The Trump administration has tapped Palantir — the notorious data-mining firm co-founded by billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel — to compile information on people in the United States for a “master database,” creating an easy way to cross-reference sensitive data from tax records, immigration records and more. Palantir also has a $30 million contract with ICE to provide almost real-time visibility into immigrants’ movements as the agency seeks to arrest 3,000 people a day. Wired reporter Makena Kelly says the company is “becoming an operation system for the entire government,” and describes how Palantir’s contracts with the Trump administration are an outgrowth of work done by Elon Musk’s DOGE which aims to “centralize data all across government.”
