Peter Thiel & The Privatised Surveillance State
Thiel, Big data, AI and Genomics series Part I
Knowledge is Power
in June 2021 a group of researchers from multiple institutions released a paper “Stewardship of global collective behaviour” that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. Techpolicy Press reported on the paper.
“The structure of our social networks and the patterns of information that flow through them are directed by engineering decisions designed to maximise profitability.” The social changes technology has contributed to are “drastic, opaque, effectively unregulated, and massive in scale.”
“We have built and adopted technology that alters behaviour at global scales without a theory of what will happen or a coherent strategy for reducing harms.” Said Joseph B Bak-Coleman, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington’s Centre for an Informed Public and the lead author of the paper.
“The vulnerability of these systems to misinformation and disinformation pose a dire threat to health, peace, global climate and more.”
In an age of big data and privatised military psy-ops, of digital profiling and behavioural microtargeting, who controls our data is surely a matter of national security. It’s been said that if you aren’t paying for a product then you are the product, or more specifically the data being collected on you is the product.
Value of Biotech
Data certainly has value, the valuation of Meta (Facebook) is estimated to be around $700billion while advertising is the main source of revenue the true value of Facebook is in the data it collects. Google bought FitBit for $2.1billion at the end of 2019, with FitBit’s CEO explaining the valuation as “ultimately FitBit is going to be about the data. The company 23andme, which maps people’s ancestry based on their DNA, controversially made millions of dollars selling the behavioural, health, and genetic insights it had accumulated from its huge customer-base to Big Pharma and biotechnology companies, as reported by Amnesty International who have also described the emerging data market.
“As companies scramble to create an even more intimate marketplace of our data – one that trades in insights about our biological selves – you don’t need to strain hard to imagine the endgame. Start-ups like China-based iCarbonX, dubbed “the next Google in BioTech”, have painted that vision for us. iCarbonX reportedly wants to capture more data about your body that has even before been possible- combining genetic sequencing, data from frequent blood tests, microbiome insights and physical data from both wearable fitness devices and products like their smart mirror, which, according to their CEO, aims to produce “an exact 3-D figure of you: the fat, the muscle—your entire body shape, plus facial recognition, and what’s going on with your skin”. The main product currently advertised on the company’s website? A covid-19 testing kit.
Digital Oligarchs
Rapid and reliable data has been essential to inform policy makers during the pandemic, however its important to ask who collects, stores, and uses our data and for what purpose. Can we trust the government to protect our data?
The “tech bros” of Silicon Valley are the industrialists of the digital age, joining the ranks of the Oligarchs of the West, they lack transparency and are barely accountable to elected Governments. Six years after the Cambridge Analytica scandal around the Brexit vote and Trump’s election the UK authorities have given up their investigations despite judgements of lawbreaking which have yielded no significant consequences for those involved or the implementation of measures to better protect us in the future. Meanwhile legal cases in the US continue to chip away at the wall of obfuscation created by Mark Zuckerberg, while also having to sort through the aftermath of the 6 January Insurrection.
How data can be collected, stored, shared and used is significant for democracy and human rights, and the public are more aware of the issues of the misuse of Government held data, China’s social credit system being the most common example, however many democracies are now outsourcing data management to private companies owned by foreign billionaires. During the pandemic many governments have awarded high value contracts for sensitive information like covid data, healthcare, genomic, traffic movement, border control and healthcare.to companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir, often without tendering or media attention.
If knowledge is power, how powerful would one person be if they accumulated control of the data collected by the governments of North America and Europe. What if that person was known to support anti-democratic ideology, was one of the largest political donors in the world and had a long record of using big tech for systematic abuses of human rights? This isn’t a hypothetical, welcome to the world of Peter Thiel.
Who is Peter Thiel
A German-American born in 1967 in Frankfurt, who spent part of his early years in South Africa before moving to Ohio is often described as having been a geeky student in the 1980’s, dungeons and dragons, speed chess and mathematics being his hobbies, his love of Lord of the Rings is well known having taken the names for several of his many companies from Tolkien’s work. As a student he was influenced by reading Aryn Rand, Hayek and others who are considered the intellectual foundations of the libertarian movement. While studying philosophy at Stanford University Thiel set up his own campus newspaper to oppose the University’s reforms that he views as an example of political correctness, it was an early sign of the man he would become, now in his late fifties he has invested considerable money and effort into culture war battles.
His first company Thiel Capital, founded mainly with money from family and friends was a hedge fund trading in derivatives but the making of his fortune came with the creation of Paypal which was the merger of his own Confinity company and Elon Musk’s X.com. After becoming CEO after a board revolt removed Musk, Thiel took the company public and eight months later the company had been bought by Ebay for $1.5billion.
Thiel would continue to work with Musk on a range of projects, including Space X which he backed through the venture capital firm Founders Fund created in 2005. Founders Firm primarily invests in genomic sequencing technology, aerospace and life extension, however it also helped launch Lift, Airbnb and Affirm as start ups. Recently he has begun investing in crypto-currencies putting funding into Bullish a crypto exchange.
Life Extension and AI Singularity
Suggestions his interest in genetics and life extension stem from the belief he might achieve immortality are less fanciful than some might think. In the libertarian journal Cato Unbound linked to the Koch backed Cato Institute Thiel wrote “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual.” On Bloomberg TV Thiel explained that part of his plan to live to 120 years of age was taking human growth hormone pills. “It helps maintain muscle mass, so you’re much less likely to get bone injuries, arthritis.” Thiel has also shown an interest in parabiosis, receiving regular blood transfusions from younger people. Another company, Unity Biotechnology is in clinical trials for stem cell based drugs and he is involved in multiple companies researching DNA testing, editing and genetic engineering including Halycon Molecular, Pathway Genomics, Juvensence and Imatato.
Thiel is a partner in many other investment funds including Y Combinator, Valar Ventures and Mithril Capital and the Thiel Foundation that funds breakthrough technologies like the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, The Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Human Rights Foundation.
The concept of an AI singularity is used in several popular science fiction books, a super intelligence of such scale that it assimilates the universe's data becoming godlike. Palantir is currently working on an AI programme for the US military to develop fully independent drone systems capable of identifying and striking targets without human input. Human rights organisations around the world have raised concerns around these kind of automated kill systems due to the difficulties in addressing responsibility for accountability if such a system were to hit a civilian target.
Philanthropic donations to protect journalists seems at odds with the way Thiel went about bankrupting the Gawker blog for intruding into his private life by revealing he was gay, however its his donations to the Human Rights Foundation which is the greatest contradiction considering the digital surveillance tools other branches of his corporate empire have produced.
In 2004 Thiel was an early Facebook investor buying a 10% stake for $500,000 that would yield close to a billion dollars of profit by 2021 when he sold most of his shares. His position on the Facebook board is the subject of multiple controversies with questions raised regarding political influence which committees and investigations were still seeking answers for in 2022 when he announced his departure from the board to focus on politics.
Palantir
Named after the mystical orbs in Lord of the Rings that allowed their users to spy, communicate and manipulate, Palantir is one Thiel’s core companies. Founded in 2003 with funding from Thiel and the CIA, Palantir has become an important part of privatised military, intelligence and police services in the US. A benefit of privatised intelligence services is they provide a degree of separation for state institutions from some of the more questionable actions conducted in the name of counter terrorism and national security. Operating through private entities allows plausible deniability and puts additional barriers in the way of freedom of information.
Rodger McNamee, an early Facebook investor said “Palantir exists to allow law enforcement to investigate citizens without obtaining a warrant… the business model of Palantir undermines civil rights'', while Palantir’s mission statement is “To become the default operating system for data across the US govt.”
While offering services to corporate clients through Palantir Foundry, Palantir’s early growth was through its role in President Bush Jnr’s War on Terrorism through Palantir Gotham which has worked with many US government agencies from the Intelligence Community and Department of Denfense, to police departments and fraud investigations. Other government groups to have used Palantir up to 2013 included the CIA, Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operational Command, the US Military Academy, the FBI, the NSA and the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization.
During the Obama administration Palantir’s work on fighting fraud for the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board was expanded to other government agencies including Medicare and Medicaid. By 2014 Palantir was one of the most valuable private tech firms in Silicon Valley with government contracts estimated to be worth close to a billion dollars.
Predictive Policing
In recent years Palantir has continued developing digital surveillance tools, what was initially used by military intelligence operations in other countries is increasingly being offered to governments to use domestically and to private companies to monitor their employees. Palantir Metropolis compiles data sets from a range of sources to discover trends, relationships and anomalies including predictive analytics.
An example of this in the private secretary is JP Morgan who in 2009 had the support of a team of 120 forward deployed engineers who had access to information like emails, download activity, browser histories, GPS locations, and recorded phone conversations to analyse patterns of behaviour and use of trigger phrases to identify potentially disgruntled employees. Flagged employees would be subjected to further investigation and even physical surveillance.
Police departments are making use of Metropolis for predictive policing projects where algorithms sort through masses of data to identify individuals who may potentially commit crime or have gang connections. One of the early examples of this was the New Orleans Police Department who provided Palantir with access to large data sets of government controlled data including criminal records and the police encounter forms that must be completed after every stop and search. Palantir would analyse this data and produce watch lists which would inform the allocation of police resources.
The service had been offered to New Orleans Police for free as a philanthropic act, meaning usual public procurement and tendering processes were bypassed. Palantirs involvement with law enforcement and its access to personal information was only made public after several years of use due to evidence provided in court during the prosecution of gang members. Civil rights campaigners were dismayed that such an infringement on personal privacy had occurred in complete secrecy; there is still a lack of transparency regarding the full details of Palantir’s work with the New Orleans Police Department. Members of law enforcement questioned if the resources allocated to monitoring and acting on the watch lists was cost effective when what crime stricken areas needed was investment in their communities and access to opportunity and jobs.
Education Data
Defend Digital Me, a data protection charity in the UK brought to attention in early 2019 concerns that companies working on predictive analytics were increasingly present at the investor fairs they attended. Alarmingly were suggestions made about making use of the national pupil database and schools data in predictive policing, by law schools must hold a lot of data for a range of perfectly good reasons such as safeguarding, educational health support plans and medical needs and they also track student behaviour, this is stored through a range of privately owned programmes. One firm looking for investment was offering to develop an algorithm to process UCAS applications for universities, removing much of the need for human input; it would draw up short lists and suggest entry grade requirements for students. The concerns are that groups already underrepresented at universities could receive less favourable treatment due to their circumstances rather than their aptitude.
Clearview AI and White Supremacy
In 2018 Thiel invested in the facial recognition company Clearview AI, a year old start up led by Australian CEO Hoan Ton-That. An investigation by the Huffington Post found evidence that Ton-That had collaborated with Chuck Johnson in the development of the Clearview AI, Johnson is a former writer for Steve Bannon’s far-right Breitbart newsnight, the investigation also revealed Ton-That’s affiliations with other members of the far-right including Mike Cernovich and neo-Nazi hacker Andrew Auernheimer. It’s reported Ton-That met his Clearview co-founder Richard Schwartz at the Manhattan Institute, another free market think tank founded by Hayek inspired Anthony Fisher whose other contributions to libertarian lobbying include the creation of the IEA and the Atlas Network. The Huffington Post identified a Slack channel from 2016 that contained Ton-That and other members involved in the original development of Clearview alongside individuals linked to alt-right white supremacy including Charles C Johnson who was one of several notable far-right trolls found to have personal accounts with Clearview.
Clearview is building a database of facial photographs harvested from the internet and social media apps without consent, offering customers the service of its algorithm to match faces to the database. In 2020 Clearview had accumulated three billion images, by 2022 the company announced it had reached 10 billion images but with the additional $50million it was in the process of securing it promised investors it would reach its target of 100billion images with the aim of making almost everyone in the world identifiable.
As with Palantir’s predictive analytics being used by the New Orleans Police Department, Clearview worked in almost complete secrecy until an investigation by the New York Times revealed it has over 3,100 users including many law enforcement agencies, the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and a range of private companies. After the NYT investigation Twitter tried to have images scraped from their site deleted from Clearview’s database with a cease and desist order, however Ton-That refused, arguing that the images had been put into a public space. At the start of 2020 Google, Youtube, Facebook and Venmo also sent cease and desist letters, again Ton-That refused, claiming a right to the information due to the first amendment. Throughout 2021 Clearview was subjected to legal complaints regarding the violation of European privacy laws from numerous countries including the UK, however while some law enforcement agencies in North America and Europe have decided against the use of Clearview on ethical grounds the company’s customer base is growing around the world and was estimated to be valued at around $100million in early 2022.
The Problem with Algorithms
The problem with algorithms is that even if they aren’t designed to produce disproportionate outcomes, they are only as good as the input data. If there is systematic inequality or institutional prejudice towards certain groups then the data collected will be skewed and the algorithm will reinforce prejudices. Take drug use for example, certain communities face higher rates of stop and search, if found in possession they are more likely to be prosecuted and taken to court, and in court they are more likely to receive harsher sentences. The algorithm then diverts more resources to policing these communities, meaning the drug users in the area are more likely to be caught, meanwhile as resources are diverted away from more affluent areas the likelihood of middle and upper class drug users being caught and prosecuted becomes even less likely. The data then shows increasingly disproportionate offending rates which leads to more resources being diverted into targeting certain communities, and in the process an increasing number of innocent people will find themselves facing police scrutiny for little more than their postcode and the school they went to.
Such analytical tools could probably be put to fantastic use in revealing the flow of dark money that makes its way into extremist groups and political corruption around the world, for cutting down abuses of philanthropic tax exemptions and the shadow banking system centred around London and British overseas territories, however these surveillance tools seem primarily aimed at the disadvantaged and marginalised.
What future awaits us with such tools in the hands of those with anti-democratic attitudes and links to white supremacy? Consider former Cambridge Analytica psychologist Patrick Fagan’s comments at the behavioural science conference Nudgestock2020 regarding facial structure being an indicator of criminality.
We should all be concerned about our governments handing over vast amounts of our data to such companies without tendering or transparency.
Part II of Thiel, Big data, AI and Genomics will look at the anti-democratic Dark Enlightenment and the Charter Cities project that seeks to remove democratic processes and accountability.