With a federal database being compiled, we can kiss the Fourth Amendment goodbye.
The Felon-in-Chief squatting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is about to fulfill his dream of a dystopic surveillance state.
In The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the “palantíri” are “seeing stones” used for spying across the fictional Middle Earth.
According to the website Tolkien Gateway:
The purpose of the stones in general was dual: to communicate with one another, and to see afar. Stones were linked with each other and each could reveal what was near another stone, but those of strong will and mind could direct their gaze anywhere, both in space and time.
But we neither live in Middle Earth, nor is our story a hobbit-populated fantasy.
In yet another example of life imitating art (see George Orwell’s 1984), in the United States of America, 2025, there is a real thing as a “palantir”, and it’s currently building a master list of all our personal information, from Social Security numbers to student loan information, that the Felon-in-Chief squatting at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue wants for his dream of a dystopic surveillance state.
That should concern us all greatly.
In March, the adjudicated sexual assaulter scrawled his illegible signature on an executive order directing the federal government to share data across agencies (just like the “seeing stones”). As the bromance between the former host of Celebrity Apprentice and the owner of Tesla and X sours, the new tech bro du jour picked to carry out this latest example of draconian government overreach is Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and, fittingly, Palatir.
As reported in the New York Times:
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 administration has already used Palantir to compile our IRS data into a central database, as the Times further explains:
At the I.R.S., Palantir engineers joined in April to use Foundry to organize data gathered on American taxpayers, two government officials said. Their work began as a way to create a single, searchable database for the I.R.S., but has since expanded, they said. Palantir is in talks for a permanent contract with the I.R.S., they said.
According to Raw Story:
The company has received also new contracts from the Pentagon and is speaking to the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service about buying its technology, according to six government officials and knowledgable Palantir employees, and Democratic lawmakers have warned that Trump could use the personal information to target immigrants and punish his critics.
Some Palantir employees reportedly do not support this, however, as the Times explained:
The company risks becoming the face of Mr. Trump’s political agenda, four employees said, and could be vulnerable if data on Americans is breached or hacked. Several tried to distance the company from the efforts, saying any decisions about a merged database of personal information rest with Mr. Trump and not the firm.
13 former employees signed on to a letter urging Palantir to end its work for the regime.
Writing for The Banter, progressive podcaster Bob Cesca, responded:
Does anyone seriously believe the Trump government is competent enough to protect the system from being breached? If the database were hacked, as Palantir workers warned, the consequences would be nightmarish, far worse than having to change your passwords or order a new credit card. The dark web would have easy access to your Social Security number, your tax returns, your bank accounts, and more. Worse, due to mass firings of federal workers, it’d be nearly impossible for millions of us to conduct damage control.
That’s the real concern.
But are people going to be sufficiently outraged to take to the streets over this? Probably not since we have become collectively inured to cool technology like the iPhone’s Siri, Amazon Alexa, social media platforms, websites we visit, and the devices we carry with us everywhere every day chronicling our motions and conversations for the sake of marketing convenience. We have over the past decade and a half allowed the surveillance state to infiltrate our private spaces—exactly the objective those who control the information required to compile mind-boggling amounts of information on all of us, whether we want them to or not. Just the thing an authoritarian regime like the one clamping down on dissent at the moment needs to solidify power.
How many of our freedoms do we have to lose before they’re irretrievable?