Heather Cox Richardson's wrap up is worth the read.
In July 2024, according to an article published today by Kirsten Grind and Megan Twohey in the New York Times, billionaire Elon Musk texted privately about his concerns that government investigations into his businesses would “take me down.” “I can’t be president,” he wrote, “but I can help...
heathercoxrichardson.substack.com
Something to take note that is buried in this article, the name of a company: Palantir
There's a large amount of money that gets redirected from taxpayers into Silicon Valley. The largest network providers under government contracts are owned by Apple, Amazon and Microsoft. Starlink and SpaceX, owned by Musk, gets billions in government contracts. It was very odd to see the CEOs and major shareholders of those same companies sitting in seats at the inauguration.
When the Healthcare.gov rollout was a failure during the Obama Administration, engineers from Google were brought in to cleanup the mess. Many of those engineers were hired by the Federal Government and became part of a new department in the Federal Government, known as the
United States Digital Service (USDS). USDS' original intent was to standardize .gov websites, help bolster government systems to make them secure and reliable and to be an internal technology consulting service for government agencies. This gave USDS an internal insight into how the various systems and technologies in the Federal Government worked.
One of Trump's Executive Orders changed USDS into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and changed its mission from being a group of internal consultants who assisted information technology departments in Federal agencies, remaking USDS (now called DOGE) into a group of people who infiltrated government systems, mined data and collected information about US citizens from Federal agencies, in violation of Federal laws, in many cases.
It sounds Orwellian but anyone who has lived in an authoritarian country will tell you that the government in authoritarian countries collect and use information about citizens as part of how the government controls the masses. It used to be that Republicans and libertarians were always very paranoid about the Federal and State governments collecting and aggregating information citizens. Republicans fought any effort to assign a
national identifier to citizens out of fear that the government could use an identifier to collect information on its citizens. Today, Republicans are sitting largely silent while DOGE collected information.
Privacy advocates noticed this Defense Contract that was posted on 21-May-2025:
Palantir USG Inc., Palo Alto, California, was awarded a $795,000,000 modification (P00005) to contract W911QX-24-D-0012 for Maven Smart System software licenses. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of May 28, 2029. Army Contracting Command Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, is the contracting activity. (Awarded May 20, 2025)
That $759 BILLION contract went to a company founded by Peter Thiel, Palantir Technologies. Palantir was named after the crystal ball in the Tolkien novels.
The New York Times also noticed.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies.
www.nytimes.com
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.
Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.
The Trump people came out of 2020 with a great deal of paranoia about the BLM protests- that millions of people would take to the street in protests, many wearing masks, and the government was unable to quell those protests. The Trumpists have reasons why they would want to have information about every citizen in order to quell any possible mass protests that might happen in the future.
We're seeing things happen in the first 3 months of the second Trump Administration that look a lot like things that would happen in Russia, China, Hungary, Turkey and other authoritarian countries. And Congress is just sitting by, letting it happen. And the American public seems oblivious.
