Trump’s Regime of Mass Surveillance, Targeting and Silencing: Coming to a Country Like Yours

Whilst the US president Donald Trump has been deploying the marines to the streets of Los Angeles to deal with public protests against the onslaught of his immigration crackdown, this purposeful shift towards authoritarianism by the current United States administration is being facilitated by an “enormous surveillance engine” currently being develop by Silicon Valley tech bros.

This is the warning being raised by the UK’s Carole Cadwalladr, who’s the journalist that broke the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook scandal in 2018, which revealed that the social media giant was allowing a consulting firm to harvest millions of people’s data to produce tailored political propaganda, to assist in the 2016 Brexit vote and Trump’s first presidential election campaign.

Cadwalladr has sounded the alarm bells in regard to the Trump administration having enlisted the assistance of US-based data analytics company Palantir Technologies to link all previously isolated government department data collections, or data silos, into one gigantic database, which can then be trawled by artificial intelligence (AI) to produce new conclusions from the wealth of information.

“These companies, with this huge amount of knowledge about every aspect of our lives, are now allying themselves with the US government, with what we can see is an authoritarian regime,” Cadwalladr told Democracy Now on 5 June. She added that “this is a new type of power” the world has never seen before, which further utilises all the information people freely share online.

The British journalist outlines that this type of technology, which is already operating in other authoritarian nations, is now being applied and tested in regard to Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants program, but, Cadwalladr assures, the surveillance system will soon be turned upon the rest of the US population, and this is likely to continue spreading across the globe.

Panoptic reach

“Palantir is a military contractor,” said Cadwalladr, during last week’s interview. “It is being used by the Israeli government to find people, to profile them, to pick out targets and to eliminate them. And the CEO of Palantir, a guy called Alex Karp, has said that out loud. He said, ‘This is what we do.’ He said, ‘Where necessary, we kill people.’

“That is now the company that is in the heart of the US federal government,” she added. “That is the company now which has the data of every citizen in this country.”

Trump signed a 20 March 2025 executive order that removed “unnecessary barriers to federal employees accessing government data”. The US president added that this interagency data sharing and elimination of data silos should be actioned by agency heads within 30 days of order issuance.

This occurred as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) then run by the richest person on the planet Elon Musk was attempting to access dozens of government agency databases. The tech bro billionaire is also said to be behind the selection of Palantir as the chief vendor for the project.

This push has seen Palantir’s data analysis product Foundry being integrated into at least four US government agencies, including Health, Homeland Security and Human Services, whilst the company is too talking to Social Security and Internal Revenue about utilising its products, while Palantir’s data defence and intelligence product Gotham is used by agencies like the CIA.

Cadwalladr made clear that Palantir is also gathering all citizens’ private information that they have freely posted on social media and is merging this data with that of the government. This system then applies generative AI to disparate information in order to make new assumptions and inferences about people and situations.

Partners in data harvesting

The Cambridge Analytica scandal broke in 2018, after Cadwalladr noted the company’s mention in the actual fake adverts it had been producing to influence US constituents to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and UK constituents to vote in favour of Brexit, with Facebook having allowed the British company to trawl millions of profiles.

A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower then revealed to the UK journalist that at the time the company, which had a 30 year history as a military contractor, was producing the “fake news” advertisements it was being run by Steve Bannon, who went on to become the White House’s chief strategist for the initial Trump administration’s first seven months in office.

While Peter Thiel, the chairman and founder of Palantir, the company that is currently charged with integrating US data systems, is a US entrepreneur, who spent his childhood in South Africa and South West Africa (now Namibia). In 1999, Thiel also founded PayPal with fellow South African Elon Musk, which involved the latter merging his company X.com with the former’s Confinity.

Making inroads down under

Palantir’s products are often referred to as big data analytics. Thiel and Karp founded the company in 2003, in the wake of the 9/11 New York terror attacks, offering government’s the capacity to merge separate data sources in order to garner new understandings and offer recommendations on potential threats, while the company has since branched out into the private sector.

Palantir has been operating in Australia since 2011, when the Australian Defence Department commenced using its products, and the company’s services were later picked up by the Australian Signals Directorate and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission.

Increasingly private Australian companies are also entering into contracts with the US company, which includes a partnership with Coles supermarkets that commenced early last year, as well as contracts with Rio Tinto and WesTrac.

“OK, if you’re not freaking out yet, you should be, because this — we have seen there is a pattern across history, across the world, which is, this is what authoritarians do,” Cadwalladr further warned Democracy Now last week. “They want as much information about the population as possible, so that they can surveil them.”

“That process has already started in the US, and we see it in the US amongst the most vulnerable population. We see it happening to immigrants. We see it happening to foreign students,” the journalist said in conclusion. “Now, that is just the test case, because these are the people with the fewest rights. But what happens to them is now going to come to other people.”