The Permission Slip: Palantir's Manifesto and the Architecture Already in Place

Companion piece. This essay is a short-form companion to the four long-form country studies in the Authoritarian Drift Index series (Russia, Hungary, Turkey, and the US quarterly timeline). It reads a specific corporate ideological document, Palantir's April 19 "22 points" post, through the analytical frameworks established in those pieces.

On Saturday, April 19, 2026, the surveillance software company Palantir Technologies posted what it called a "brief" 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp's book The Technological Republic to its corporate X account. Within hours, the post had accumulated more than 21 million views. By Sunday, reactions had moved from the usual tech-industry commentary to something more pointed: the Belgian philosopher Mark Coeckelbergh described the document as "an example of technofascism." Former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis warned that "AI-powered killer robots are coming." Al Jazeera ran the same framing in its headline. Engadget said the document "reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain." And Bellingcat's Eliot Higgins captured the underlying analytical point in a single sentence: "These 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space, they're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating."

That is the correct frame for reading the document. And read through the Russia, Hungary, and Turkey case studies assembled elsewhere in this series, a more specific claim becomes possible: Palantir's manifesto is not the beginning of anything. It is the ideological finish work on infrastructure that has been under construction in the United States for nearly a quarter of a century. What the Russian case took a decade to assemble through child-protection legislation, what the Hungarian case installed through a two-thirds parliamentary supermajority, what the Turkish case compressed into two years under an emergency decree regime, the United States built first, in plain view, funded openly through defense and intelligence appropriations, across the span of four administrations. The only thing that was missing was the public ideology that would license pointing the infrastructure inward. On April 19, Palantir supplied it.

I. What the document actually says

The 22 points in brief

The Palantir post is short enough, roughly a thousand words, that the content can be characterized precisely rather than paraphrased generally. Ten of the twenty-two points argue, in substance, that Silicon Valley has a moral and patriotic duty to align with the national-security state. Four argue for the expansion of AI-based military and deterrent capabilities, including an explicit call for "a new era of deterrence built on A.I." replacing the atomic age. Two call for the undoing of postwar constitutional constraints on Germany and Japan. One advocates reviving conscription. One argues that "free email is not enough"; that Silicon Valley owes the country more than consumer software. And the final point, which received the most immediate backlash, argues against "the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism," on the grounds that "certain cultures and indeed subcultures have produced wonders" while others "have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful."

The four points that matter most analytically (verbatim).

5. "The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications."

9. "The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software."

19. "The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price."

22. "We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. Certain cultures and indeed subcultures have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful."

These four points carry the weight of the argument. Point 22 supplies the civilizational hierarchy: a mechanism for sorting people and communities into those worthy of state protection and those available as state targets. Point 19 argues against the post-1945 institutional restraints that were built specifically to prevent industrial states from acting on such hierarchies at scale. Point 9 asserts that moral persuasion is no longer sufficient, only coercion ("hard power … built on software"). And Point 5 frames the production of AI weapons as an inevitability, with the only remaining question being who builds them. Read in sequence, they describe not a policy proposal but a completed worldview, offered by a company whose software is already operational inside the US deportation system, the Israeli military, and the UK government's civil administration.

II. Who is doing the arguing

The revenue side of the ideology

Any analysis of the manifesto that treats it as a free-floating intellectual document is missing the central feature of the case. Palantir is not a philosophy department. It is a publicly traded company whose US government revenue grew 66 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching $570 million in a single quarter. Its US commercial revenue in the same quarter grew 137 percent year-over-year. Total contract value closed in Q4 2025 was $4.262 billion, a 138 percent year-over-year increase. The company, in short, is in the middle of the largest revenue expansion of its history, driven heavily by contracts with the United States federal government during the first year-plus of the second Trump administration.

What Palantir's ideology is aligned with, in dollars.

| Figure | What it is | |---|---| | $145M+ | ICE "Investigative Case Management" (ICM) sole-source contract; the backbone of US deportation targeting. Reporting indicates the existing ICM deal has ballooned past $145M with the April 2025 ImmigrationOS modification folded in. | | $30M | ImmigrationOS prototype contract (April 2025). Designed to streamline identification, apprehension, and "self-deportation" tracking; reporting indicates integration with IRS, Social Security, passport, and other federal data. | | $300M | USDA "National Farm Security" BPA, with a separate no-bid component up to $75M for tracking federal workers' return-to-office compliance. | | $570M | US government revenue in Q4 2025 alone. 66 percent year-over-year growth. | | $4.26B | Total contract value closed in Q4 2025; a company record, 138 percent year-over-year growth. | | 2013 | Year Palantir first entered ICE systems. The ICM platform has been operated by Palantir continuously across three administrations. |

This is the context in which a surveillance contractor publishes a civilizational manifesto. Higgins's framing, that the document is the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating, is not interpretive commentary. It is an empirical description of the revenue model. Palantir's ImmigrationOS requires an administration that wants to conduct mass deportations at scale. Its Gotham platform requires an intelligence and law-enforcement ecosystem that values cross-agency data integration above civil-liberties constraints. Its USDA contract requires a federal employment environment in which surveilling civil servants is treated as legitimate executive function rather than as an affront to the civil service tradition.

Each of these revenue lines requires specific political conditions to exist. Those political conditions are precisely the ones Palantir's manifesto argues for. This is what Al Jazeera's coverage of geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand captured when he said the manifesto reveals that Palantir's tools "aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours." The company has moved past describing its product and into describing the world in which its product makes sense. The two are now the same document.

III. Reading the manifesto through the framework

Eight ADI dimensions, one corporate document

The Authoritarian Drift Index used elsewhere in this series scores countries across eight dimensions, drawn from V-Dem, Freedom House, the EIU, Umberto Eco's Ur-Fascism framework, and Robert Paxton's comparative work. The striking feature of the Palantir manifesto, when read through those dimensions, is how comprehensively it maps. Five of the eight dimensions receive direct, textual support in the document. Two more are implicated by context. Only one, electoral integrity, is entirely absent, which is itself analytically meaningful.

The analytical significance of this coverage is not that the manifesto is unusually bad. It is that the manifesto is comprehensive. A typical piece of American political rhetoric, from either party, touches two or three of these dimensions at most, and usually in tension with others (hawkish on state violence but protective of civil liberties, say, or anti-surveillance but pro-enemy-construction). Palantir's document touches seven of eight, coherently, in a single direction. That consistency is what makes it legible as a completed ideology rather than as a set of policy positions. It is also what makes it comparable to the foundational texts of the other cases in this series: Orbán's 2014 Băile Tușnad speech, Putin's 2012 child-protection legislation preamble, Erdoğan's 2016 "gift from God" framing.

IV. The four-country comparison

Which case is Palantir's positioning most similar to?

The Turkish case is the closest structural analog, and the most instructive for reading the current moment. Pre-2013 AKP Turkey consolidated power through a working alliance with the Gülen movement, a distributed quasi-independent network inside the judiciary, police, civil service, and media. When that alliance became threatening, Erdoğan destroyed it in 2013–2016 and replaced it with a tighter configuration: pro-AKP media conglomerates, construction firms, and state-adjacent businesses whose continued viability depended directly on government favor. This is the shift from ambient alignment (institutional networks whose interests happened to align with the regime's) to contractual alignment (institutional actors whose revenue explicitly depends on continued regime favor).

"They're effectively saying: our tools aren't meant to serve your foreign policy. They're meant to enforce ours."

Arnaud Bertrand, on Palantir's April 19 post, via Al Jazeera.

What distinguishes the US case from the Turkish one is the delivery mechanism. Erdoğan's realigned industrial bloc was domestic, privately held, and deeply embedded in AKP networks. Palantir is publicly traded, has a multi-billion-dollar market capitalization, sells simultaneously to the Israeli military, UK government, and various EU states, and publishes its corporate ideology on social media to tens of millions of viewers. The consolidation into contractual alignment, in the US case, is happening through the mechanism of public capital markets rather than opaque oligarchic networks; which is novel in the comparative frame and analytically worth paying attention to.

V. What the timing tells us

Why April 2026, specifically

Karp's book The Technological Republic was published in February 2025. The 22-point summary is not new material. The question of why Palantir posted it on April 19, 2026, why that specific date, under current conditions, is analytically interesting. The proximate context is the ongoing Congressional Democratic letter to ICE and DHS about Palantir's role in the deportation operation; a wave of protests at Palantir offices in the preceding weeks; an open letter from former Palantir employees warning that "leadership has abandoned its founding ideals"; and sustained critical press coverage, including the Washington Post's December 2025 investigation into Palantir's shift "to play key role in ICE deportations."

In other words, the 22-point post comes at a moment when Palantir is under unusual scrutiny for the specific alignment its manifesto defends: the alignment of its products with state coercion against named populations. The timing is not accidental. The post functions as pre-emptive moral clarification: not a response to any specific criticism, but an assertion that the posture being criticized is the correct posture, and that the alternative ("shallow" pluralism, moral persuasion absent hard power, a Silicon Valley not aligned with national-security objectives) is itself the problem. In the vocabulary of the ADI framework, this is the enemy construction dimension operating at the level of corporate communications. The manifesto names the threats (adversaries abroad, regressive cultures at home, pacifist allies, morally-appealing-but-weak societies) and offers itself as the necessary response.

Inflection point, not initiation. In the US ADI timeline, Q2 2025 recorded Steven Levitsky's direct statement that the United States had "already crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism," a threshold moment of diagnostic clarity from a comparative politics scholar. The April 19 Palantir post is not an analogous threshold. It is not a diagnosis of the state. It is a piece of corporate communication by a surveillance contractor. But it is legible as a particular kind of marker: the moment when the private-sector ideological infrastructure of competitive authoritarianism becomes textually visible.

The Hungarian parallel is Orbán's 2014 Băile Tușnad speech, where the "illiberal state" language was stated explicitly for the first time. The Turkish parallel is Erdoğan's "gift from God" statement of July 16, 2016. The Russian parallel is the late-2013 expansion of the blacklist law categories to include "extremism." In each case, the moment when the framework became textually visible was also the moment when the ratchet audibly clicked.

VI. What you can do about it

Palantir's revenue lines depend on federal procurement. Federal procurement is a congressional matter.

The reason this section exists in a piece that is otherwise comparative-political analysis is straightforward. Palantir is not a state agency. It is a federal contractor. Its revenue stream depends on appropriations, contract awards, and oversight decisions made by elected officials and the agencies those officials confirm and fund. Constituent pressure on Congress about specific contracts, specific data flows, and specific oversight failures is one of the few levers that has historically been able to slow this kind of integration. The 2015 USA Freedom Act, which closed an earlier surveillance loophole, is the most recent demonstration that the lever still exists.

The active asks, at the time of writing, are:

1. Cosponsorship of the No Tech for Tyrants Act and related bills that restrict federal contractor access to cross-agency personal data. Any bill that limits ImmigrationOS-style data integration is a direct constraint on the revenue model the manifesto defends.
2. Hearings on the USDA "National Farm Security" no-bid component. A $75M sole-source surveillance award to a politically aligned contractor for monitoring federal employees' physical movements is the kind of procurement decision congressional oversight committees exist to scrutinize.
3. Disclosure requirements for federal data integration. The April 2025 ImmigrationOS prototype reportedly pulls data from IRS, Social Security, passport, and other federal sources into a single deportation-targeting platform. Whether and how that integration was authorized is a question Congress has standing to ask.

Find your representatives

All three sites take a ZIP code and return your House member, your two senators, and their Washington office contact information.

• U.S. House: house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
• U.S. Senate: senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
• 5 Calls (current scripts on Palantir, ICE, and federal data integration): 5calls.org
• Capitol Switchboard (transfers to any office): 202-224-3121

The 90-second call. "Hi, my name is [Name], I live in [Town], and I'm a constituent of [Representative/Senator Name]. I'm calling about Palantir's federal contracts, especially the ImmigrationOS contract with ICE and the USDA no-bid surveillance contract for federal workers. I'm asking the [Representative/Senator] to support oversight hearings on these contracts and to cosponsor any legislation that limits federal contractor access to cross-agency personal data. The Fourth Amendment was written to require a warrant before the government searches our personal records. Buying that integration from a contractor is not a workaround the Constitution recognizes. Please record my call as constituent opposition to expanding federal data integration through private contractors. Thank you."

Why this framing works. Members of Congress, including those in their seventies and eighties, generally respond more readily to constitutional and procurement-oversight arguments than to technology-industry vocabulary. Lead with: (1) the warrant requirement, (2) the no-bid procurement question, (3) congressional oversight of cross-agency data flow. "Palantir is using AI to integrate federal databases" registers as abstract; "the executive branch is buying a unified citizen-tracking capability from a single sole-source vendor without competitive bidding" registers as exactly the kind of thing committees are supposed to investigate.

VII. The architecture was already there

What Palantir's document actually demonstrates

The comprehensive reaction to the April 19 post, the tens of millions of views, the "technofascism" headlines, the former employees' open letters, has a tone of shock that is, under analysis, somewhat misplaced. Nothing in the document describes infrastructure that does not already exist. Palantir has been operating inside ICE systems since 2013. The ImmigrationOS contract was signed in April 2025. The USDA federal-workforce surveillance contract was signed in early 2026. The Gotham platform has been in use by US intelligence agencies, police departments, and allied military organizations for over a decade. The technical reality the manifesto describes is a technical reality that exists. What the manifesto adds is the ideological license to describe that reality out loud, as a positive feature of the civilizational project, rather than as an embarrassing edge case to be managed through careful public relations.

This is the specific contribution the manifesto makes. It is not the creation of an infrastructure. It is the public retirement of the fiction that the infrastructure is accidental or unintended; that ICE's data integration is just a tool, that the Pentagon's targeting systems are just software, that civil-liberties concerns about cross-agency data flow are reasonable debates between competing legitimate values. The manifesto asserts that the infrastructure is the point; that the targeting is a feature; that the civilizational hierarchy it implies is not a bug but an explicit normative commitment the company is now willing to publish under its own name.

"Palantir's leadership has abandoned its founding ideals. The promises of protecting against discrimination and disinformation have now been violated, and are rapidly being dismantled at Palantir Technologies and across Silicon Valley."

Open letter, former Palantir employees, 2025.

In comparative terms, this is the step that closes the ideological-industrial alignment loop. Russia built the infrastructure and allowed the ideology to remain implicit. Hungary made the ideology explicit and built the infrastructure economically. Turkey did both in compressed form under emergency rule. The United States is doing it in a configuration no comparative case has previously displayed: infrastructure built by the state over two decades, operated by a publicly traded private contractor, legitimized by that contractor's own published manifesto, at a moment when the comparative politics literature has formally classified the country as competitive authoritarian. The sequencing is different. The destination is not.

The question Palantir's document poses, perhaps without intending to, is whether a competitive authoritarian system whose surveillance backbone is operated by a publicly traded corporation with multi-billion-dollar ideological commitments to its own continued role is more resistant to reversal, or less, than one operated by the state directly. The Hungarian case suggests private operators can be a check on consolidation when they retain independent capital structures. The Turkish case suggests they become the consolidation mechanism once their revenue stream is tied to regime continuation. Palantir has now told us, in its own words, which of those positions it occupies. It remains to be seen whether the rest of the infrastructure, the judiciary, the press, the civil service, the comparative political science community, the publicly traded technology sector, takes the document at face value.

Higgins was right. The 22 points aren't philosophy floating in space. They're the public ideology of a company whose revenue depends on the politics it's advocating. In the authoritarian drift literature, this is what the pattern looks like when it resolves.

Appendix: Methodology

How the manifesto was scored against the eight ADI dimensions

The Authoritarian Drift Index (ADI) used throughout this series is a composite framework synthesized from five underlying measurement systems: the V-Dem Liberal Democracy Index (University of Gothenburg, 4,200+ expert coders across 202 countries); Freedom House Freedom in the World (100-point scale, tracking since 1972); the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index (60 indicators across 5 sub-scores); the CIVICUS Monitor (open/narrowed/obstructed/repressed/closed civic space classification); and qualitative frameworks from Umberto Eco's "Ur-Fascism" (1995) and Robert Paxton's The Anatomy of Fascism (2004). The eight dimensions that structure the ADI are: electoral integrity, judicial independence, press freedom, state surveillance, civil liberties, enemy construction, cult of leadership, and state violence / threat. Scores run 0 (full liberal democracy) to 100 (closed totalitarian state). The framework is described in detail in each of the country studies in this series.

What this appendix documents is the specific interpretive move made in the "Reading the manifesto through the framework" section above: the claim that Palantir's 22 points map onto seven of the eight ADI dimensions. This is the author's synthesis, not a published methodology, and transparency about how the mapping was performed is the minimum requirement for the argument to be evaluable by others.

Mapping standard. A point was scored as a direct hit on an ADI dimension if the manifesto's language explicitly advocates for a position that would, if implemented, move the dimension in the authoritarian direction as defined by at least two of the five underlying measurement systems. A point was scored as indirect if it supports the authoritarian direction by implication or secondary argument but does not explicitly advocate for it. A dimension was scored as not addressed only when no point in the manifesto touches it directly or indirectly.

Per-dimension mapping.

• 1. Electoral integrity, not addressed. The manifesto is textually silent on elections. No point advocates for changes to electoral law, challenges to vote counting, restrictions on voter eligibility, or redistricting. This absence is analytically significant: in competitive authoritarian systems (Levitsky & Way, 2010), elections remain the legitimizing front-end of the system while the substantive conditions for meaningful contestation are eroded elsewhere. A manifesto aligned with competitive authoritarian consolidation would be expected to leave the electoral surface untouched. This one does.
• 2. Judicial independence, indirect. Point 9's argument that "the ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal" and that "hard power" is necessary is scored as indirect because it displaces the role of deliberative-adjudicative institutions (including courts) with enforcement-capable infrastructure. Point 20's characterization of scrutiny of public figures as pathological extends this logic. Neither point calls explicitly for judicial capture, so this is not a direct hit, but both are consistent with reduced institutional check capacity.
• 3. Press freedom, direct. Point 20 frames adversarial journalism as a cultural problem rather than as a democratic check. Read against the RSF and Freedom House press-freedom frameworks, which score systems based on journalists' ability to scrutinize powerful actors without retaliation, the manifesto's framing places accountability journalism on the wrong side of the civilizational line it draws. Scored as direct, though the manifesto does not call for specific legal restrictions on press activity.
• 4. State surveillance, direct. This is structural rather than textual. The document's author operates the Investigative Case Management platform used by ICE since 2013, the $30M ImmigrationOS platform deployed in 2025, and the up-to-$75M USDA federal-workforce surveillance system deployed in early 2026. Points 9 ("hard power built on software") and 11 (supporting police capacity against "violent crime") are coherent with expansion of the surveillance state along the V-Dem civil-liberties-subindex dimensions. The scoring rests on treating the document and the company's revenue as a single analytical object, per Higgins's framing.
• 5. Civil liberties, direct. Point 22's civilizational hierarchy ("certain cultures and indeed subcultures have produced wonders, others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful") establishes a categorical distinction between groups whose rights are implicitly protected and groups whose rights are implicitly optional. This is the V-Dem "equality before the law and individual liberty" sub-index in compressed form: when a category of people is identified as civilizationally inferior, the state apparatus becomes available for differential application against them.
• 6. Enemy construction, direct, primary. This is the dimension the manifesto targets most comprehensively. External enemies are named at point 5 ("our adversaries") and point 18 (competition for Asian balance of power). Internal enemies are named at point 22 ("regressive and harmful" subcultures). Institutional enemies are named at point 8 (public servants framed as overcompensated) and point 13 (a culture that "almost snickers" at charismatic leadership). Eco identified the simultaneous construction of enemies that are "both too strong and too weak" as the key Ur-Fascist marker; the manifesto exhibits this pattern textually.
• 7. Cult of leadership, direct. Point 13's explicit defense of "Musk's interest in grand narrative" against a culture that "almost snickers" at it is scored as direct because it specifically endorses charismatic-visionary leadership against institutionalized scrutiny. Paxton's mobilizing passions framework identifies "the need for authority by natural leaders culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny" as a core fascistic element. The manifesto's framing of Musk, and by extension Karp himself, maps to this structure.
• 8. State violence / threat, direct. Point 19's explicit argument that "the postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone" is a direct argument against the post-1945 international legal architecture that constrained industrial states from acting on civilizational hierarchies at scale. Point 5's framing of AI weapons as civilizational necessity completes the argument. Point 6's call for a universal national-service duty (effectively, conscription) extends state-violence capacity into the civilian population. Scored as direct on all three sub-points.

Summary: 7 of 8 dimensions. Of the eight ADI dimensions, five receive direct textual support in the manifesto, two receive direct structural support via the company's operational products (state surveillance as structural, with textual support also present), one receives indirect support (judicial independence), and one is not addressed (electoral integrity). The seven-of-eight claim in the main text depends on treating state surveillance as a direct hit (which combines the textual and structural evidence) and treating judicial independence as indirect but present rather than absent. Under a stricter reading, counting only direct textual hits, the score is 6 of 8. Under a more generous reading, treating the electoral silence as itself a signal of competitive-authoritarian alignment, the score is 8 of 8. The 7-of-8 figure used in the main text is the middle interpretation.

Caveats and honest limitations. This mapping is an interpretive analytical synthesis, not a measurement. Three limitations deserve explicit acknowledgment. First, the ADI framework itself is a composite, not a single institutional index, and its eight dimensions are the author's synthesis of the underlying measurement systems. Reasonable comparative-politics scholars could define the dimensions differently. Second, treating a corporate communications document as an object scoreable against a framework designed for country-level assessment is a deliberate analytical move, not a conventional application. The justification is that the company's revenue scale, government integration, and ideological-industrial alignment warrant treating its public positions as politically significant in ways an ordinary corporate communication would not. Third, the mapping rests on the text of the 22 points as published on April 19, 2026, plus contextual evidence drawn from public-record sources about Palantir's contracts and revenue. It does not rest on interviews, internal documents, or non-public information about company strategy. If new evidence emerges that meaningfully changes the interpretation of specific points, the mapping should be revised.

Sources and Further Reading

• Palantir Technologies, "Because we get asked a lot. The Technological Republic, in brief" (X/Twitter, April 19, 2026)
• TechCrunch: Anthony Ha, "Palantir posts mini-manifesto denouncing inclusivity and 'regressive' cultures" (April 19, 2026)
• Engadget: "Palantir posted a manifesto that reads like the ramblings of a comic book villain" (April 2026)
• Al Jazeera: "'Technofascism': Critics accuse Palantir of pushing AI war doctrine" (April 20, 2026)
• Al Jazeera: "Technofacism? Why Palantir's pro-West 'manifesto' has critics alarmed" (April 21, 2026)
• Mark Coeckelbergh: "Palantir's manifesto: Technofascism in plain sight" (Medium, April 2026)
• Fortune: "Palantir's mini manifesto claims some cultures are 'harmful' and 'middling'" (April 22, 2026)
• Futurism: "Palantir Issues Ominous Corporate Manifesto" (April 2026)
• Common Dreams: "'One of The Scariest Things I Have Seen': Alarms Sound Over 'Technofascist' Palantir Manifesto" (April 2026)
• Euronews: "'Ramblings of a supervillain': Palantir 'manifesto' claims AI weapons and cultural inferiority" (April 22, 2026)
• France 24: "What the Palantir CEO's 'manifesto' tells us about the changing face of war" (April 23, 2026)
• TechPolicy.Press: "Palantir's Manifesto Is as Subtle as a MAGA Hat" (April 2026)
• ACLU: "All the Ways Palantir is Assisting Trump's Abusive Removal Campaign"
• State of Surveillance: "ICE Paid Palantir $30 Million to Build a Deportation Operating System"
• State of Surveillance: "Palantir's New Target: Federal Workers"
• American Immigration Council: "ICE to Use ImmigrationOS by Palantir, a New AI System, to Track Immigrants' Movements"
• Immigration Policy Tracking Project: "Palantir granted $30 million to build 'ImmigrationOS' surveillance platform for ICE"
• USAspending.gov: ICE Palantir contract record
• FedScoop: "Agriculture Department kicks off $300M Palantir deal on IT, national security work"
• Jacobin: "Is Palantir Under Contract to Surveil the Federal Workforce?" (March 2026)
• Washington Post: "How Palantir shifted course to play key role in ICE deportations" (December 2025)
• Washington Post: "What to know about Palantir, tech company playing key role for ICE" (December 2025)
• NYU Stern Center for Business & Human Rights: "Palantir Is Profiting from Trump's Ravenous Appetite for Deportations"
• NPR: "Former Palantir workers condemn company's work with Trump administration" (May 2025)
• Palantir Investor Relations: Q4 2025 Investor Presentation
• Palantir IR: "Palantir Reports Q4 2025 U.S. Comm Revenue Growth of 137% Y/Y and Revenue Growth of 70% Y/Y" (February 2026)
• CNBC: "Palantir (PLTR) Q4 2025 earnings" (February 2026)
• Karp & Zamiska, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West (Crown Currency, February 18, 2025)
• Levitsky, Way & Ziblatt, "The Price of American Authoritarianism," Foreign Affairs (December 2025)
• Levitsky & Way, "The Path to American Authoritarianism" (Harvard Ash Center, 2025)

Civic action:

• house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative
• senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm
• 5calls.org
• U.S. Capitol Switchboard: 202-224-3121

Prior pieces in this series: "The Blacklist Machine" (Russia), "The Gavel, Not the Gun" (Hungary), "A Gift from God" (Turkey), and "The Autocracy Ratchet" (US quarterly timeline).

Part of a series on how surveillance and authoritarian infrastructure is assembled in democratic and semi-democratic contexts. See also, in reading order: The Blacklist Machine: How Russia Built a Surveillance State, The Gavel, Not the Gun: How Viktor Orbán Dismantled Hungary's Democracy, A Gift from God: How Erdoğan Turned a Failed Coup Into an Authoritarian State, The Autocracy Ratchet: Scoring America's Democratic Erosion Quarter by Quarter, The Receipt You Didn't Sign: FISA, Data Brokers, and AI, Protect the Children: The Global Surveillance Playbook, Child Safety as a Backdoor to the Surveillance State.