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Video Description
Philip K. Dick wrote The Minority Report in 1956 as a warning, and this video from the Conscious Radical channel argues the warning is now being bought by governments. The subject is Palantir Technologies, a private American firm named for an all-seeing stone, now woven into policing, the Ministry of Defence, and even NHS patient data at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds.
The video treats the central claim as ominous but precise: pre-crime infrastructure is being built even though the evidence that predictive policing actually works is thin. It does not call for panic, but for awareness. If a single company can quietly become part of how a state watches people, the first act of resistance is simply learning its name.
Full Video Transcript
A few days ago someone left this comment on my video about Philip K. Dick and the Gnostics.
They’d said they’d been on a PKD rabbit hole thinking about parallels between his work
and today’s events and I replied pre-crime infrastructure hiding in plain sight via
Palantir. What does it mean to live freely in a society that has already decided who you are?
That commenter was right to make the connection and I want to credit them for it because I started
to pull the thread. This is about Palantir Technologies and most of you have never heard
of it but the UK government has given them over 670 million of your tax money anyway.
The Minority Report Connection. In 1956 PKD wrote the Minority Report. If you haven’t read it,
it’s about pre-crime and predictive policing arresting people before they commit the crime
and it’s based on what the system says they’re likely to do and in 2002 Spielberg made it a film
with Tom Cruise and up until this point it was fiction but then in 2012 a company called Palantir
Technologies began secretly testing it in New Orleans. The software takes crime data, arrest
records, social networks, geographic patterns and runs them through an algorithm and it generates
lists of people the system predicts are likely to commit crimes and then it sends this information
to the police. Various cities across America deployed it including New Orleans, Los Angeles
and Chicago. The technology was called different things like heat maps or predictive analytics or
risk assessment tools but it was the same idea PKD warned about 70 years ago the evidence it
actually works is thin to non-existent so in New Orleans researchers evaluated Palantir’s
predictive policing program to try and see if it reduced violent crime but the study couldn’t
confirm it worked one of the professors who helped build the gang database Palantir used had this to
say when he found out what they’d done with his data trying to predict who is going to do what
based on last year’s data is just… His name is Professor Nick Cossaro from the University of
Cincinnati and he helped New Orleans build the gang database that Palantir used. He and Professor
Robin Engle evaluated the city’s ceasefire program without knowing Palantir’s role in it
and even though there was some resistance from those that compiled the data, New Orleans kept
using it anyway. Palantir marketed it to other cities claiming it had dramatically reduced
at violent crime even though the study said no such thing cities eventually scrapped the programs
los angeles cancelled theirs after accusations it reinforced racism and didn’t reduce crime
chicago system disproportionately targeted black and latino neighborhoods but by then palantir
had already moved on because the real market was never american local police it was government so
if the evidence is thin why are governments spending billions on this? I think it’s likely
to be fair. After 9-11 and every terrorist attack thereafter the question usually asked is
why didn’t we connect the dots? The 9-11 commission report said it explicitly. Different intelligence
agencies had different pieces of information. If they’d been shared maybe the attacks could
have been prevented and that maybe haunts every government decision since and Palantir’s pitch
is seductive they will connect the dots they integrate all the data so there’ll be no more
missed signals it’s the promise of omniscience which is exactly what US Congress rejected in
2003 when they shut down the total information awareness program due to it being too invasive
and too Orwellian but what congress wouldn’t fund private contractors could still build and what
governments couldn’t legally do they could buy as a service and so the psychology at work here is
action bias we had to do something even if that something doesn’t work it at least looks like
we’re taking the threat seriously but there’s another layer here political cover if something
goes wrong you can say we use the best technology available but you outsource the decision to the
algorithm the proprietary is classified algorithm that no one can question but i don’t think that’s
accountability and once the system is embedded it becomes infrastructure and very difficult to
remove what so you want to cancel the system that could prevent the next attack how unpatriotic so
the system stays whether it works or not now the uk government has spent 670 million minimum on
palantir across at least 10 departments police authorities local councils the nhs has a 330
million contract which started in 2023 so now palantir has access to patient data but the
contracts contents remain heavily redacted the ministry of defense awarded a contract worth 240
million in january 2026 and this was a direct award with no competitive bidding it covers data
analytics capabilities supporting critical strategic tactical and live operational decision
making palantir are also working on systems for the royal navy’s nuclear-powered submarines
so when our police forces the met police gchq regional intelligence centers local councils
defra the cabinet office and highways england are all using the system it’s already become
infrastructure in december 2025 the uk signed palantir’s biggest ever deal outside the us
the company announced it would make london its european defense headquarters providing
a 1.5 billion investment into the uk in parliament mps asked the defense secretary whether peter
manderson had any involvement in securing these contracts now peter mandelson is the disgraced
former british ambassador to the us who coincidentally consultancy firm global council
had palantir as a client but the defense secretary said the decision was his alone but hang on let’s
take a look at the facts mandelson’s firm represented palantir the contracts were awarded
without competition and the timing lined up with secretive meetings between uk leadership
and palantir executives now mps from multiple parties have expressed concern one called it
vendor lock-in another said do we really want to be involved with a company like that
can we not just distance ourselves from palantir altogether and have an ethical procurement policy
the government’s answer was we work with our closest defense and security partner meaning the
us and palantir so who is palantir anyway okay the company was found in 2003 by peter thiel now he’s
the billionaire co-founder of paypal and also happens to be a trump supporter and alex carp
a philosophy PhD who wrote his dissertation on aggression and political identity and they named
it Palantir. Now if you’re a fan of Tolkien you’ll know that Palantir are the seeing stones in Lord
of the Rings and in Tolkien’s story the Palantiri were magical artifacts that let you see across
vast distances. They granted knowledge, foresight and control but they also corrupted their users
because the stones only shows you the partial truth and partial truth is enough to manipulate
you into making catastrophic decisions. Saruman looked into one and saw Sauron’s armies. He saw
the power and decided to join him. Denethor looked into one and saw his son dying, saw Gondor falling
and he burned himself alive. Now the stones didn’t lie but they also didn’t share the whole truth.
so why would you name your company after that my thoughts are that you’d do this if you thought
it doesn’t apply to you alice carp has a phd in philosophy and i’m pretty sure he knows the
tolkien reference and what the palantiri did but he named the company after them anyway i think
there’s a particular psychology at work here the belief that you’re one of the enlightened few
who can handle the power without being corrupted by it plato called these philosopher kings they
with a guardian class who are wise enough to rule. Karp quotes Goethe, practices Tai Chi and frames
himself as an altogether thoughtful intellectual who wrestles with the ethics of what he’s building
but he’s also the one who said the West’s dominance comes from superiority in applying
organized violence whereas Peter Thiel has said explicitly I no longer believe freedom and
democracy are compatible. So the co-founder of a surveillance company used by democratic governments
does not believe in democracy. To me it stinks of we know better than the public what the public
needs and we’ll build the infrastructure to protect them whether they understand it or not
because we can see everything and we won’t be corrupted. Even their office locations are named
after places in Tolkien’s Middle Earth. The Shire, Rivendell, Minas Tirith and now London,
European Defence Headquarters. Maybe they’ll call that one Mordor. When Palantir first started,
every venture capital firm rejected them. Sequoia Capital’s chairman allegedly doodled through their
pitch. Kleiner Perkins told them they were doomed. The only people who believed in them
were Peter Thiel and the CIA. In 2005 the CIA’s venture capital arm In-Q-Tel invested 2 million
in them. Now that’s not a lot of money but it did give Palantir credibility and access and the CIA
became their first major client. So Palantir’s origin story is Silicon Valley startup meets
intelligence agency doing what is harder for governments to do directly which is to integrate
databases track people and predict behavior. But unfortunately we can’t check Palantir’s
algorithms because they’re protected as proprietary trade secrets which means the public
has no right to know how they work even when they’re being used on us. What does it actually
do? Well Palantir integrates data that is collected by others and it joins it up. So as an example
The NHS has patient records, the police have arrest databases, the DVLA has your driving history,
your bank has transaction records and your phone company has location data. Now these are all
separate systems that don’t talk to each other until Palantir connects them. So they make the
disconnected information link and it puts it into one searchable map which builds a digital profile
of your life and your relationships. And then it runs predictions of who you know, where you’ll be
and what you’re likely to do. For immigration enforcement in the US that means finding people
to deport. For the military it means analysing drone footage to identify targets. For police
it meant generating lists of people to watch even if they hadn’t committed a crime. And in the UK
it means the MOD, the NHS and police forces are all running their operations through a private
American company’s infrastructure. Okay now sometimes connecting information actually
matters. In Soham, Cambridgeshire in 2002 Ian Huntley murdered two 10 year old girls Holly
Wells and Jessica Chapman. He was working as a school caretaker and he’d had previous allegations
of sexual offences against minors and that was across multiple police forces but because they
were on different systems even though the information existed it wasn’t connected. When
Huntley applied for the job the background check came back clean because the forces doing the check
couldn’t see what other forces knew and that’s the problem Palantir claims to solve and in cases like
that connecting the dots could save lives so yes there is an argument that some information should
be integrated however there is a difference between connecting information to find someone
who’s already committed crimes and predicting who’s going to commit crimes before they do
because that’s less integration and more surveillance look humans are biased we know this
when we arrest people based on assumptions or patrol certain neighborhoods more than others
we will see patterns and data spikes that aren’t necessarily there when algorithms make decisions
they learn from biased human data so it’s possible that they automate our assumptions at scale
a human analyst looking at integrated data might see someone’s previous offenses their associates
their location patterns and make a judgment call and that judgment call could be right and it could
save a life but it could also be wrong and ruin one and algorithms do the same thing but faster
at scale and without explaining itself because it can process millions of data points but it can’t
tell you why it flagged this person and not that one because the reasoning is proprietary so you
end up with a system where neither humans nor machines are trustworthy but someone still has
to decide. Palantir’s answer is let the algorithm decide and trust that the people building it know
what they’re doing. History’s answer is the people building it are the least trustworthy of all
because they’re not the ones who live with the consequences. I don’t have the answer to this.
All I can say is that I know the difference between a tool and a system. A tool connects
information when there’s a specific reason or a specific person or a specific crime whereas
a system watches everyone all the time just in case so needed at all but now we’ve built a system
where the people running it don’t believe in democracy palantir is a global infrastructure
now the united states 10 billion army contract 1.3 billion maven smart system which is an ai
targeting system that analyzes drone footage and the pentagon just made maven a program of record
which means it’s permanent in israel they have a strategic partnership with the idf palantir’s
technology has been accused of powering systems called lavender and gospel which are ai tools
that generate kill lists in gaza the ceo alex carper said i’m proud that we’re supporting israel
in every way we can in the ukraine plant here powers battlefield intelligence it pulls together
drone footage satellite data and troop movements into one operational map with nato while they
signed a contract for maven smart system nato version to include denmark france germany poland
australia and canada this is the infrastructure of modern warfare and modern surveillance and
most people have never heard the name. In February 2026, Anna Bacciarelli from Human Rights Watch
told Al Jazeera, thanks to successive UK governments, Palantir has a strong foothold
in multiple public services while also contracting with other governments carrying out abuses. She
said all companies have a responsibility to ensure their products aren’t causing or contributing to
human rights abuses and she said the UK government should undertake thorough due diligence for all
contractors especially given Palantir’s access to UK populations sensitive health data and national
security data. Now parliament is asking the question but is ignored if this company is
providing technology for operations that multiple human rights organizations have condemned should
we be handing them NHS patient records? The UK’s government position is that rigorous due diligence
has been done and that all supplies are subject to security and legal obligations. But the contracts
remain heavily redacted and the technology remains proprietary, which means we’re being told to trust
a private American company with access to our health data, our security infrastructure and our
military systems without the ability to see how it works and as I said before algorithms learn from
data and if the data is biased the algorithm reproduces that bias at scale. Predictive policing
tools are trained on historical arrest data but arrest data doesn’t show where the crime happens
it shows where police made arrests and police patrol some communities more heavily than others.
In the US if black men are arrested for drug possession at four times the rate of white men
despite similar usage rates the algorithm learns that black neighborhoods are high crime so it
sends more police there. This generates more arrests which feeds back into the data and it
becomes an automated self-fulfilling prophecy. This was the pattern found in LA and Chicago.
planted systems disproportionately targeted minority communities. Now in the UK we don’t
have the same data transparency but we do know that black people are nine times more likely to
be stopped and searched than white people. If predictive systems are built on that data what
do you think they’ll predict? Trying to predict who will commit a crime based on biased historical
data is ridiculous it just automates injustice as i said alex carp has a phd in philosophy
he practices tai chi he’s described as brilliant thoughtful and unconventional now that is
wonderful but he also said this palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner
with the very best in the world and when it’s necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill
them. He also quotes Samuel Huntington, saying the West’s rise wasn’t made possible by the
superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but by its superiority in applying organised
violence. Karp frames Palantir’s mission as defending Western civilisation and protecting
democracy, keeping the West ahead of China and Russia in the AI race. But he’s building systems
that undermine the values he claims to defend which are privacy due process transparency and
accountability one writer has described it as surveillance capitalism dressed as patriotism
another called it weaponizing philosophy to justify technological brutalism and the protests
have been growing this isn’t the first time a government has tried to achieve total information
awareness. The Stasi in East Germany had files on six million people and one in three citizens
was an informant but it didn’t prevent the fall of the Berlin Wall. Cointelpro in the United States
surveilled civil rights leaders, anti-war activists and political dissidents. The FBI knew everything
about them. The Panopticon is Jeremy Bentham’s design for a prison where guards could see every
prisoner but prisoners never knew when they were being watched the idea was the constant surveillance
would create perfect discipline but the reality was that it created psychological torture and yet
governments keep reaching for the same solution more surveillance more data more prediction
and the pattern repeats because the psychology doesn’t change fear wants control and data
promises control but every historical attempt at total surveillance has failed in the same way
the system becomes the thing it was meant to protect us against and the watches become
corrupted when the infrastructure gets turned on the population the predictions become pretexts
carp can quote philosophy all he wants but history has already run this experiment multiple times
the seeing stone always corrupts its users in the uk parliament has seen heated debates with
mps questioning the contracts and civil liberties groups demanding transparency the good law project
and just treatment are asking is your local nhs trust using palantir software former nato advisor
chris cremades courtney condemned embedding palantir into mod systems as risky because the
company is controlled by peter thiel a billionaire ideologue with far-right affiliations now globally
in july 2025 there are coordinated protests across five u.s cities hundreds blocking palantir
offices and in april 26 15 people were arrested in new york after occupying the company’s lobby
during a Passover protest against ICE deportations.
Over 200 Palantir employees have petitioned against ICE contracts,
13 former employees publicly condemned the company’s work,
Belgian banks have divested from Palantir for sustainability reasons,
and We Move Europe is running a petition calling on the EU
to investigate Palantir’s use across Europe,
as well as halt new deals until strong safeguards are guaranteed the petition says europe must not
hand its public systems data and security to a private u.s surveillance company especially one
involved in fueling wars and mass deportations so why haven’t you heard of this well palantir is
described in academic literature as among the most secretive and understudied surveillance firms
globally. The company cultivates mystery where employees sign strict NDAs and most operational
details are classified. There are no public demos and there is limited media access. It operates
through government contracts not consumer products so we don’t use Palantir the way we would use
Google or Facebook. Reintegrate databases doesn’t sound alarming until you understand the scale.
perhaps we’re focusing on the wrong companies everyone watches meta google x and consumer
facing platforms whereas defense contractors seem to get less scrutiny when you have intentional
corporate secrecy plus government classification plus complexity plus the wrong focus that equals
invisibility despite massive power until someone connects the dots under uk law specifically the
Data Protection Act and UK GDPR, you have rights over your personal data. You have the right to
know what data is being held about you, the right to know how it’s being used, the right to challenge
decisions made solely by automated processing. But if the system is classified as national security
or if the algorithms are protected as trade secrets, those rights become difficult to enforce.
you can request your data but if it’s integrated across multiple agencies through a private
contractor’s proprietary system who actually holds it and who do you ask and if decisions are being
made about you risk assessments predictions targeting based on that integrated data how do
you challenge an algorithm you can’t see so the law says you have rights but the infrastructure
makes them very hard to exercise. In the US pre-crime policing raises serious constitutional
issues. Fourth amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. If police
show up at your door because an algorithm flagged you with no warrant no evidence of a specific
crime that’s a problem. Fifth and fourteenth amendments due process you have the right to
know the charges and evidence against you. An algorithm’s prediction is not evidence. Sixth
Amendment, the right to confront your accusers. If your accuser is a proprietary algorithm and the
company won’t reveal how it works, you can’t challenge it. These protections exist in different
forms in UK law too. The presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, protection from
arbitrary detention. But predictive systems bypass all of that. They act before the crime, before the
evidence based on patterns and probabilities and once it becomes infrastructure embedded in how
the MOD operates, how the NHS manages data, how police forces coordinate, it becomes nearly
impossible to question. Now I’m not going to tell you what to think about this but I can show you
what the alternatives would require. If we wanted surveillance systems that were accountable
they would need to be transparent open source algorithms that can be audited not proprietary
black boxes if we wanted them to be democratic elected bodies would need to decide what level
of surveillance is acceptable not private contractors with profit motives if we wanted
them to be temporary they’d need sunset clauses systems that expire unless actively renewed by
public mandate. If we wanted them to be fair they’d need to account for bias in the data
and when the predictions are wrong when innocent people are flagged or detained or deported
someone would need to be held accountable you can’t just blame it on the algorithm
and if we wanted them to be constitutional they’d need to respect due process which means evidence
before action not predictions instead of evidence. That’s what the alternative looks like but whether
we can get there is a different question. Should we even try to stop companies like Palantir?
There’s always the first step is to see something clearly and the second step is asking what and who
does this system serve? Does it serve safety or does it serve the people who profit from fear?
Does it serve justice or does it automate the injustices that are already in the data? Does
it serve democracy or does it concentrate power in the hands of people who don’t believe in
democracy? The seeing stone shows you what its builders want you to see and once you understand
that you can start asking well who are the builders and what do they believe and why should
we trust them with the infrastructure of our lives? So here’s where we are. Pre-crime infrastructure
is operational. It’s being deployed by militaries, police forces, immigration agencies, health
services and governments around the world the uk has spent over 670 million pounds on it the mod
is running operations through it the nhs is managing patient data with it the company
building it named itself after a corrupting surveillance artifact from a fantasy novel
the evidence it works is contested at best and most people have never heard of it that commenter
was right to connect PKD to today’s events because the pattern they sensed is real. What does it mean
to live freely in a society that has already decided who you are? I don’t have the answer
to that but I know that the question matters and now you see it what you do with that is yours
because your thinking belongs to you.
Source: The Conscious Radical