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Surveillance — Peter Thiel's Company

Palantir: The Company
That Is Becoming the
Operating System
for Government Surveillance.

You have probably never heard of it. It knows almost everything about you. It is now embedded in ICE, the IRS, the Pentagon, and dozens of police departments. Its co-founder's former employees now run parts of the federal government. This is what it does, how it does it, and what you should know.

Digital Security · Fourth Amendment · Surveillance · Updated March 31, 2026
$970M
Palantir federal contracts in 2025 alone — nearly double 2024
$30M
ICE contract for ImmigrationOS — real-time tracking of immigrant movements
$180M
Paid to Palantir by the IRS since 2018 across 26 contracts
17
Current or former Palantir/Thiel employees working at highest levels of the Trump administration
What Is Palantir — Plain English
Founded in 2003. Its initial funding came from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm.

Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 with initial funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA.

Peter Thiel is Palantir's largest individual shareholder and its ideological architect. Thiel was a major donor to JD Vance's Ohio Senate campaign. The Vice President of the United States owes his political career to Palantir's co-founder.

Two Products. One Purpose.
Law Enforcement / Intelligence
Palantir Gotham
Used by police departments, ICE, the FBI, CIA, NSA, and military intelligence. Designed to aggregate data from incompatible sources and make them searchable through a single interface. You put in a name, a license plate, a phone number, an address — and Gotham pulls every database record connected to that starting point. What took detectives days of manual work now takes seconds.
Government / Enterprise
Palantir Foundry
Used by the IRS, Department of Health and Human Services, and large corporations. Designed to ingest and unify massive, incompatible datasets into one searchable system. DOGE is using Foundry to build the unified IRS database. Where Gotham is the investigator's tool, Foundry is the infrastructure layer — the plumbing that makes all the data flow into one place.
The Core Value Proposition

Imagine the "detective wall" from every crime drama — photographs pinned to a board, connected by strings to names, addresses, associates, vehicles. That wall represents the work of connecting disparate information: this person lives here, drives this car, calls this phone number, has this associate. It takes hours. Sometimes days.

Palantir is that wall — automated, instantaneous, and covering everyone. Not just people under investigation. Not just people suspected of crimes. The system pulls from police databases, DMV records, IRS tax files, utility records, license plate readers, social media, and hundreds of other sources. Anyone who appears in any of those databases — which is to say, everyone — is in the system. The question is only who chooses to search for them, and why.

The Network Effect
It Does Not Just Search. It Maps.
Palantir does not return a list of records. It builds a visual web — a node graph — showing the relationships between every piece of information connected to the person being searched. Your address connects to your neighbors. Your phone number connects to everyone who called it. Your car connects to every location it was recorded. A search that starts with one name can expand within seconds to map an entire social and geographic network. No court order required to query. No suspicion required to start.