Palantir’s Surveillance Machine Will Make Us All “Terrorists”
In the most chilling development yet in America’s long war on dissent, the Trump administration has partnered with Palantir Technologies to build a vast centralized data platform that will allow the federal government to compile, cross-reference, and analyze personal information on nearly every U.S. resident. The stated goal is “threat detection.” But the real risk is this: a state capable of preemptively labeling and punishing political dissidents under the pretense of national security.
The Palantir platform—already under development—will integrate data from the IRS, Social Security Administration, immigration enforcement, and other federal agencies. It promises to apply artificial intelligence to analyze behavioral patterns and identify supposed threats. What it does, in practice, is bring the final puzzle piece of authoritarian governance online. A state that already criminalizes protest can now surveil and categorize dissent in real time. This is not a theoretical future. It is happening. And it is only the latest step in a decades-long, bipartisan campaign to equate dissent with danger.
Since returning to office in January, Trump has made no secret of his intentions. He campaigned on “retribution” and wasted no time reviving rhetoric that frames protesters, immigrants, and journalists as enemies of the state. But he doesn’t have to start from scratch. The infrastructure to prosecute dissent as terrorism has been built—often enthusiastically—by Democrats as well as Republicans.
After 9/11, the Bush administration’s Patriot Act dramatically expanded surveillance and detention powers. Muslim Americans were the first to be targeted, but the scope grew rapidly. Under Obama, the administration prosecuted whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden under the Espionage Act, and justified expansive domestic surveillance in the name of security. Even Biden’s domestic terror strategy, focused publicly on combating far-right violence, reinforced a set of legal tools that are facially neutral and easily turned against the left.
Meanwhile, state-level laws have made dissent itself a criminal offense. The movement to stop “Cop City”—a $90 million police training facility in Atlanta’s South River Forest—offers a stark example. Dozens of environmental and racial justice activists have been charged with “domestic terrorism” for actions as basic as sitting in trees or organizing bail funds. Georgia’s attorney general took it further, weaponizing RICO statutes designed to prosecute organized crime to pursue long prison sentences for protesters.
This is not confined to the South. West Virginia has proposed defining disruptions to “economic stability” as acts of terrorism. Tennessee is pushing a constitutional amendment that would allow indefinite pretrial detention for those accused of terror-related crimes. Oregon has passed a sweeping anti-terrorism law that civil liberties advocates warn could easily be weaponized against protest movements.
That these efforts come from both Republican and Democratic jurisdictions is no accident. Influential think tanks and corporate-backed groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council have promoted model legislation enabling such crackdowns. And as the climate crisis, labor uprisings, and anti-racist movements escalate, political elites have responded not by addressing the underlying grievances—but by fortifying the tools to suppress them.
Palantir has long provided software to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), enabling real-time tracking and arrest of immigrants, often with little or no due process. Now, with its new federal contract, it is building a centralized system that could do the same to American citizens. Civil liberties groups warn that such a platform, especially in the hands of a vengeful administration, will be used not to protect the public, but to preemptively identify and neutralize “troublemakers.”
And what makes someone a “troublemaker” in today’s political climate? Marching for Black lives. Disrupting fossil fuel pipelines. Demanding a ceasefire in Gaza. Unionizing a workplace. The broadness of anti-terror legislation, combined with data-driven surveillance, means nearly any form of meaningful resistance can be reclassified as extremism.
This selective application of terror law also reveals a profound double standard. Right-wing militants who stormed the Capitol in 2021 were not uniformly labeled terrorists. The white supremacist who massacred churchgoers in Charleston wasn’t charged under terrorism laws, even as Georgia cited that shooting as justification for expanding them. These laws are not applied equally—they are reserved, with strategic clarity, for those challenging systemic injustice.
By redefining protest as terror, the state doesn’t just criminalize action. It delegitimizes cause. It casts movements for racial, environmental, and economic justice as inherently suspect. And it builds the legal, digital, and rhetorical arsenal to suppress them.
What’s unfolding is not just authoritarian drift. It is a coordinated transformation of governance—away from persuasion and toward punishment. Dissent is no longer treated as a feature of democracy but as a flaw to be corrected. And the bipartisan consensus that fuels this shift—from the Patriot Act to Palantir—makes clear that the threat is structural, not merely partisan.
If Americans wish to preserve what remains of our democracy, we must reject this logic entirely. We must push for legal reforms that protect protest and resist predictive surveillance. We must expose how corporate interests—from pipeline builders to software companies—profit from the criminalization of dissent, before today’s “troublemakers” become tomorrow’s enemies of the state.
The machinery of fear has been built. The final switch is being flipped. Soon we may all be terrorists. Whether we resist it or submit will determine the character of American democracy for generations to come.