The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State
An excellent resource on why the police don't bring up what Flock does and why Thiel doesn't bring up what Palantir knows.
The Private Companies Quietly Building a Police State
From Palantir’s data fusion to Clearview’s face scraping and Flock’s license-plate dragnets, a handful of private vendors now underpin everyday policing—and ICE’s deportation machine. Sold as “public safety,” these tools supercharge surveillance, stitch together vast personal data, and evade democratic oversight. Here’s what they are, who profits, and how we can shrink police reliance on them.
By Campaign Zero
10/02/2025 Updates
Overview
Donald Trump entered the White House last January with a promise to carry out the largest mass deportation in United States history. While Trump hasn’t made history with the numbers, his administration’s policies have led to a dramatic surge in ICE arrests, fueled in part by private technology companies that have made them possible.
Powerful tools that collect and aggregate data, enable facial recognition, and increase surveillance have become a bedrock of American policing over the past two decades. In collaboration with private technology companies, law enforcement agencies at all levels have experimented with how to implement these tools and created a large consumer market for them. Against this backdrop, it is essential to understand the role of the tech industry in both increasing the reach of local law enforcement and enabling mass deportations by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration has made a public show of its deportation efforts, but the technologies that make it possible have received less attention. ICE is, for example, one of the largest customers for Clearview AI, a facial recognition company that has scraped more than 30 billion faces from internet sources. Data brokers, including one owned jointly by several airline companies, are actively selling data to ICE and other federal agencies. Perhaps most noteworthy is a new $30 million contract between ICE and Palantir to build a platform integrating data from myriad sources to provide “near real-time visibility” of migrants in the country.
Palantir is a defense contractor that builds data integration tools for law enforcement and government agencies–what one former employee describes as “really extravagant plumbing with data.” While the company brands itself as a neutral “data infrastructure” provider, Palantir is in reality a largely unchecked force in the expansion of mass surveillance. For example, the company is in conversation with the Trump administration to build and manage systems for the Social Security Administration and the IRS, a move challenged by civil rights groups. Palantir’s “plumbing” could lay the foundation for which law enforcement agencies leverage massive troves of private information never intended for police use. Such systems have been used on a smaller scale for years in local police agencies, enabling mass surveillance and, in many cases, exacerbating racist policing.
The surveillance technologies currently used by ICE empower the agency in ways that are both unprecedented and massively expand its reach. But they are also in use far beyond this one agency. Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy organization, has mapped a wide range of intrusive technology systems – from surveillance cameras to complex systems like Palantir’s – used by local police agencies throughout the country. Hundreds of companies, many of which began as military and defense contractors, now market their tools to, and develop them in concert with, law enforcement agencies across the United States.
Continues...
https://campaignzero.org/the-private-companies-quietly-building-a-police-state/
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