived up to their fullest potential in their respective field.
According to what Alex told his brother Ben, "If our father had been an alpha, I never would have founded Palunteer." And the good news is, if you love cringe lines like that one, there's plenty more where that came from. Like the way in which the Democrats just completely neglect males. Like there is nothing wrong and it's admirable to be a somewhat to high testosterone male.
Steinberger also wrote that Karp's mother, Leah, was originally attracted to Bob in part because he was Jewish. She had been enamored by the religion ever since she visited Israel, he says. Likewise, a part of Bob's attraction to Leah was that she was black. Their son Ben told the author that my father wanted to marry a black woman.
Steinberger noted that it was this realization that racial and ethnic identity had been foundational to his parents' relationship that caused Alex Karp to feel as though he had been the product of virtue signaling which bothered him. In spite of debilitating dyslexia, Karp worked hard in school and obtained his bachelor of arts and philosophy from Hfordford College in 1989.
At this time, Steinberger wrote that Karp blamed Ronald Reagan for the pervasiveness of racial discrimination on college campuses, saying the president had set a mood that signaled to bigots that racism was acceptable. Karpour a kafia for his yearbook photo, which suggested a broader interest in fighting injustice.
After graduating Havford, he quickly applied for law school at Stanford. But his outlook on world issues couldn't have put him further apart from the ideology being espoused by his fellow Stanford grad student and future business partner Peter Teal. We argued like feral animals, Karp told Steinberger. Teal added that Karp was more socialist. I was more capitalist.
He was always talking about Marxist theories of alienated labor and how this was true of all people around us. But it was his unlikely friendship with Teal that Karp says sustained him during law school, which was otherwise an incredibly dull and donrewarding venture. Not too dissimilar from what Teal's experience had been.
Before long, Karp needed a break, which is when he decided to pursue a doctorate in social theory in Germany. Later, employees at Palunteer would speculate, half jokingly, that his German doctorate was a cover story and that he was actually a spy, possibly for the MSAD. His travel to Europe was, in a way, an opportunity for Karp to reconnect with his familial roots. His father's side of the family was German.
By the time he completed his PhD, writing his thesis in part on the rhetoric of fascism, Karp had become so enamored with Germanic culture that he had contemplated building a nest egg large enough to stay there for good and pursue more of a nomadic lifestyle, but those dreams were short-lived. Carr must have believed he had a higher calling.
And after obtaining his PhD abroad, he soon returned to Palo Alto, where he'd reconnect with an old Stanford buddy. Together, they'd kick off a chain of events that would change the future of government surveillance and global warfare forever. When asked why Peter Teal selected Alex Karp of all people to lead what would become one of his most lucrative companies, Karp told wired contributor Steven Levy that God only knows.
After all, this was a guy with no experience in programming or computers of any kind, in charge of a data analytics company. I mean, he was a philosophy student. Even Max Chaffkin admitted in The Contrarian that Karp was a bit out of place in the Tealverse, considering he's a mixed race Jewish man who self-identifies as a socialist, mingling amongst a pool of reactionaries who aren't afraid to ally themselves without and about white nationalists. But Teal also must have understood how that could help Palunteer. A company that was sure to be
criticized by a range of activists spanning from civil libertarians to leftists. Picking an ostensible socialist to lead such a company would be the perfect shield. Boosting Palunteer's credibility among doubters. When in reality, the only thing progressive about Alex Karp has been his progressive shift to the right.
When confronted by Steinberger with the reality that Teal had dined with numerous leaders of the far right in 2016, Carpet dismissed it as a non-issue and suggested that the fact that he, a biracial Jew, was Palanteer's CEO was proof that Teal was not himself a white nationalist.
I wouldn't be in this position if it were true, would I? Palanteer's actual work gets misconstrued a lot. It's easy to regard them as an entity that collects troves of data on Americans when in actuality they provide the tools that make it easier for governments and businesses to manage and sift through the data they collect, which is almost as terrifying. In his interview with Steven Levy, Karp explained it as such.
If you're an intelligence agency, you're using us to find terrorists and organized criminals while maintaining the security and data protection of your country. Then you have the special forces. How do you know where your troops are? How do you get in and out of the battlefield as safely as possible? Avoiding mines, avoiding enemies.
Then there's Palanteer on the commercial side. The shortand is if you're doing anything that involves operational intelligence, whether it's analytics or AI, you're going to have to find something like our products. But who are the customers? Well, as Carp alluded to back there, you've really got two types.
The commercial side and the defense side. Let's start with defense. As Levy pointed out in his Wired article, the majority of Palunteer's business lies with the US government and its allies. Its software was essentially custommade for and in some cases made by the US government. Going back to the research of Whitney Webb, immediately after the Inqutell investment, she writes, "Palanteer's two top engineers, Ay Jane and Steven Cohen, traveled to CIA headquarters at Langley, Virginia every two weeks. Jane recalls making at least 200 trips to CIA headquarters
between 2005 and 2009. During those regular visits, CIA analysts would test Palunteer software out and offer feedback, and then Cohen and Jane would fly back to California to tweak it. As with Inqutel's decision to invest in Palunteer, the CIA's chief information officer at the time, Alan Wade, played a key role in many of these meetings and subsequently in the tweaking of Palunteer's products.
It should come as no surprise then that there is an overlap between Palunteer's products and the vision that Wade and Po Dexter had held for the failed TIA program. Eventually, those helpful CIA agents alongside the hobbits at Palunteer engineered the ideal software that would soon begin to challenge the Pentagon's increasingly outdated intelligence system, DIGs.
Gotham, which has been Palunteer's foundational product for about the past two decades, utilizes what it calls an AI powered kill chain, enhancing situational awareness and enabling real time operational planning and intelligence gathering for data, defense, and intelligence agencies, which is really a bunch of corporate slap speak for what Karpmore is succinctly summed up as.
We have dedicated our company to the service of the west in the United States of America and we're super proud of the role we play especially in places we can't talk about. You know we are doing what the United Kingdom and many other places. Palunteer is here to disrupt and make our the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare our enemies and on occasion kill them.
And we hope you're in favor of that. Thanks to Gotham, Palunteer has secured extremely lucrative deals with all six branches of the US military. Not to mention the Treasury Department, the DHS, the HHS, the DOJ, and others for an estimated total of a ton of money. Over $10 billion when you factor in its recent contract with the Army worth $10 billion, which you'd think would buy more than one of the shittiest displays of military power we've ever seen.
Look at my global hedgeimon dog. We're never getting healthcare. But it's also important to highlight the Palunteer's long-term success once very much hinged on their ability to penetrate the corporate world. For a while, they sold a product by the name of Metropolis, which, in the words of Bloomberg reporter Lzette Chapman, performed the same type of big data analysis Gotham does, helping users sift through troves of data to mine for patterns and specific information before replacing it with a sleeker product, Foundry. Palanteer used Metropolis to get its
foot in the door with big business from across a range of sectors. Nowadays, their flagship products include not just Gotham and Foundry, but Apollo, which involves software deployment, and AIP, which is their artificial intelligence platform. But it was the use of Metropolis that sparked one of their very first PR nightmares.
The story concerned a former Secret Service agent by the name of Peter Kavvakia III who in 2009 was running special ops for JP Morgan Chase, which may sound crazy on its face, but that's actually pretty normal for big banks, believe it or not. But what wasn't normal was for Kvakia along with his internal security team to be vacuuming up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations from employees of the bank using the help of
about 120 forward deployed engineers from Palunteer. According to Bloomberg's investigation, workers would joke that Kvakia was listening in on their calls and would occasionally plant fake information to see if he'd bring it up in meetings, which he did.
The outlet reported that Palanteer equipped Kvakia with administrative access to a full range of corporate security databases that had previously required separate authorizations and a specific business justification to use. He had unprecedented access to everything all at once, all the time on one analytic platform. Palanteer had turned him into what Bloomberg called a one-man national security agency.
While Karp likes to boast that Palanteer's products come with built-in guard rails to prevent this exact type of abuse from happening, including audits that show who searched what, basically amounting to a digital paper trail to theoretically dissuade unauthorized users from accessing restricted information.
A 2020 profile in the New York Times contained the following passage. The data, which is stored in various cloud services or on clients premises, is controlled by the customer. And Palanteer says it does not police the use of its products, nor are the privacy controls foolproof. It is up to the customers who decide who gets to see what and how vigilant they wish to be.
Max Jaffkin has also pointed out how such guard rails can be ignored. As he wrote, one of Palanteer's former engineers recalled meetings during which government clients would suggest trying to use the database to look up an ex-girlfriend. Palunteer employees would never object to these requests, this person said.
Instead, they would remind the clients that searches were logged and then allow them to look up whoever they wanted, no matter how flimsy the pretext. In response to the JP Morgan debacle, Palanteer released a statement reading, "We are aware that powerful technology can be abused, and we spend a lot of time and energy making sure our products are used for the forces of good.
But as the magazine aptly points out, much depends on how the company chooses to define good. The entire reason Kvakia got caught in the first place is because he started spying on the wrong people, going rogue in the words of Bloomberg and using Palunteer to collect data on the bank's most senior executives, which was an obvious no no and resulted in the termination of his job in 2013.
As Michael Steinberger wrote, the episode illustrated the potential pitfalls with Palunteer software. No matter how well-intentioned Karp and his colleagues were, it was the endusers who ultimately determined whether the software was employed ethically.
As one engineer put it to Bloomberg, "The world changed when it became clear everyone could be targeted using Palunteer." Nefarious ideas became trivial to implement. Everyone's a suspect, so we monitored everything. It was a pretty terrible feeling. And that engineer couldn't have been more right. The world had changed quite a bit thanks to Palunteer and not exactly for the better. In 2011, a security services firm by the name of HB Garry was targeted by the hacking group Anonymous after the HB Gary CEO Aaron Bar threatened to unmask members of the collective. Yeah, hard to imagine that being the outcome of you threatening an international hacking
rig. It's not really surprising. Anonymous is a hornet's nest and bar said, "I'm going to stick my penis in that thing." But what people were surprised to learn was that HB Gary, at the direction of the law firm Hunt and Williams, had planned to team up with two other security companies, Bo Technologies and Palunteer to wage an information war on Wikileaks, a scheme that even involved going after Puliter Prizewinning journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Specifically, the plan, as a leaked pitch deck revealed, involved spying on and discrediting those who supported or who had worked with Wikileaks, which of course had become the go-to hub for whistleblowers to post classified information, as Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning had done.
Obviously, depending on who you were, there was a massive incentive to get rid of what some saw as the Wikileaks problem. Huntton and Williams, which had been representing Bank of America, planned to enlist HBG Garry and Palanteer to pull off the scheme and had hoped to later pitch their tactics to the US Chamber of Commerce.
One of the strategies, according to a Guardian article from the time, was to submit falsified documents to Wikileaks and expose them as forgeries when published. The goal was to ruin the website's credibility and make its supporters in the media look like frauds. Here's how it was reported by Wired in 2011.
When the US Chamber of Commerce wanted to look into some of its opponents, bar teamed up with two other security companies and went nuts, proposing that the chamber create an absurdly expensive fusion cell, which would cost about $2 million a month. If the fusion cell couldn't turn up enough opposition research, the security firms would be happy to create honeypot websites to lure the Chamers's union loving opponents in order to grab more data from them.
The security companies even began grabbing tweets from liberal activists and mapping the connections between people using advanced link analysis software most often used by the intelligence community. Apparently looking to harm the livelihood of journalists like Greenwald. Bar reportedly wrote, "These are established professionals that have a liberal bent, but ultimately most of them if punished will choose professional preservation over cause, such as the mentality of most business professionals.
Without the support of people like Glenn, Wikileaks would fold. Greenwald, for his part, stated that his initial reaction was to scoff at the absurdity, but after learning more about the scheme, he began to take the attempt more seriously. Not in terms of my involvement, he said, but because of the broader implications this story highlights.
He blasted the company for engaging in a lawless and unrestrained axis of government and corporate power. Alex Karp was also one to recognize the broader implications or at least recognize how it looked from a PR perspective, which is why he wasted no time throwing the folks at HB Garry under the bus, breaking off all contact with the company and issuing a public apology to progressive organizations in general and Mr. Greenwald in particular for any involvement that we may have had in these matters.
Similar to the JP Morgan debacle, the HB Garry incident underscored to many people the ways in which Palunteer's technology when in the wrong hands could be used to violate the privacy of American citizens. Chaffkin noted that despite Karp's public condemnations, it wasn't clear whether Karp or Teal truly regretted the proposal to strongarm journalists.
One former engineer said that some employees whispered that the Palunteer staffers who'd been party to the plan, including a 26-year-old engineer, Matthew Steckman, and a manager, Eli Bingham, were simply doing their jobs. Palanteer put Stecman on leave, but he returned to the company and was later promoted, ultimately becoming the head of business operations and a senior adviser to Karp before leaving in 2017.
Bingham was also promoted and put in charge of the company's machine learning operation. But what were the implications of this technology beyond this apparent scheme, such as how it was being used on the streets? What about the numerous police departments that had already been working with Palunteer for years before they ever became a household name? The federal government wasn't the only one to make use of Palunteer software in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as it was also adopted by state and local law enforcement, too. Entities like the NYPD, the Virginia State Police, the Cook County Sheriff's Office, and the
New Orleans Police Department have of course made use of Palunteer's Gotham over the years, not to mention the deals cut by international police departments from Britain to Germany. Palanteer has always found business across the Atlantic, further wrapping its tentacles around the UK government's national health service thanks to an emergency co bill and was more recently reported to have signed on to assist the Bedfordshire police force with AI powered software that incorporates data on an individual's race, sex life, health, and political beliefs. According
to police memos obtained by the IPAP and the Liberty Investigates, the memos caused a panic among senior MPs and campaigners with one former cabinet minister calling for Nectar, the name of the program, to be scrutinized by Parliament. The Iper notes that Project Nectar could be used to target persons suspected of committing or being about to commit a criminal offense in what is a clear extension of Palunteer's predictive policing methods.
Predictive policing has always been a controversial practice. As one study out of the University of Southern California put it, "Predictive policing is a police tactic that uses computer algorithms to predict where crime is likely to occur. This tactic, which has been used in cities like Los Angeles, allows the police to deploy more officers to high-risk locations. But this also raises a number of ethical questions, too.
with this particular study concluding that predictive policing violates the ethics of consequentialism and the ethical frameworks of justice and fairness by disproportionately targeting lowincome neighborhoods and high minority areas with increased police activity. In 2013, a sociologist from Princeton by the name of Sarah Brain embedded herself in the LAPD and was able to see up close just how the department made use of Palunteer software and quickly understood how it was used to justify extreme measures.
According to the Intercept, as Michael Steinberger wrote, Brain discovered that more than 1,000 LAPD officers had access to the software and were using it to merge a wide range of data from phone numbers to field interview cards to images called from automatic license plate readers or ALPRs.
With the help of Palanteer, they could also pull up material that was completely unrelated to criminal justice. Social media posts, foreclosure notices, and utility bills. It was a trove of personal information, Steinberger says. And it didn't stop there. With Palanteer, the police could identify a person of interest, family members, friends, colleagues, associates, and other relations, putting all of them in the LAPD's purview, he wrote, describing an unprecedented level of access that amounts to a virtual drag net.
In a column she wrote in 2020, appropriately titled Enter the Drag Net, Brian recalled how she witnessed one user search for a car by entering just part of a license plate, searching the number six, seven. They were able to immediately access all of the crime reports, traffic citations, field interview cards, automatic license plate recordings, names, addresses, and border crossings associated with cars whose license plate contained these numbers in this order. One police captain quipped, "I'm so happy with how big Palanteer got. I
mean, it's just every time I see the entry screen where you log on, there's another icon about another database that's been added. They just went out and found some other public data on foreclosures, dragged it in, and now they're mapping it where it would be relative to our crime data and stuff.
When Brain asked a Palunteer engineer, "What happens if the system gives a false positive, pointing the police to the wrong suspect?" The engineer simply responded, "I don't know." You don't know? You should. Adam Schwarz, an attorney with the Electric Frontier Foundation, told Wired journalist Mark Harris that for centuries, minority people have been over represented in arrests and other aspects of criminal justice.
So, if you use arrests, convictions, or field interviews as the training data, you are going to get a prediction that is contrary to reality. It's going to have the appearance of objective computer truth, but is just perpetuating an old racial injustice. Harris also points out that once people are labeled chronic offenders, they'll receive additional police attention, meaning they may be stopped for minor infractions which would be ignored outside of supposed hot zones.
Schwarz also added that a lot of this data is garbage. People end up getting overinvestigated because information in these databases is false or misleading. There isn't a way for people to get the bad information out or put their own side of the story in.
In his book, Steinberger raises some valid concerns of his own, encouraging readers to imagine a scenario where a detective could discover that a reluctant witness was having an affair and use that information to coersse his testimony. Or even outside of the police station, an unscrupulous analyst could conceivably use Palunteer's software to keep tabs on his ex-wife's comingings and goings.
Beyond that, millions of innocent people were unknowingly being pulled into the system simply by driving their cars. In an interview with Steinberger, Sarah Brain raised another point worthy of consideration. Digital surveillance is invisible, she said. How are you supposed to hold an institution accountable when you don't know what they're doing? Ever since it signed its first contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency under the Obama administration, the specific ways in which Palunteer has assisted ICE have been mostly kept under the radar. That
is until an FOIA request from an immigrant legal rights group obtained a massive cache of documents, including hundreds of emails exchanged by Palunteer and ICE that showed that the agency had amassed millions of data points that it uses to track its targets.
from social media posts to location history and even tax information. That's according to a recent article from the Guardian which reported that through Falcon, an app Palunteer built specifically for ICE, the agency was able to search for people's names, known locations, vehicles or passport information against Department of Homeland Security and other federal databases like the Enforcement Integrated database, a vast database that holds biometric and personal information on anyone who has been encountered or arrested, detained, or deported by any DHS agency on the go.
Another document suggested ICE agents enhance their investigations by using phone numbers or names extracted from phones the agents unlocked using technology from Celbrite, an Israeli forensic software company that also contracts with ICE. As summarized by one data and tech fellow at Just Futures Law, Hannah Lucell, Palanteer is the corporate backbone of ICE that the agency is relying on for surveillance and deportations. Palanteer has been used in ISIS's day-to-day operations for data surveillance around deportations.
And that's been true for over a decade, which raises some especially pertinent concerns now that Trump has ordered strict new quotas with ICE agents being assigned to 75 arrests per day for each of their 20 field offices back in March.
And that's on top of the president's additional threats to go after political dissident. A concern only heightened by a report from The Intercept that revealed Homeland Security had subpoenaed Google and Meta to hand over information on students being investigated for pro Palestinian activism, which the tech giants did. As you can imagine, Palanteer has received plenty of push back over the years for their affiliation with ICE and DHS.
In 2019, a business insider reported that Palunteer software was used in a controversial ICE raid on a Mississippi chicken farm that resulted in 680 arrests. Insider pointed out also that the raid had occurred on the same day that Trump visited El Paso, Texas in the wake of a mass shooting carried out at a Walmart by an anti-immigrant white nationalist. A few years later in 2017, shortly after Falcon had been announced, protesters appeared at the home of Peter Teal himself.
Equipped with signs that read, among other things, Palunteer, "Wake up. You are complicit. Don't build software for Mordor and Peter Teal is a vampire." In addition to ICE awarding Palunteer a $30 million contract to track self deepportations, Amnesty International reported this year that Palunteer's new case management system, immigration OS, offers a wave of new capabilities, including streamlining the selection and apprehension of individuals based on ICE priorities and endto-end immigration management from identification to removal, focusing on deportation efficiency. While Palanteer defended itself to Amnesty International
on the basis that it does not power the Trump administration's infamous cash and revoke policies, nor does it claim to go after student protesters. The company did confirm its ties to ERRO, enforcement and removal operations, which manages all aspects of immigration enforcement, including detention and arrest.
It is for that reason that Amnesty slammed Palanteer's response as it does not fundamentally address the concerns raised by the group's research, which is that Palunteer's tech is at risk of contributing to human rights violations against migrants as a result of their contracts with federal immigration enforcement agencies.
As media justice coordinator Justinta Gonzalez told the Guardian, "Now with access to more federal databases, ICE can use this type of surveillance apparatus on anyone. not only anyone who is undocumented, but anyone who this administration wants to criminalize and anyone who the administration wants to put under surveillance.
It does have a chilling effect, she added. When you know they have a technology that can track relationships, your conversations, and your organizing activity, that can be a silencing force. Perhaps these were the horrifying implications of Palanteer's work that prompted 13 ex employees to pin an aggressive letter earlier this year condemning what they see as the company's complicity in aiding an increasingly authoritarian regime.
Titled the scouring of the Shire, these former Palunteerians, which ranged from software engineers to managers, began their letter with the following quote from Carl Sean. I have a foreboating of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time. When the United States is a service and information economy, when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues.
When the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or in knowledgeably question those in authority. Unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide almost without noticing back into superstition and darkness. The paper serves as a blistering critique of what the ex employees considered a deviation from Palunteer's core values. Early Palunteerians understood the ethical weight of building these technologies.
They wrote, "A code of conduct was crafted to uphold democracy, preserve the spirit of free scientific inquiry, and ensure responsible AI development. Guard rails were set to prevent discrimination, disinformation, and abuses of power. These principles have now been violated and are rapidly being dismantled at Palanteer Technologies and across Silicon Valley.
They raised the concern of democracy being eroded, citing biometric data collection on immigrant children, journalists being targeted, and science programs that were at the time being ripped apart by Doge. Elon Musk's former department that had also been reported to have swept up young workers from Palunteer.
The letter sneees also warned against what they called the increasingly violent rhetoric which the company is employing today and the actions to which it might become complicit in the future. This line in particular was an obvious shot at Alex Cart who had developed a habit of generating headlines with his own trademark brand of shocking rhetoric. I don't think in win lose.
I think in domination you know America's going to become more lethal, more economically strong and we're participating in that and we're thrilled. Our adversaries do not have our moral compunction and they need to wake up scared and go to bed scared and safe means that the other person is scared. But it might be worth emphasizing here that it wasn't just rhetoric.
Even back in 2003, it's clear that Karp and Teal never considered Palunteer to be aligned with the values of Silicon Valley. Despite being founded in the liberal hub of Palo Alto, Karp has always seen Palunteer as fundamentally different than the likes of Facebook and Google, exemplified by what he said upon taking the company public in 2020.
The engineering elite of Silicon Valley may know more than most about building software, but they do not know more about how society should be organized or what justice requires. Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector's values and commitments, he wrote.
Driving the point home, Palunteer then moved out of the valley and relocated to Denver, Colorado that same year. Part of Palunteer's branding is that it prides itself on being the one tech company that goes where others won't, which they demonstrated in 2019 by taking on the Pentagon's controversial project Maven, an effort to ramp up AI powered warfare when Google allowed its contract to run out following a string of protests that came from its own engineers.
At the time, Palunteer co-founder Joe Londale appeared on CNBC to declare that Peter and I built a patriotic company. Google is clearly not a patriotic company. But that begs the question, what exactly does a patriotic company look like? Meanwhile, Amnesty International has just released a major report on the state's public institutions and companies that have enabled and profited from Israel's genocide and occupation.
Companies named in the report include US military contractors Boeing and Loheed Martin, the Israeli arms companies Elbit Systems, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, and Israel Aerospace Industries, the South Korean conglomerate Hyundai, and the US tech company Palanteer Technologies. If one were to look beyond the multi-billion dollar deals scored within the various branches of America's military, you'd find that Palunteer has also rad in hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with foreign nations as well.
Despite their supposed political differences on other issues, Teal and Karp have both remained aligned in their lifelong support of Israel. With the latter justifying Palunteer's firm commitment to the apartheid regime by stating, from my perspective, it's not just about Israel.
It's like, do you believe in the West? Do you believe the West has created a superior way of living? despite his concern when it came to Saudi Arabia's own deplorable record of human rights abuses, flatout denying them, Palanteer's technology in the past, even though recent reporting indicates he may be warming up to the kingdom now, Carpus never really seemed to bat an eye at Israel's extensive history of human rights abuses, continuing to sell them weapons, showing immense public support for the nation despite privately saying he'd throw Benjamin Netanyahu out of the helicopter if given the chance, according to
Steinberger. even flying to Tel Aviv and hosting a conference called there as yet another show of support for a country that human rights groups all over the world agree has committed genocide in Gaza with an untold number of civilians now dead and displaced.
When Peter Teal was questioned last year for his allegiance to the foreign government, he conceded that he's not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel, but that his bias is to defer to Israel anyway. Um, so what do you think about the use of artificial intelligence or lavender by the IDF in identifying Hamas targets? Um um, look, I I'm not I'm not um, you know, I, you know, without without um going into all the det I I'm not on top of all the details of what's going on in Israel because my my bias is to defer to Israel.
It's it's it's not for us to to second guessess every um everything. And uh I I believe that um broadly the IDF gets to decide uh what it wants to do and that they're broadly in the right and that's that's sort of the the perspective I come back to. Much like ICE, the exact ways in which the Israeli Defense Forces make use of Palunteer's technology remains murky.
But there are a few facts that we can glean based on the reporting. In April 2024, James Bamford, the definitive leading voice in NSA coverage, published an article in The Nation that attempted to draw attention to Palunteer and the way US intelligence feeds Israel's killing machine.
Because, as he noted in the tagline, it isn't so much the bombs that kill, but the list that puts civilians in the way of the bombs. In the article, Bamford names Unit 8200, an elite and highly lethal arm of IDF intelligence specializing in eavesdropping, codereing, and cyber warfare. Both Bamford and Whitney Webb have drawn comparisons of Unit 8200 to the NSA.
A not so fun fact to note here is that all but one founder of Carbine, the emergency communications company backed by Peter Teal and Jeffrey Epstein that we talked about at the beginning of this video, was first a member of unit 8200. As an Israeli spokesperson stated, it was this unit that first began to incorporate elements of AI into its system, which transformed the entire concept of targets in the IDF.
Despite boasting the best of the best AI targeting capabilities, thanks in part to Palanteer. Bamford points to one incident where the IDF had attacked three clearly marked aid vehicles from the world's central kitchen as they attempted to deliver food to starving Palestinians. Despite Israel labeling the strike a mistake, seven aid workers were killed as a result of what Bamford described as a precise targeting that placed missiles in the dead center of the aid agency's rooftop logos, adding to Israel's staggering kill count of international aid workers. around 383 by the UN's latest estimation. Bamford
reiterates that Palanteer thrives off data and in the context of Israel's atrocities, this data comes in the form of intelligence reports on Palestinians living in occupied territories. For decades, Israel has relied on the NSA to provide just that kind of information with Bamford calling back to an interview he conducted with famous whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013.
Snowden, who is obviously considered one of the foremost experts on draconian surveillance strategies, told Bamford that one of the biggest abuses he saw during his time working at the NSA was how the agency secretly provided Israel with raw, unredacted phone and email communications between Palestinian Americans in the US and their relatives in the occupied territories.
Snowden was concerned that as a result of sharing those private conversations with Israel, the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank would be at great risk of being targeted for arrest or worse. Tying all of these facts together, Bamford's reporting has led him to the conclusion that unit 8200 relies on critical information from the NSA to target tens of thousands of Palestinians for death.
And it is extremely powerful data mining software such as that from Palunteer that helps the IDF to select targets despite research from the Israeli based human rights group 972 magazine that found that the IDF's own numbers say 83% of the casualties in Gaza are civilians. Karp has been steadfast in the belief that his technology is being used to kill terrorists.
You're getting wealthy off of killing Palestinians with Palestine kills Palestinians with their AI and technology. Oh, you're killing my family in Palestine. Yeah. And you know what kind of person are you? How do you sleep at night? Well, if you do you want to hear my answer? So, the primary source of of death in Palestine is the fact that Hamas has realized that there are millions and millions of useful idiots that will using that excuse. This is why you don't get a flat.
How dare you? Your AI and your technology from Palunteer kills Palestinians. Mostly terrorists. That's true. No, it's not everyone. If you say mostly, so it's okay to kill other do if your argument was so strong, wouldn't you let me talk? I if if anything Okay, have a great day. Perhaps it's no surprise then that a considerable number of Palanteers engineers have resigned amidst its support of a state responsible for such brazen atrocities.
Even Alex Karp has been reported to have asked himself, "If I were in college, would I be protesting me?" And I have to admit, this one tiny sliver of self-reflection from one of the richest, most unapologetic weapons dealers in the Western world reminds me of a quote from Omar El Akad that really sticks with me.
In his book, one day everyone will have always been against this. Al Akad states that when we in America are asked to look past and excuse the endless death and destruction being wrought by our tax dollars overseas, you are being asked to kill off a part of you that would otherwise scream in opposition to injustice.
You are being asked to dismantle the machinery of a functioning conscience. Who cares if diplomatic expediency prefers you shrug away the sight of dismembered children? Who cares if great distance from the bloodstained middle allows obliviousness? Forget pity. Forget even the dead if you must. But at least fight against the theft of your soul.
I'm not sure Alex Karp or Peter Teal have the capacity to do that because they aren't just ignoring some faraway tragedy and shrugging away the images of dismembered children they see on their timelines. Their technology has directly facilitated the bloodshed.
And as long as people's lives are being ripped away with the help of Palunteer software, they will continue to turn a profit and sign even more deals with even more agencies. It is no debate that Palanteer has benefited massively from the destabilization taking place all over the world. Karp has even admitted himself that bad times are good for Palanteer because we've built products that are robust and built for danger.
But I think it's also important to consider the role Peter Teal has played in getting us here to begin with. Not only is he pushed for Palanteer's use by some of the most lethal militaries on the planet, the role he plays is also a political one.
From backing Trump's candidacy in 2016 to grooming a young hedge fund manager into joining the Senate and later rising to the position of vice president, Teal's fingerprints cover a wide array of American life, more than we may even realize. In our third and hopefully final installment of this series, we'll be exploring the rise of J. D. Vance, the bizarre ideas of a democracy-hating, self-styled philosopher by the name of Curtis Yarvin.
a little scandal called Cambridge Analytica and much much more. I hope you join me in finishing out the rest of this journey. It's been a long one, but I promise we're almost there. In the meantime, check out the articles I cited listed down below in the description. Read the books I mentioned and remember, Palunteer is always watching.
