Title: The Secretive Tech Company Working With the Trump Administration

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Now we turn to Palantir, a company that most Americans have never heard of, but is playing a crucial role in carrying out the goals of Donald Trump's second presidency. Last week, The New York Times published an exposé of on the Trump administration tapping Palantir with the task of compiling data on Americans. According to The Times, Palantir has the technology to swiftly merge Americans data from across multiple federal agencies into one large master list which could "give him untold surveillance power."

Do you remember the news in April that RFK Jr. was planning on creating an autism database with the goal of "curing autism" by fall of this year? Palantir's product is now in use at the Department of Health and Human Services. According to reporters at WIRED, Palantir is involved in Immigration and Customs Enforcement surveillance, ISIS surveillance of immigrants as well, both in the country and those who are self-deporting. That publication also found Palantir to be involved with Trump's goal of creating the Golden Dome, as it's called, similar to Israel's Iron Dome, which protects the country from missile attacks.

These are just some of the ways we know so far that Palantir's tech is crucial to the Trump administration's projects. What is Palantir? Who's behind this all-powerful, yet widely unknown company? And what does its presence in our government mean for Americans' privacy and safety?

Joining us now to dive deep into Palantir and its role in the Trump administration, plus what the feud between Elon Musk and Donald Trump means for that company, is Caroline Haskins, business reporter at WIRED, where she covers Silicon Valley surveillance and labor. Caroline, welcome to WNYC. Hi there.

Caroline Haskins: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Palatine is notorious for its secrecy, from what I read. Most Americans, however, have not heard of this company, or maybe that's one of the reasons they haven't heard of this company. What even is Palantir? What kind of work does this company do?

Caroline Haskins: Palantir is a software company, and I think the simplest way to describe it, rather than saying data and analytics firm, which it is, but it essentially allows companies to get data out of their IT systems without fixing the older systems. Picture a government agency with decades worth of data and maybe messy IT systems. Palantir can essentially sit on top of it and help them extract data from it and put it all in one place so that they're able to act upon it without doing the surgery underneath in the guts of the IT systems, if that makes sense.

Brian Lehrer: Your news outlet WIRED has been deeply investigating Silicon Valley's work in the Trump administration generally, I'll remind our listeners, your colleagues were the ones who uncovered the identities of Musk's so called DOGE boys and are seemingly the newsmakers when it comes to DOGE's work thus far, you all are at WIRED. Can you talk about your publications work in this realm and the connection between DOGE and Palantir?

Caroline Haskins: That's right. My co-workers, Makena Kelly and Tori Elliott, have been breaking a lot of news in this area. Back in April, they broke the news that there was a so-called hackathon happening at the irs led by two top DOGE operatives, one with ties to SpaceX, one with ties to Databricks, which is another data company. Then, it was later revealed that this hackathon was actually part of a larger effort to build what they were calling a mega API at the IRS. This would essentially allow them to access any data that the IRS has that is normally siloed in order to protect people's privacy and put that in one place. That would be names, addresses, tax returns, employment data.

Then, simultaneously, there are efforts-- Oh, and to be clear, these efforts under DOGE directly involve Palantir. This hackathon, DOGE was essentially bringing Palantir into the loop to help them accomplish this mega API. It is also happening at the Department of Homeland Security. DOGE is trying to build a larger immigration database that's taking data from Social Security, voting records from Pennsylvania and Florida, and essentially, trying to build a system that would track immigrants in real time.

This is happening simultaneously as Palantir got an extra $30 million in order to help ICE build what they want to be a real-time way to track people that are self-deporting from the country, which they currently don't have a way to track.

I think one of the main things to know is that a lot of people who are currently at DOGE, several are either alumni of Palantir, have ties to the company, and others have ties to one of the company's co-founders, who is Peter Thiel. One of them got a Thiel Fellowship grant. This is all to say that DOGE and Palantir definitely have a deep set of ties, and DOGE has been, as reported by my colleagues, again, Makena Kelly and Tori Elliott. They've been trying to compile and centralize data about millions of Americans over the past couple of months.

Brian Lehrer: I see that you were recently at Palantir's AI+ Expo booth when the company threatened to call the police on you. Give us your side of the events that unfolded and why you believe you were targeted by Palantir as a journalist from WIRED, specifically.

Caroline Haskins: This was a defense tech conference that's open to the public, open to journalists. Dozens of different companies were there doing software demos in their booths. This is just an area where they're set up and they have a screen, and someone stands up there and essentially just walks through how one of their software programs works.

In Palantir's booth, they were highlighting their partners through the Fed Start program, which is essentially where they use Palantir infrastructure in order to get their own products certified to work with the government. One of the presentations I watched was from Anthropic. Anyway, [chuckles] I watched a couple of presentations there. I didn't say anything. I was watching. I was taking notes, et cetera, et cetera.

Then, at one point, I stepped out of the booth and I wrote down a few questions and I was going to approach someone in the Palantir booth to ask them. Then, I was stopped at the entrance by this man named Eliano Younes, and he's a visible figure at Palantir, at least online. He told me that I wasn't allowed to enter the booth. I asked why? He just repeated himself, I'm not allowed to enter. He said, "If you do try to enter, I'm going to call the police." I was like, "Oh, okay." [chuckles] I took a few steps back and I called my editor. They didn't give a reason, obviously, when I asked why I'd been banned from the booth.

I mean, I had reported at the conference the previous year when I was a freelancer, and I wrote about it for The Guardian, and I wrote about the comments of CEO Alex Karp and a software demo that I had watched from Palantir, which essentially showed how one of its tools could work in a war fighting capacity to target people and attempt to weed out civilian casualties, which felt kind of macabre from at least my point of view.

Brian Lehrer: What does that mean, weed out civilian casualties?

Caroline Haskins: Essentially, try and pick targets that would minimize but not eliminate civilian casualties. It felt a little bit morbid, [chuckles] but it's a defense tech conference. A lot of different companies were trying to highlight technologies that would be used to kill people. Anyways, it's possible that they saw that. I've also been reporting on the company over the past. I've reported on them on and off for a couple of years now. I've published some pieces that touch upon them recently. I don't know. [chuckles] Honestly, I really have no idea. They could have read articles. They could have-- I don't know. I'm not going to guess.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few questions or comments for Caroline Haskins, business reporter at WIRED, where she covers Silicon Valley surveillance and labor. As we talk about their reporting on Palantir, in particular, 212-433-WNYC and Palantir's role in the Trump administration, 212-433-9692 call or text. Last week, The New York Times exposed the Trump administration's expansion of Palantir throughout federal agencies for the purpose of data compilation on Americans. Palantir has denied, we should say, collecting data on Americans since The Times' story was published. Is there a distinction there that we need to discuss between data collection and data compilation?

Caroline Haskins: It is an important distinction. Data collection would imply that Palantir is housing data about Americans internally, but rather it's more-- Picture it's actually providing an IT system, so it's essentially sitting on top of what an organization already has and filtering it out and arranging it so that agencies can work with it. It's not as if Palantir is a data broker that's either obtaining data or providing it, it's more like they're going to a company and enabling them to leverage it in a way that they weren't before.

One thing to note is that like a lot of experts have noted that a lot of times what distinguishes something that's privacy safe versus not is whether data is able to be combined with each other, which would enable a user to get a really detailed portrait of a person, maybe their purchasing activities, what have you. The concern that, for instance, there were 13 former Palantir employees who signed a letter of concern the other week about Palantir's current work with the government.

Their concern is that what Palantir is currently helping DOGE and federal agencies to do would put Americans privacy at risk, exactly, for this reason, that their data is essentially escaping these silos that they were put in for their own protection and then potentially being used for unknown purposes that, you know, Americans can't exactly consent to.

Brian Lehrer: What purposes? What can your reporting at WIRED, or any other that you're familiar with, tell us about the goals of this project or how broadly they're collecting what kinds of information about Americans?

Caroline Haskins: It depends which agency we're talking about. For instance, at the Department of Homeland Security, obviously, one of the major objectives out of that department recently is to ramp up immigration arrests and deportations. The data that is being combined there includes data from the US Citizens and Immigration Services, the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, and voting data from two states. That could be used to get a pretty detailed portrait of a person and their activities.

One stated goal of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is to get as much detailed data as possible, as close to being in real time as possible, about people and what they're doing for the purposes of arresting them or trying to deport them. The surveillance and ramping up of the deportation machine is one use case there.

Then, at the IRS, where Palantir has been involved in helping DOGE to make a mega API, one concern there is just the sensitivity of the data that is, you know, inherently involved there. This would include names, addresses, tax returns, different employment data. It's unclear exactly what that could be used for. You know, it could be combined with DHS data in terms of, you know, using that for immigration purposes.

I mean, The Times noted that it could possibly be used to punish political enemies or critics of the administration. Ultimately, it's not as if that DOGE has come forward and said that these are our goals, aside from what they're saying publicly, which is just, "We want to do our jobs more efficiently." There are ways to sort of organize the IT systems and make them work better without combining all of this data, which could put people in a really vulnerable position.

Brian Lehrer: Alan in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with Caroline Haskins from WIRED. Hi, Alan.

Alan: Good morning. Thanks very much. This seems like a plot line that it would be hard for a spy novelist to do much better on the idea that Musk, who has been in alliance with Trump and has also worked more closely with people from Palantir on his government efficiency efforts, could now be set loose from the Trump alliance, keep his alliance with Palantir and create a parallel track of abuse from the private sector, no longer under any palpable supervision by the Trump Justice Department is a very frightening prospect because this could be a standing government in exile of parallel oligarchs who would be very hard for anyone to keep track of.

Brian Lehrer: Alan, thank you for raising that troubling prospect. Now that Musk has fallen out with Trump, do you think the caller, Caroline, is raising an actual possible scenario?

Caroline Haskins: Obviously, the Musk and Trump fallout is in the early days, and it remains to be seen how that's going to pan out. I mean, it's worth noting that there have been various reports across different publications about DOGE exporting data during its activities at certain agencies and working through those IT systems. We currently don't know definitively what may or has come out of that.

I think it's worth noting also that the DOGE infrastructure, as far as we know now, does remain in place. Even without Musk as the head of it, we still have these many figures, some of whom are alums from Musk's companies, others who are alums from Peter Thiel's companies. They're still effectively in these roles and doing their jobs. There's not really any indications right now that that's threatened now that Musk and Trump are having this falling out. Anyway, as, as far as the data export question, I think, again, it's unclear right now, aside from the reports that we have seen about data possibly being exported to private servers.

Brian Lehrer: I'm going to read a little bit from The Times article last week on this. Oh, no, I'm not. It just blew off my screen, so I'm going to have to get it back. But I'm going to summarize it. It seemed to say that a lot of the problem that Democrats and privacy advocates have with this kind of data collection, that the Trump administration has hired Palantir to do, is that it could be used against Trump's political enemies.

There may be some, some people who think, "If I'm not doing anything wrong, why do I care if the IRS or ICE or Social Security administration have my data? It's not going to hurt me." But one of the emphases of The Times article seemed to be that Trump, if he chooses, could use this data for political retribution. You have your eye on that?

Caroline Haskins: It's definitely something to keep an eye on. It's good that The Times noted it. Obviously, we've seen so many cases of personal political retribution in just the first few months of this administration. Ultimately, when data is combined at all of these agencies, maybe it's being combined for one purpose originally, but who's to say it couldn't be used for another purpose in the future? Again, I don't want to speak to what we don't necessarily know just yet, but it's definitely a concern worth keeping an eye on.

Brian Lehrer: You mentioned one of Palantir's co-founders, Peter Thiel. The other one, their CEO currently is Alex Karp. I see he's not the typical tech CEO in many ways. He got a PhD in neoclassical social theory. He has a new book out this year called The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Give us a little on your reporting on Karp's ideology and how it's embedded in the work of Palantir, this company that many people have never heard of until maybe recent reporting.

Caroline Haskins: I think the most obvious thing we see on the public end is a pretty non-apologetic stance toward Palantir working with Immigration and Custom Enforcement or different military agencies, both with the US and with countries that are considered allies. But backing up one thing that Karp actually wrote his dissertation about was specifically the West and the monopoly on violence, and that as a maintaining force of a world order, as it should be. This is definitely someone that sees military force in these different agencies as playing a crucial role.

He's definitely doubled down since the Trump administration began on this work. He's been pretty outspoken in favor of the current conflict in favor of Israel and the Israel-Gaza War, but he has also-- These things exist separately. He's also expressed various political beliefs, like he claimed that he voted for Hillary Clinton, but now he's really embracing the Trump of it all. He recently traveled to the Middle East on that trip a couple of weeks ago. He's embracing the current moment in terms of the Trump administration being in favor of all of this defense spending, which stands to benefit a company like Palantir.

Brian Lehrer: Listener asks in a text message, how is Palantir similar to or different from what the NSA, the National Security Agency, was revealed by Edward Snowden to be doing? That was a decade ago.

Caroline Haskins: What the NSA is doing is directly gathering data that it directly has its fingers on and is working through. What Palantir is doing is saying-- Picture a funnel. Palantir is the funnel, and it isn't housing the liquids or materials that are going through the funnel, but the funnel is being used to work through this different data. It's the infrastructure for what a government agency could use for surveillance, but Palantir itself isn't conducting the surveillance. It's not as if every single Palantir employee is plugged in and working on this. It's usually a pretty small group of dedicated engineers, but it's essentially providing the infrastructure.

Brian Lehrer: We're just about at a time, but one listener is concerned with how this could intersect with AI to know more and more and more and more about our individual data once it's unleashed.

Caroline Haskins: It's worth noting that one of Palantir's flagship products, which is called Foundry, it includes AI-driven tools. It exists under this umbrella called the AI Intelligence platform. These tools can essentially be used to make AI-driven alerts about things that an engineer might want to be indicated to them. It could be used to do summaries, et cetera, et cetera. Without getting too much into the abstract, AI is built into the technology that Palantir sells currently. Where it's being used, that's not a separate concern from AI for sure.

Brian Lehrer: Just very briefly, like in 30 seconds, this very public fallout between Musk and Trump, biggest national politics story in the country the last few days. Palantir stock took a hit, apparently because of the souring relationship between the two. Is that your understanding, and what would the relevance be? We have 30 seconds.

Caroline Haskins: I think Palantir stock indication could just be used as a proxy for that relationship, simply because I think DOGE, which Musk was leading, just led to a large influx of people who had associations with Palantir into the administration.

To be clear, they're still there. It's not as if Musk leaving directly-- To the best of my knowledge, it doesn't necessarily hurt Palantir's chances of continuing this work with the federal government, but the stock price could definitely reflect, at a minimum, the uncertainty on how all of this is going to play out because it's just been the first couple hours of this playing out and maybe something could change. At least at the current moment, those people with ties to Palantir remain in place.

Brian Lehrer: Caroline Haskins, business reporter at WIRED. Thanks a lot for coming on and sharing your reporting.

Caroline Haskins: Thanks so much.

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