S7, E271 - One File to Rule Them All

In this episode of Privacy Please, Cameron Ivey investigates Palantir Technologies — a data analytics company founded in 2003 with CIA backing that has quietly become embedded across nearly every major arm of the U.S. federal government.

This week's investigation covers:

The USDA Deal On April 22nd, the Department of Agriculture signed a $300 million blanket purchase agreement with Palantir to build "One Farmer, One File" — a unified digital profile for every American farmer. The deal was awarded without competitive bidding.

The IRS Bombshell The same week, The Intercept revealed — based on documents obtained by watchdog group American Oversight — that Palantir has been running financial crime surveillance operations inside the IRS since 2018. The IRS has paid Palantir over $130 million for access to a platform that cross-references bank records, tax filings, transaction histories, and more across millions of Americans.

The Immigration Enforcement Machine Palantir's ICE contracts — now over $145 million — power the agency's case management, deportation targeting, and real-time location tracking of immigrants. A tool called ELITE creates individual dossiers on deportation targets by pulling data from the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Pushback That's Working New York City's public hospital network canceled its Palantir contract after community organizing and City Council pressure. In the UK, 229,000 people have signed petitions to remove Palantir from the National Health Service. Public pressure is moving the needle.

Five Things You Can Do Right Now Cameron closes with specific, actionable steps every listener can take — from requesting your IRS transcript to freezing your credit to contacting your representative about sole-source contracting.

Privacy Please is part of the Problem Lounge Network. New episodes weekly. theproblemlounge.com

Chapter Markers 

• 00:00 — Cold Open
• 01:30 — Intro & Show Welcome
• 02:45 — Act One: The USDA Deal
• 06:00 — Act Two: Who Is Palantir?
• 11:30 — Act Three: The Empire Expands (ICE, Policing)
• 17:00 — Act Four: Your Tax Returns Are In There Too
• 24:00 — Act Five: The Layer Nobody's Talking About
• 30:00 — Act Six: The Part That Gives Me Hope
• 34:30 — What You Can Actually Do (5 Tips)
• 39:00 — Closing Reflection (Adjust timestamps after editing)

Transcript

The Hidden Company In Government

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a company operating right now inside the US government that most people have never even heard of. And I want to be really specific about what I mean by inside. Not a vendor, not a contractor who shows up, does a job, and leaves. I'm talking about embedded people, woven in, running underneath federal immigration enforcement, domestic policing, military operations, missile defense, veterans' health records, and as of last week, the entire American food supply. Oh, and your tax data too. Since 2018. Quietly.

unknown 0:38

Shh.

USDA Deal And One Farmer File

Palantir’s CIA Origin Story

ICE Targeting And Data Fusion

IRS Data Mining Since 2018

One Database For Every Farm

When Public Pushback Works

Simple Steps To Protect Yourself

The Seeing Stone Problem

Final Takeaway And Share Request

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Nobody needs to know. And they've done this without telling any of us. Of course, why would they tell you? Hey, by the way, I got all your info. All of it. One company, all of that. You never voted on this, nobody asked you. And the contracts, hundreds of millions of dollars worth, keep getting signed without competitive bidding, without public debate, and in some cases without anyone even knowing until a journalist filed a FOIA request and found out. The company is called Palantir. They started as a CIA project. And whether you're a farmer in Iowa, a patient at a New York City hospital, or someone who filed a tax return in the last eight years, this story is about you. Let's go. We are talking about data consolidation, government surveillance, a CIA origin story, your tax records, your food supply, and here's the part I want you to stay for: what regular people are actually doing to push back and what's working. Before we dive in, Privacy Please is a part of the Problem Lounge Network. Head on over to the problemlounge.com, find us on YouTube, give us a follow, tell a friend. We put a lot of work into these videos and episodes, and we'd really appreciate uh the push to get this out to as many people as possible. So anything helps. And um let's go ahead and get into this. So April 22nd of this year, less than two weeks ago, the US government of agriculture signed a$300 million deal with a company called Palantir Technologies. The official framing is a government modernization story. The USDA has old, fragmented computer systems that don't talk to each other. A farmer dealing with three different USDA agencies might have to schedule three appointments, drive to a county office, fill out the same paperwork three times. The new initiative is called One Farmer, One File. Every farmer gets a single unified digital profile, accessible from their iPhone, faster payments, less paperwork, quicker disaster relief. And honestly, for the farmers dealing with that nightmare, some of this is genuinely useful. When the USDA's Farmer Bridge Assistant Program launched earlier this year, it broke all prior records for online signups in 62 minutes. Billions in payments in the first five days. That part is real. So on the surface, boring government IT upgrade. Nothing to see here, right? Except the same week this deal dropped, the Intercept published a bombshell report revealing that Palantir has been quietly running data mining operations inside the IRS since 2018. Bum bum bum on millions of American taxpayers without any meaningful public disclosure. And suddenly, this isn't a story about farmers at all. Alright, let's back up here. Because to understand why any of this matters, you need to know who Palantir actually is. They were founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor, one of the most influential controversial figures in Silicon Valley. So after 9-11, Thial had an idea. PayPal had built fraud detection algorithms to track suspicious patterns in financial transactions. What if you applied the same logic to tracking terrorist networks? He poured$30 million of his own money into the idea. Named the company after a fictional artifact from Lord of the Rings, the Polentiri, the Seeing Stones, if you're familiar, if you're nerdy like we are. Come on. So ancient objects that let you observe anyone, anywhere, the all-seeing eye. They knew exactly what they were building. Remember that. When Teal shopped the idea around Silicon Valley, the VCs passed. Pretty hard. Sequoia Capital, which had previously backed PayPal, their partner, apparently spent the entire pitch doodling on a notepad. Others said the idea was guaranteed to fail. The only people who believed Palantir were Peter Thiel and the CIA. Hmm. Specifically, NQTE, the CIA's venture capital arm, they invested$2 million in Palantir in 2004. Not a huge amount of money. I mean, I think it's a lot of money, but not in this context. It opened a door that money alone couldn't buy. Palantir engineers started sitting side by side with CIA analysts, learning their actual workflows, building software around their real problems. The product that came out of that partnership became Palantir Gotham, their flagship intelligence platform, used today by the military, the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI. The company went from a sketch on a whiteboard to the operating system of the U.S. intelligence community. And they kept going. From the intelligence community, Palantir's reach spread and started making a lot of people uncomfortable. By 2014, they had a contract with ICE, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, if you're not aware. That contract has grown to over$145 million today. The system they built called Investigative Case Management pulls together passport records, Social Security files, IRS tax data, phone records, social media activity, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, SMS monitoring, and license plate reader data with over 5 billion data points. That's a lot. Nobody should know that much. All of it is flowing into one dashboard accessible to ICE agents. Then, in 2025, ICE signed a separate$30 million contract for something called Immigration OS. The goal per ICE's own documents is managing the entire immigration lifecycle from identification to removal, prioritizing who gets deported first, tracking whether people are voluntarily leaving the country. There's even a tool inside it called Elite. That stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. That pulls data from the Department of Health and Human Services to create maps of deportation targets and individual dossiers on each person. The ACLU has documented Palantir's software being used in workplace raids, in operations that arrested sponsors of unaccompanied migrant children, and predictive policying programs in Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC. And here's the thing that keeps coming up in every single one of these contracts. The justification for why there was no competitive bidding, why no other company was even considered is always some version of Palantir is the only company capable of doing this. They've made themselves indispensable. And indispensable is a very powerful place to be. Okay, this is the part that really hit the hardest when I started digging into this. And it dropped just seven, six days ago. So it's pretty fresh. The Intercept published a report based on public records obtained by a nonprofit watchdog called American Oversight, revealing that the IRS has been running its financial crime investigations through Palantir's surveillance software since 2018, people. Eight years. The IRS has paid Palantir over$130 million for this. And almost nobody knows about it. The system is called lead and case analytics. It uses both of Palantir's core platforms, Gotham and Foundry, to do the contract paperwork, literally describes as analysis of massive scale data to find the needle in the haystack. The platform lets IRS agents quickly search and visualize connections across millions of records, bank transactions, financial histories, tax filings to generate investigative leads. Now, here's the part that should make your stomach drop. The IRS has access to the financial data of virtually every working American. Yes, you that are that's listening, you, every W-2, every 1099, every bank account that reports interest, every transaction over a certain threshold. When the data feeds into Palantir's platform, the same platform architecture used for counter-terrorism and deportation targeting, it gets run through the same pattern matching and connection visualization tools. And here's the twist that makes it even more complicated. The IRS Criminal Investigation Division that's now running this system has, under the current administration, drastically scaled back its pursuit of actual tax cheats. The Wall Street Journal reported they've pivoted toward investigating what was described as left-leaning groups. So the tool built to find financial criminals is now in the hands of an agency that's been redirected towards investigating political enemies, running on infrastructure built by a company whose CEO had dinner at the White House with the president in March. The director of American Oversight, Chioma Chukwu, put it plainly. She said, the real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency, especially one built and operated by a contractor whose entire business model is built around integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities. And then she said something I want you to really sit on. And I quote: When the government can map relationships, track behavior, and generate investigative leads across data sets on this scale. The question isn't just what it can do, it's who it will be used against. That's very powerful. Not what it can do, who it will be used against. Alright, so now that we're caught up a little bit, let's bring it back to the USDA deal. Because now you have that context, the One Farmer, One File Initiative isn't just an agriculture data project. It's running on Palantir's Foundry platform, the same platform at the IRS, the same platform architecture underpinning ICE's enforcement. The USDA's own data has already been quietly running through Palantir's platform called Landmark since at least 2025. The$300 million contract announced last week is a continuation of work that was already underway. What's being built is a unified database of every farming operation that interacts with the USDA. Their land, finances, conservat conservation practices, insurance claims, loan history, acreage, location, all of it. It's in one place. And it's managed by one company. And the Trump administration has already signed an executive order directing agencies to break down barriers to interagency data sharing. The same week the USDA deal was announced, a watchdog group filed a lawsuit against multiple federal agencies, including the IRS, ICE, CDC, DHS, and the Social Security Administration. Specifically over the use of Palantir's systems for surveillance and personal data analysis. The same week. Hold on tight! Here it comes. Palantir started as counter-terrorism, expanded to immigration enforcement, expanded to predictive policying, expanded to tracking federal employees' office attendance. Yes, there was a separate USDA contract for that, using Palantir to monitor which government workers showed up and where they sat. Now they have the food supply. And your tax records for the past eight years. One company, counterterrorism, deportations, policying, employee surveillance, tax data, food infrastructure, missile defense, veterans' health records, that is not a contractor. That is the operating system of a federal government. And nobody elected them. I'll give Palantir a chance to respond here because I think fairness matters. Their chief technology officer has said publicly that Palantir is not building a master database and is not enabling mass surveillance. He said their platforms are built at every stage to uphold legal and regulatory protections. Oops, their engineers will tell you that the audit logs are real, the data controls are real, the protections are real. Maybe. But trust us has never been an oversight mechanism. And the question I keep coming back to isn't whether Palantir is trustworthy today. It's what happens to all of this infrastructure when the priorities change, when the administration changes, when somebody new decides what the seeing stone should be pointed at. Because if you've been listening to this show, and especially if you've heard our Murkore episode, you know this by now. The infrastructure underneath the systems we rely on is always more fragile and more interconnected than anyone publicly admits. Murkore showed us what happens when one crack forms and shared plumbing. 40 minutes of poison software, 40,000 people's identity on the dark web. Palantir is now the plumbing for almost everything. Here's the thing that I didn't expect to find when I started reporting this episode. People are pushing back. And it's actually working. New York City's public hospital network, the largest municipal health system in the country, serving over a million New Yorkers, had a quiet contract with Palantir. About$4 million since 2023. Using Palantir to scan patient health notes to find missed billing charges. When the Intercept exposed it in February, community organizations mobilized really fast. Protests, city council testimony, a formal human rights assessment request from the New York Comptroller. And in March, the hospital CEO announced to the City Council that the Palantir contract will not be renewed. Done, gone, because people showed up and made noise. This gives me hope. In the UK, over 229,000 people have signed petitions demanding the government cancel all Palantir contracts, including a$330 million deal with the National Health Service. The Green Party leader personally delivered a letter to Palantir's offices. Members of Parliament are calling for cancellation. The campaign is loud and it's growing. None of this stops the$300 million USDA deal. None of it undoes eight years of IRS data mining. But it proves something important. This company is not untouchable. Public pressure moves the needle. Transparency creates accountability. And when people know what's happening, things can change. Alright, practical time. And I mean genuinely useful things. Not just be aware and good luck out there. Here's the first thing. Know what's in your IRS file. You can request your tax transcripts directly from the IRS at irs.gov slash individuals slash git transcript. This shows what the IRS has on record for you. You won't see Palantir's analysis, but you will see your own data baseline. Know what's there. Number two, freeze your credit. Seriously, if you haven't done this, do it this week. I've said this a couple times in past episodes. Equifax, Spirion, TransUn, it's free. It takes about 15 minutes across all three. A credit freeze means nobody can open new accounts in your name. Not a hacker, not a data broker, not anyone who gets their hands on your info through a breach or a government data leak. Go to annualcreditreport.com and you can get started. And also, we're not sponsored by them, but it's it's a great way to start and do all that. This is the single highest impact that most people aren't doing right now. Alright, number three. Audit your data broker exposure. Companies called data brokers are constantly buying and selling profiles built on your financial behavior, your location, and your online activity. Services like Delete Me or Canary can automate the opt-out process across hundreds of brokers. It's not free, but it's not expensive either, and it's a meaningful way to shrink your footprint. Number four, follow the watchdogs. The organizations doing the actual work on Palantir accountability right now are the Intercept, the ACLU, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the American Oversight. These are the groups filing FOIA requests and funding the lawsuits. Follow them, share their reporting. That's how stories like these break into the mainstream. Number five, contact your representatives about sole source contracting. The USDA deal, the IRS contract, the ICE contracts, all awarded without competitive bidding. One company, chosen without a public process. Find your rep at house.gov or senate.gov, send a message, tell them you want transparency on no bid government tech contracts. It takes like a couple minutes. And finally, the New York City Hospital story proves this works. Public pressure, city council testimony, organized community pushback. A contract with the largest municipal health system in America ended because regular people showed up and they said no. Don't ever underestimate that. There's one detail in this story that I genuinely cannot stop thinking about. The company is named after a seeing stone from Lord of the Rings. Peter Thiel chose that name deliberately. He knew the reference. The Pollantiri in Tolkien's world were dangerous not because they lied, but because they showed partial truths. They could be turned. The enemy could choose what they saw, and the people who used them, even with good intentions, could be slowly corrupted by what the stone chose to show them. Palantir's founders understood that. They named themselves after it anyway. What they may not have anticipated, or maybe they did, is that one day they wouldn't just be the ones looking through the stone. They'd be the stone. Your tax data is in there, your food supply is in there, your immigration status, if that applies to you, your health records, if you've been a patient at a New York City public hospital, and as this platform keeps expanding, your everything is in there. The question isn't whether Palantir has bad intentions, the question is whether any single private company should have this much of a view into American life with this little accountability and this much dependency built in so that they can never easily be removed. I'm Cameron Ivey. This was Privacy Please, part of the problem lounge network. If this one hit you differently or you enjoyed it, please share it. Send it out. Let's get this out. Follow us. If this is your first time listening, thank you so much for tuning in. I love doing this stuff. It's so fascinating. And we really appreciate you uh sticking around. We'll see you guys on the next one. Cameron Ivy. Over and out.