US government, Palantir partner to create “pre-crime” law enforcement

The sci-fi movie Minority Report tells the story of a dystopian future where a special “pre-crime” policing unit has been created in Washington D.C. to prevent crimes before they happen. Unfortunately for lovers of liberty, a partnership between the US government and Trump’s favorite “tech bro” Peter Theil — the founder of Palantir — is making sure that pre-crime law enforcement isn’t just a sci-fi movie anymore.

During the 2016 primary season, then-Representative Kevin McCarthy introduced a bill to destroy the Second Amendment by creating a “pre-crime” unit within the Department of Homeland Security. Known as the Homeland Safety and Security Act (HR-5611), the bill was intended “to prevent terrorists from launching attacks and obtaining passports, AND FOR OTHER PURPOSES” (Emphasis mine).

They threw that “for other purposes” part in there to leave the door wide open as to how the law can be applied, and as you’ll soon see, that’s where Palantir’s threat to our constitutional rights comes in.

Two years later, following the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, Republicans took another step in the direction of pre-crime law enforcement when they proposed a bill that I satirically called the Minority Report Act of 2018. This was a reintroduction of HR-5611 but included the creation of the Office for Partnerships to Prevent Terrorism — later known as the Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention.

Such laws might have quite literally been lifted from the script of the Tom Cruise movie, Minority Report. Here’s a recent real-life example from the state of Florida of what it looks like in practice (via J.D. Tuccille at Reason.com):

Predictive policing—a concept seemingly pulled straight from the 2002 popcorn flick Minority Report—has become increasingly hot with law enforcement agencies over the past decade. The field tempts budget-minded officeholders and cops alike with its science-y promise to forecast where crimes will occur in the future and who will commit them, targeting risk while minimizing wasted resources. But it also holds the potential to justify hassling people based on what a computer program and biases entered as data say they might someday do. That’s the basis of a recent lawsuit charging that a [Pasco County] Florida sheriff’s department has used predictive policing to harass the innocent.

“Predictive policing is the use of analytical techniques to identify promising targets for police intervention with the goal of preventing crime, solving past crimes, and identifying potential offenders and victims,” according to a 2013 RAND Corporation report. Even in those early days of the field, though, the report acknowledged that “[t]he very act of labeling areas and people as worthy of further law enforcement attention inherently raises concerns about civil liberties and privacy rights.”

“How does the Pasco County program live up to everybody’s worst fears of acting on predictions of what people haven’t done but might do?

“First the Sheriff’s Office generates lists of people it considers likely to break the law, based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence and arbitrary decisions by police analysts,” the newspaper’s report noted. “Then it sends deputies to find and interrogate anyone whose name appears, often without probable cause, a search warrant or evidence of a specific crime.”

“Make their lives miserable until they move or sue,” is how a former deputy described the department’s tactics to reporters. (Emphasis mine)

While Minority Report-inspired legislation went unrealized at the time, the partnership between the US government and Palantir Technologies have still been hard at work making pre-crime policing a reality going back to the days of Trump’s first term in office (via Wired.com):

Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads.

The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.

Palantir sells its technology to police forces on the basis that it breaks down silos, connects databases, and enables sharing between jurisdictions, saving everyone time and resources. The promise, however, comes with one big catch: You don’t get that benefit unless other agencies are also using Palantir. (Emphasis mine)

Technology that “breaks down silos” is exactly why Donald Trump has given Theil and Palantir the keys to the information kingdom. In fact, “eliminating information silos” was specifically mentioned in Trump’s March 2025 executive order as the way to allegedly stop “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

An information silo is an information management system that is prevented from freely communicating with other information management systems. On a practical level, this is how government-held information about you and me couldn’t be shared between agencies. However, this all changed following Trump’s executive order thanks to Elon Musk and DOGE.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was allegedly formed to eliminate “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but the reality is that it was used as cover for Donald Trump’s true objective: build a technocratic dictatorship capable of completely destroying what little remains of liberty in America.

DOGE promised to produce $2 trillion in budget cuts, but in the end, Musk only managed to shave a few billion dollars from annual federal spending. What DOGE was very successful at, however, was expanding Donald Trump’s technocratic dictatorship by vastly expanding government’s domestic surveillance capabilities by building a “master database” containing the personal data of held by numerous federal agencies, including the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

One of the recipients of this massive collection of personal data was none other than Palantir, a company specifically chosen by Trump to surveil Americans (via NewsMax.com):

The New York Times reported that Palantir, the AI-focused software and military contractor, has expanded its “work across the federal government in recent months” after it had been tapped by President Donald Trump to create “detailed portraits” or a digital ID on Americans “which could easily merge data on Americans — throughout agencies,” such as from the IRS, the Department of Homeland Security, the Health and Human Services Department, the Social Security Administration and the Department of Education.

Palantir employees told The Times that the company’s engineers had been “quietly” discussing creating a digital ID for Americans and that they had grown worried about placing such sensitive data in one place. Anonymous government officials also told The Times that Palantir’s pick to create a program compiling data on Americans “was driven by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.” (Emphasis mine)

The partnership between the US government and Palantir is bad news for many of our God-given, constitutionally protected rights. Pre-crime law enforcement violates the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Sixth Amendment’s guarantee of knowing who your accusers are and the nature of the charges and evidence being brought against you, and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due-process and equal-protection rights protecting you against the arbitrary or irrational actions of government.

Pre-crime law enforcement makes a good story line in the Minority Report movie, but it’s a terrible idea in the real world because it will inevitably destroy our Republic . . . and that’s a crime that doesn’t require a Precog to predict.

 

---

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties. He the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty.

Follow the Strident Conservative on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to receive podcasts of his daily radio feature: iTunes | Pandora | Tune In | iHeart | RSS

For media inquiries or to have David speak to your group, use the Contact Us form.