Forget trump, Palantir AI is The Ultimate Evil and You’re Probably Already on Their(kill) Lists

The dystopian sci-fi surveillance state is here

May 13th, 2025

This week Customs and Border Protection set-up check-points at US border crossings into Canada. No big deal, right? Except these check-points were searching every single vehicle before they crossed into Canada all week.

These check-points are not entirely unprecedented; they have been seen in the past in conjunction with law enforcement activity during Amber alerts(missing children) and in search of wanted fugitives they suspect might be trying to escape via a land border. Never before however have outbound check-points been set-up like this where it appears CBP is simply collecting information and harassing anyone crossing the border.

The normal procedure if you are crossing from the US to Canada is that you wait in a line until you reach Canadian customs. Canadian customs officials will then ask you questions, and if everything is okay allow you entry into Canada. The US CBP in the past have had zero interest in those leaving the US. Their entire job is to protect the border and check what is coming into the United States.

So these check-points are a disturbing new development. Officially we don’t know why they’re doing it. My speculation is that this is an intimidation tactic and they want to normalize this behavior so that they can at some point lock-down our borders and keep people from leaving the US. It would be highly alarming and likely illegal for the US to simply shut borders to Canada, right?

But what if these check-points needed to do a “thorough screening” of every person leaving the US in order to “keep Canada safe from dangerous terrorists?” What if it took half an hour to process each car? That would effectively shut down the border crossing without an actual policy of shutting down the border crossing.

I think this is step-one of them implementing a system to impose travel restrictions as part of a wider effort to force people to comply with their tyrannical regime. This idea might sound outlandish and far-fetched to Americans, but this is what authoritarian regimes always do.

No Way In or Out: Authoritarian Controls on the Freedom of Movement

Sealed borders and exit bans evoke images of the Cold War, when communist states limited the free movement of hundreds of millions of people.1 Today, blanket prohibitions on international travel, like those imposed in North Korea, are rare. However, governments around the world use a variety of mobility controls—including revoking citizenship, passport restrictions, denial of consular services, and travel bans—to coerce and punish dissidents, activists, journalists, and ordinary people.

At least 55 governments across the globe employ one or more of these methods to restrict freedom of movement. They can apply to individual dissidents, like the six UK-based Hong Kong prodemocracy activists living in exile who recently had their passports canceled,2 as well as to groups, like Eritreans abroad who must sign a “regret and repentance” form admitting to leaving the country illegally or failing to fulfill their national service in order to receive consular services.3 Our research found that mobility controls are a ubiquitous tool of global authoritarianism, and that many governments are expanding their use of these tactics.4

https://freedomhouse.org/report/transnational-repression/2024/no-way-or-out-authoritarian-controls-freedom-movement

“We’re under attack. Those motherfuckers. We’re under attack.”

Building a surveillance state has been a bi-partisan effort that was kicked into high gear after 9/11. I was just a freshman in high school that morning on September 11th, 2001. I was walking to my second class after the bell dismissed first period when my friend Gerald stopped me and said, “dude, a plane crashed into a building.”

“A plane hit a building? What?” My brain tried to catch up.

“Yeah, a plane hit this big tower!” In my mind I pictured a small prop plane that had hit a cell-phone tower. I didn’t know why Gerald felt the need to tell me this information.

“Alright, hey are you gonna be online tonight?” Gerald and I had been playing Everquest together for two years and I couldn’t wait to log-in and run some dungeons. Gerald played a Dwarf Paladin, I played a Woodelf Druid. We made a formidable team and were always able to find parties because healers and tanks are hard to find in MMOs. Gerald and I had been friends since we were ten. He’d been home-schooled until high school and we’d spent countless days together on summer vacations and sleepovers, always playing the latest video games together.

“Yeah I’ll be on, just message me on ICQ.” Said Gerald as he turned to goto his next class. We didn’t have cell-phones yet and I was still on dial-up, so if I were connected to the internet I couldn’t make or receive any calls on our landline.

I walked to my second period class which was history. I really liked my history teacher. I forget his name now but I felt like he was tough but fair and a genuinely good person who cared about us. He was also in the National Guard, an aviation mechanic and worked on Apache Attack Helicopters. He had the TV on showing live images of the first tower to be struck with smoke billowing out. We sat together in stunned silence and watched the events unfold. I watched the second plane impact live. I can still hear the collective intake of breath from our whole class followed by the explosion of yells and curses.

That was the only time I heard my history teacher swear. “We’re under attack. Those motherfuckers. We’re under attack.” His anger was a palpable presence and it subdued the class. We sat in shocked silence for the rest of the period and continued to watch the towers burn on live TV. Just two years later my teacher would be deployed to fight in Iraq with his aviation unit.

I was still completely shut-off and numb to my emotions at that age so I didn’t consciously feel anything. But that event must have been traumatizing with how clearly I can remember that day. I didn’t even eat dinner that night, I had no appetite. One of my personality quirks is I never skip dinner. On the CYTC I would take the time to make a big meal no matter how long and hard the day was. Even on the 20 hour day through Mahoosuc notch and up Mahoosuc arm I still took time to eat before going to sleep. But on 9/11 I went to bed without eating.

It’s interesting my memory of that day is mixed with the memory of the day that I learned my father had died. Everyday after school I would ride the bus to my adopted grandparent’s home and then spend the afternoon watching reruns of The Simpsons and King of the Hill and then Friends and Seinfield. My grandparents had a large TV in the living room next to the hallway leading to their bedroom. That day on 9/11 every channel was airing live footage of the attacks, no Simpsons reruns for me.

I remember seeing images of falling bodies as people jumped from the towers. This is the most traumatic memory I have of that day. Even now it makes my stomach churn to think about those poor people clinging to dear life praying for rescue outside the windows high up in those towers while smoke and flames poured out. The live shots of their bodies plummeting to the street hundreds of feet below will stay with me forever.

My memory of 9/11 features the dark hallway leading to my grandparent’s bedroom. I can remember the TV playing those awful images, with the dark hallway in the background. A year prior I had come home from school and was watching the usual reruns when my adopted mom came in from work as was her usual routine. Then we would all eat dinner that my grandma had cooked.

That day I was watching TV and Nancy beckoned for me to follow her down the dark hallway into my grandparent’s bedroom. “Come here Jack, I have something I need to tell you.” I followed her into the bedroom during a commercial break in King of The Hill.

“Your dad died.” I felt my body go numb with shock. Nancy hugged me. Then I went back to watching King of The Hill. We ate dinner. I went home. I logged onto Everquest and killed some goblins with Gerald. Our characters were brand-new at that point and we were killing level 6 goblins outside of Freeport.

That was it. We never talked about it again. I didn’t feel anything except for a numb detachment. I didn’t remember anything changing. I was 13 and had only seen my father twice since I’d left China at eight. My Chinese mother and he had secured visas and come over. I saw him twice, spending maybe two to three total hours with him. I’d forgotten my Mandarin. His English was bad. We couldn’t really communicate. I don’t have any clear memory of my time with him from those two brief visits.

And then he died.

I cried at his funeral. In truth I sobbed uncontrollably as a bunch of strangers from the church he’d attended gave me their condolences. But that was it. At a conscious level I thought his death wasn’t a big deal. Five years apart isn’t that long to an adult but remember I was only 13 and had left China at 8. Most kids don’t form consistent memories until four to five years old. So having spent five years away from my parents I’d spent more of my conscious life in the US. To my conscious mind my Chinese father was a stranger. He spoke a different language. His actions and mannerisms were weird and foreign.

But my unconscious actions show just how much his death affected me. The day he died is the day I went from enjoying video games like any normal kid enjoys video games to being a full-blown addict. I stopped wanting to goto Gerald’s house because that meant I was away from my computer and couldn’t log-in to Everquest. I started staying up until 3am on the weekends playing. I remember that summer Gerald invited me to go water-skiing and I declined saying I wanted to stay online and raid instead.

I’m sure if I’d had access to alcohol or heroin I would have become an addict and likely killed myself with those drugs in an attempt to escape my pain. I count myself lucky that as harmful as video games were to my social life and schooling, they didn’t cause lasting physical damage aside from sleep deprivation and too much sitting. It would take me two decades to finally put aside my gaming addiction for good. Even today I find I need to immerse myself in projects. Otherwise I feel ill-at-ease. I think that’s why I’ve been drawn to thru-hikes and the military and firefighting. My brain is still hard-wired to dive into immersive projects in order to distract myself. I’ve been working on this book for three weeks and have already written 148 pages.

The addict’s brain is hardwired for addiction. This is doubly true if their addiction started in childhood, like mine did. I can only cope and replace my unhealthy obsessions with healthier ones. Today my obsessions are Muay Thai, producing anti-fascist videos, and writing this book.

Big Tech, Artificial Intelligence, and the Surveillance State

“Customs and Border Protection has called for tech companies to pitch real-time face recognition technology that can capture everyone in a vehicle—not just those in the front seats.”

“A CBP spokesperson tells WIRED that the agency plans to expand its program for real-time face recognition at the border, potentially aiding Trump administration efforts to track people who self-deport.”

Two articles from Wired magazine that were published last week.

Artificial intelligence is what will bring to fruition the vision of the dystopian “big brother” surveillance state we have seen in sci-fi movies. For most of us watching this vision is a nightmare. But for those in government they see this vision as a blueprint.

Palantir is the center of this dystopian artificial intelligence surveillance state. The most dangerous man in America isn’t Trump—it’s Alex Karp

This is the man building your future AI overseer.

Alex Karp doesn’t look like a warmonger. The Palantir CEO is often photographed in quirky glasses and wild hair, quoting St Augustine or Nietzsche as if he were auditioning for a TED Talk on techno-humanism.

But behind the poetic digressions and philosophical posturing is a simple truth: Karp is building the operating system for perpetual war. And he’s winning.

For years, Karp was treated like a curiosity in Silicon Valley—too weird, blunt and tied to the military-industrial complex. “We were the freak show,” he once said, half-proud, half-wounded.

But today, he’s not just inside the tent. He’s drawing the blueprint for a new kind of techno-authoritarianism where AI doesn’t just observe the battlefield—it becomes the battlefield.

Palantir’s flagship product, AIP, is already embedded in US military operations. It helps with target acquisition, battlefield logistics, drone coordination, predictive policing and data fusion on a scale that would make the National Security Agency (NSA) blush.

Karp boasts that it gives “an unfair advantage to the noble warriors of the West.” Strip away the romantic rhetoric, and what he’s offering is algorithmic supremacy—war by machine, guided by code, sold with patriotic branding.

And corporate America is buying. Citi, BP, AIG and even Hertz now use Palantir’s product. The line between military and civilian application is evaporating.

What makes him so dangerous isn’t just the tech—it’s the belief system. Karp talks about “transforming systems” and “rebuilding institutions” like he’s Moses on a mountaintop.

But beneath the messianic tone is something more chilling: a conviction that democratic drag—messy deliberation, public resistance, moral caution—is something to be bypassed. He’s not selling tools; he’s selling inevitability.

Karp doesn’t hide his politics. He’s pro-military, anti-transparency and openly contemptuous of Silicon Valley’s squeamishness. While other CEOs flirt with ethics boards and open letters, Karp says the quiet part loud: Palantir is here to wage war—on inefficiency, on bureaucracy, on enemies foreign and domestic.

I’m not being hyperbolic and I’m not fear mongering. AI systems have already been put into place and used to devastating effect by Israel in their genocide in Gaza. While it’s hard to find direct links it’s almost certain that Palantir systems were involved in building these AI target lists.

AI warfare may conjure images of killer robots and autonomous drones, but a different reality is unfolding in the Gaza Strip. There, artificial intelligence has been suggesting targets in Israel’s retaliatory campaign to root out Hamas following the group’s Oct. 7, 2023 attack. A program known as “The Gospel” generates suggestions for buildings and structures militants may be operating in. “Lavender” is programmed to identify suspected members of Hamas and other armed groups for assassination, from commanders all the way down to foot soldiers. “Where’s Daddy?” reportedly follows their movements by tracking their phones in order to target them—often to their homes, where their presence is regarded as confirmation of their identity. The air strike that follows might kill everyone in the target's family, if not everyone in the apartment building.

These programs, which the Israel Defense Force (IDF) has acknowledged developing, may help explain the pace of the most devastating bombardment campaign of the 21st century, in which more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, whose count is regarded as reliable by the U.S. and U.N. In earlier Gaza wars, Israeli military veterans say airstrikes occurred at a much slower tempo.

“During the period in which I served in the target room [between 2010 and 2015], you needed a team of around 20 intelligence officers to work for around 250 days to gather something between 200 to 250 targets,” Tal Mimran, a lecturer at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and a former legal adviser in the IDF, tells TIME. “Today, the AI will do that in a week.” https://time.com/7202584/gaza-ukraine-ai-warfare/

In case you didn’t read the above article, Israel used AI to build target lists. The AI used big data - phone GPS records, social media, calls, texts, every scrap of data it could get its hands on and then matched that data against target lists that Israel had. The AI then generated target lists of specific buildings to bomb based on lists of names and then all of the aforementioned data. Israel dropped real bombs on these buildings. Without regard to whether these buildings housed innocent civilians(which they always did). Without regard to even whether it was targeting the right person. The AI gave them the list. So if your name happened to match the same name of one of their high priority targets you could very well have been blown up based on this AI generated target list. That’s not my speculation. That’s a damn fact.

“For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives, residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas operative.

“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as suspicious — is inaccurate.”

In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],” said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

The dystopian sci-fi future is here. Tens of thousands of people have been murdered based on AI target lists already. And now that same technology is infiltrating every branch of the US military and US government.

Back to the original point that I started with. Why is CBP setting up check-points on the US side of the border to check vehicles and passengers leaving the US? Why have they put out bids to expand real-time facial recognition systems? Why do they want to gather biometric data on those leaving the country?

I can foresee a dystopian future where AI systems powered by Palantir flag political dissidents as they try to flee into Canada through matching their face to their social media platforms. Platforms where they have been vocal and critical of the trump administration. I think this is already happening.

Hasan Piker, one of the top political pundits on Twitch, on Monday said that he was stopped and questioned by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officials at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport over the weekend after a trip to France.

“They knew who I was and they were ready to receive me, let’s just say, and it wasn’t a very warm welcome,” Piker, known as HasanAbi online, told his followers during a live stream. News of his detainment was first reported by User Mag.

Piker said that on Sunday when he returned from Paris, he was taken to an area in the airport with “fluorescent lightbulbs, the whole nine [yards]” and questioned for about two hours. He said he was asked about his views, including whether he supports President Donald Trump, and whether he has been in contact with Hamas, the Houthis or Hezbollah. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/hasan-piker-twitch-streamer-questioned-us-customs-rcna206406

In Hasan’s video of the incident he says he was pulled aside after he scanned his face at the Global Entry kiosk. Hasan is not the only one to have reported being detained because of their anti-trump online activity. TikToker Savanna Pinder was detained in Miami after scanning her face at the Global Entry kiosk. She sells anti-trump t-shirts as part of her business. https://www.binnews.com/content/2025-05-12-anti-trump-tiktoker-says-she-was-detained-by-ice-at-airport/

My own Global Entry was revoked in March, two weeks after I started posting publicly calling trump a traitor. At the time my gut told me this was retaliation, but I didn’t know. My suspicions were confirmed after “Chris Krebs’, President Donald Trump’s former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency” had his Global Entry revoked. ”Krebs, who has repeatedly attested to the security of the 2020 election, told CNN he finds it hard to believe this isn’t another act of retribution from the administration.” https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/30/politics/chris-krebs-cbp-global-entry-revoked/index.html

This is why I am writing this book from self-exile in Europe. I am certain my name is now on lists of political enemies and as the regime ramps up their suppression of dissent, people like me will face more harsh penalties. If this country falls to full-on authoritarianism then people like me on these lists will be disappeared by secret police, tortured to give up names of other dissidents and then quietly murdered. Our bodies will be disposed of in unmarked mass graves. This is not fear mongering. This is the history of every authoritarian regime.

And now the police state has a massively powerful weapon. Where they used to have to rely on human informants and human KGB workers to build verified target lists, now they can rely on AI to build those lists for them. I don’t think it’ll look like Gaza in the US. They’re not going to drop a JDAM on your house because you made an anti-trump post.

Here’s how I think the lists will work. We know they are already using AI to search through the social media profiles of immigrants. USCIS itself has admitted that.

WASHINGTON— Today U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) will begin considering aliens’ antisemitic activity on social media and the physical harassment of Jewish individuals as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. This will immediately affect aliens applying for lawful permanent resident status, foreign students and aliens affiliated with educational institutions linked to antisemitic activity. https://www.uscis.gov/newsroom/news-releases/dhs-to-begin-screening-aliens-social-media-activity-for-antisemitism

They are undoubtedly using Palantir AI technology to do this.

According to Watson, roughly 10 to 20 federal employees took between two to three weeks to run roughly 1.3 million names through the NCIC. Of those 1.3 million names, Watson said about 16,000 were in the NCIC, but that number went down to 13,900.

After additional validation against Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records returned just over 6,400 names, and after checking with the State Department, a list of about roughly 3,000 people was returned to DHS. https://www.abc4.com/news/national/court-transcript-visa-revoke-hearing/

If you’re reading this your name is likely already on different lists. Their AI system will create different priority lists for targets. Based on your online activity, your associations, your words, you will be placed on various lists. Then action will be taken on those lists.

Right now people like Hassan, Krebs, and myself are having issues with Global Entry. But I can see a dystopian future where those at the top of the priority lists are kidnapped by masked men and thrown into unmarked vehicles just like they’re doing to immigrants right now. I can see a future where they’ll move down the priority lists. In the first month they’ll be going after the judges, the journalists, the union leaders, and the activist leaders.

They’ll round up those dissidents with specialized knowledge and training. Veterans, people who work in AI and computer science. They’ll purge the intellectuals and higher learning institutes.

Eventually they’ll move down their target lists to normal people who have voiced dissent about the regime. It’s just a matter of how long it takes them to work down the lists and what triggers your activity evokes with their Artificial Intelligence systems.

If a full-blown civil war is sparked and blue states fought back with their National Guard and other military assets then these systems will be used to create target lists for drone-strikes and bombs. Admittedly even I can’t truly envision this scenario but it’s not out of the realm of possibility. If the situation devolved to this point their AI system would build lists of key players and leaders within the resistance just like they built lists of HAMAS leaders and they might well send bombs just like Israel bombed Palestinians if they can’t reach you with their gestapo goon squads.