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“Pure undistorted truth burns up the world.”
Nikolai Berdyaev
(Also, apparently, Palantir’s unofficial mission statement.)

I. Enter the Magical Spy Orb, Stage Right

In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, the palantír was a sort of medieval CCTV camera with attitude. A seeing stone that showed you just enough truth to make terrible decisions with great confidence. Much like modern analytics platforms, only with fewer PowerPoint slides.

Naturally, an American surveillance company looked at this cursed artefact and thought:
Perfect. That is exactly the brand identity we want.

Australia, faithful golden retriever of global tech trends, promptly threw open its security apparatus to this cheerful little CIA-spawned contraption. Because nothing says national sovereignty like importing your intelligence tools from a company the CIA incubated when everyone else in Silicon Valley backed away slowly.

II. Raised by Intelligence Agencies, House-trained by ICE

Palantir began in 2004 with money from the CIA’s venture capital arm. Even venture capitalists, whose favourite hobby is setting billions on fire, passed on Palantir. The CIA, however, has always had a soft spot for tools that hoover up data. It is a love language.

Soon the company was helping expand XKEYSCORE, the NSA’s vacuum cleaner for emails, chats, photos, and probably your overdue library fines.

Then came the ICE years. Workplace raids. Family separations. Software that could locate the relatives of unaccompanied migrant children. Exactly the sort of thing a responsible tech company brags about while sipping cold brew in Palo Alto.

Predictive policing? They did that too. In New Orleans, nobody bothered to tell the city council they were part of a secret crime-prediction experiment. Minor detail.

Even prosecutors did not know where their evidence came from. The constitution came out of it looking like a chewed frisbee.

Naturally, this was the moment Australia said:
Yes. Yes, this is the firm for us.

III. The Palantirification of Australia

Since 2017, Palantir has landed contracts with almost every Australian agency that has ever uttered the words “classified” or “sensitive.” AUSTRAC. Defence. ACIC. ASD. The NSW Crime Commission. Victoria’s Department of Justice. The gang is all here.

Victoria now even advertises intelligence jobs requiring experience with Palantir.
Imagine applying for an Australian government job and being told:
“Do you have skills with the foreign surveillance platform we just married in a small private ceremony?”

The private sector jumped in too.
Coles is now using Palantir to improve workforce management across 840 supermarkets. Because who better to optimise shelf stacking than a company previously employed to identify potential gang associates in Louisiana?

Your lettuce is now brought to you by counterterrorism analytics.

Rio Tinto signed up as well, because of course it did.

IV. Government Secrecy Meets Corporate Secrecy. Reader, They Bonded.

Palantir loves opacity the way a cat loves cardboard boxes. Its engineers embed inside agencies like very expensive barnacles, ensuring no one can ever remove the system without collapsing the workflow, the organisation, or possibly the national economy.

Meanwhile, the Australian government is engaged in the speedrun version of dismantling transparency. FOI approvals have dropped from 59 percent a decade ago to 25 percent. Senate orders for documents are treated as performance art. The Attorney-General’s proposed FOI reforms would make it even harder to obtain information unless you are considered a “trusted stakeholder”, which does not include journalists, academics, whistleblowers, or most mammals.

It is quite something to watch a government attempting to hide its own decisions contract with a company whose algorithms are also hidden.

A perfect marriage.
A ceremony of two veils.

V. And About That Security Record

You might assume a surveillance company would be good at securing its own systems.
Adorable assumption.

In 2015, red-team testers achieved total network compromise. They obtained encryption keys, internal documents, source code, office security footage, and passwords. They might as well have taken Palantir’s office plant for good measure.

In 2021, an FBI case file was accessible to the wrong people for more than a year. Palantir blamed the FBI. Naturally. If you cannot trust the world’s largest law enforcement agency to use your software correctly, imagine how thrilling it will be when Australian agencies try.

Palantir’s internal security bulletins read like a competition to see how many vulnerabilities can be introduced before lunch.

VI. Sovereignty, Schmovereignty

The real danger is dependency.
Once Palantir becomes the dashboard for AUSTRAC analysts, Defence planners, intelligence assessments, and police investigations, you have handed the nervous system of the state to a foreign company with a colourful CV.

We obsess over sovereign submarines, sovereign missiles, sovereign supply chains. But sovereign intelligence software?
Apparently that is optional. We will outsource it like payroll.

At some point a minister will discover we cannot function without Palantir and will declare, gravely, that it is “too big to replace” which is Canberra-speak for “we forgot to think”.

VII. Meanwhile, the Birds of Ararat Remain Unimpressed

Out my window the blackbirds continue their eternal business, blissfully unbothered that a foreign surveillance platform now has deeper access to Australian government data than Australian voters do.

They sing. We shrug.
Palantir prospers.

It appears no dystopian future is required. The surveillance state has already arrived, wearing a hi-vis vest that reads “Efficiency Review Deliverables”.

VIII. What Now?

We could, if we were so inclined, demand:
• transparency for government algorithms
• independent audits before any system becomes mission-critical
• an FOI system that functions
• procurement rules preventing high-risk foreign lock-in
• a national conversation about whether sovereignty in intelligence capability matters or not

Or we could simply continue believing the magical seeing stone will show us the full truth rather than only what its owners want us to see.

In Tolkien, the palantír corrupted kings.
In Australia, it seems to be corrupting common sense.

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