Do the anti-ICE riots in LA present a golden opportunity to unleash tech giant Palantir’s impressive and unprecedented surveillance power on domestic targets?
One highly influential social media personality thinks so.
“Time to deploy @PalantirTech to Los Angeles to deal with the illegals,” Laura Loomer wrote on X. “You know you’d love to see it.”
She doubled down on her position with a later post: “Do you really think we are going to mass deport 65 million people without advanced technology? Are you that naive?”
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Over the past several months, Palantir has won hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of federal contracts in the service of the DOGE agenda.
Via The New York Times (emphasis added):
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…
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.
Loomer’s embrace of Palantir is quite the about-face, as less than six months ago, she condemned the company and its CEO in harsh terms.
This was Alex Karp, the CEO of @PalantirTech on Fox News today being the smug elitist that he is. He cofounded Palantir with Peter Thiel, who earlier this year wouldn’t even confirm if he was supporting Trump and Vance.
— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) December 24, 2024
Just a reminder that Palantir and their board members want… https://t.co/KWqG6RqS4s pic.twitter.com/NPkFjljLCh
Why the dramatic rhetorical shift?
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It’s unclear what relationship, if any, Loomer has with Palantir.
However, multiple allegations have surfaced in the past year and a half that Palantir has been actively courting social media influencers to push its interests.
Last year, in a bid to shore up public support of its partnership with the UK’s health service, the company came under investigation for allegedly illegally contracting social media influencers to pimp its business.
Via Bloomberg, January 2024 (emphasis added):
Just about a week after signing a controversial contract with the UK’s national health service, Palantir Technologies Inc. launched an influencer marketing campaign to counter criticism of the patient data platform it’s building, potentially breaching terms of the deal.
After winning the bid on Nov. 21, Palantir contracted with a digital marketing agency to solicit interest from content personalities. “I’m getting in touch regarding one of our current campaigns,” the marketers wrote in emails to influencers, according to copies of communications obtained by the legal nonprofit Good Law Project and shared with Bloomberg. The pitch said the objective was “to clear up misinformation relating to some recent data privacy concerns that were shared in the UK press.”
