Here’s What Palantir Is Really Building

0:03Hello, and welcome to the 404 Media podcast, where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.co. As well as bonus content every single week, subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. gain access to that content at 404media.co. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are all of the 404 Media co-founders. The first being Sam Cole. Hey. Emmanuel Mayberg. And Jason Kebler.

0:40Emanuel:Hello, hello. Jason, do you briefly want to explain why your background looks a little different? Why there's a mosquito net behind me? Yeah, I'm on Lamu Island in Kenya. which is not where I normally record. I was invited to take part in this AI conference, AI and Journalism conference, and specifically how to keep humans relevant in the age of AI. So I've taken a very long trip, very lucky to be here. And I'm actually going to be doing a little bit of reporting while I'm here. Kenya is like a hotbed of data labeling, which is like content moderation for ChatGPT and AI tools, as well as training a lot of these tools.

1:29Emanuel:So I'm meeting with some folks here. We'll probably record some podcast material for the future. But this is... It's been a really very fun trip for me. Very lucky to do it. I've met a lot of really great Kenyan journalists, including a lot of people who focus on the same things that we do, like surveillance and privacy and things like that in a much different context. So hopefully we'll be able to have a little bit more info about that on future episodes and talk to some of them about some of the work that they're doing while I'm here. Yeah, that sounds really, really interesting. And do you want to take us through this first story?

2:12Emanuel:Yeah, so let's first talk about this story. It's called Elite. Elite is in quotes. the Palantir app Ice uses to find neighborhoods to raid. This is kind of the latest on our reporting on the surveillance tools that Ice uses and specifically the latest in a series of stories that you've been doing about Palantir. Do you just want to give us some of the background about how you got started on this story before we jump into specifically what Elite is? yeah so as you say we've been covering ice and its technological backbone and palantir stuff for a while you know months ago we first revealed that palantir was getting much closer to ice with a leak through palantir and some public procurement records i looked at with this story i was hearing about something called elite and i didn't really know what it was there were just rumblings of it And then eventually, I got this user guide, which explained in much more detail what it was, what it was capable of.

3:23And of course, we'll get into that a little bit shortly as well. And then also this testimony from Oregon, which, again, we'll get into more specifics in a minute, but ICE and Customs and Border Protection officials talking really explicitly about not just this elite tool, but also mobile Fortify, the facial recognition app that we've covered, and some other stuff as well. and then of course I found the Palantir connection as well which frankly when I figured that out it was oh I have to write this quickly because this is uh this is taking on a new sense of urgency that not there wasn't important before of course but as soon as you realize Palantir is involved I mean I think people are interested in that uh for better and for worse sometimes it seems sort of this omnipotent sort of bogeyman that can do anything.

4:14But I think it's really important to know what Palantir is doing during the second Trump administration. So this story sort of brought all of that together.

4:24Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, I think some of our first reporting on the Trump administration and on ICE's activities were about some legacy contracts that Palantir had with the Department of Homeland Security to build these big databases for the government. soon after things started there was this reporting about something called immigration os and something that was never really clear to me at the time was like what was or what is immigration os like we had these contracts we had this name immigration os we knew that it probably had something to do with aggregating data and providing it to ice but with elite which you know there's all these names floating around like i I don't actually know if Elite is part of Immigration OS or if Immigration OS has become Elite or whatever.

5:12But we now know about this program called Elite.

5:17Emanuel:So that is being used by ICE right now. What is it and what is its purpose? Yeah, it's a dedicated tool for ICE to basically acquire lists of targets or people, obviously. And I should say that maybe as a force of habit, I'll use the word target just because that's sort of the terminology that Ice uses in the user guide. But of course, I'm talking about people, individuals, human beings. So I apologize if I lean on that term. But I remember when you were editing, Jason, you were like, it's okay to use target a couple of times. But do I not use it during the entire copy? Which I did because I was just referencing the material.

6:00But just keep that in mind. So it allows us to draw a list of people from a particular neighborhood, drill down on them, and then export these lists of people that they want to target or detain. It's meant to be basically the entire lifecycle from, well, let's find a neighborhood. Okay, well, let's find who lives there. Well, now let's get a list of those people. Now let's have a supervisor approve this operation and then go out. And to make it a little bit more tangible, one part of it is a geospatial interface, or rather it's a maps interface, right? So ICE can, kind of like the tool we spoke about last week, which was different, to be clear, they can draw a shape on a map, you know, a circle or a rectangle or whatever.

6:47The map will be populated with all of the people that ICE may wish to target there. you can then click on an individual person, bring up their dossier, and that will have their name, their date of birth, a photo of them, if that's available, and their current or known address. And this is the most important part, I think, because it also comes with a confidence score. Let's say it will be 88.2 out of 100 or 79 out of 100. And that is based on where the data is coming from and its recency. And I've mentioned this before, but as we keep covering ICE and its technology and its data sharing agreements, one thing comes up over and over and over again.

7:38It's addresses. ICE wants them. It is like gold for them where they can go, we believe this person is at this location or this apartment block or this particular flat or apartment or whatever. that is what they're trying to get. We've seen that where they've hired bounty hunters and PIs to verify addresses. So this elite tool essentially brings all of that together. Now, I don't mean all of the data. We'll get into where some of it comes from, but I don't know where it's all coming from necessarily. But it's to turn that data that ICE has going into this tool into something they can actually act on.

8:18It's not like an abstract technology product over here doing something that we can't really visualize or think about or sort of touch or understand. This is what it seems ICE is using to actually plan where to go and who to pick up.

8:37Emanuel:Yeah, I mean, that's part of the headline where it's like the Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid, which I guess we'll talk a little bit more about this case in Oregon in a minute. But was there anything else from the user guide that you sort of wanted to highlight before we get into that? Yeah, I think it would just be some of the data sources. So again, with the addresses, there was a little bit in the user guide that said, hey, the address confidence score is this new feature in Elite. And those addresses come from, it says, the Department of Health, which is pretty interesting.

9:15A lot of people aren't going to assume that data from the health department is going to be used for immigration enforcement. But obviously, this is a different world now. There's mentions of USCIS, which is part of DHS as well, right? And then there's also a mention of CLEAR, which it is hard to report when companies don't respond to requests for comment. We don't think it's CLEAR, as in the system lets you go through the airport quicker, right? It seems to me that it's probably Thompson Reuters data product called Clear. Reuters has sold tons of data to the government in the past. They regularly contract with ICE.

10:00We've covered that before. So it looks like they gain data from that as well. That being said, I don't know if that's all of the data sources. Like, oh, remember all of that stuff about the IRS giving addresses to ICE? Could that be fed into here? I don't know. like potentially but those were the ones that were mentioned in the user guides at least yeah so um

10:24Emanuel:i mean i i know you had sort of like sourcing on this and that sort of thing but the government actually has talked about the use of elite uh in this case in oregon and you got testimony from that case from i believe it was an ice officer or maybe a dhs official. So what is the case in Oregon and what did you learn through that testimony? Yeah. So the case in Oregon is about a woman whose initials in the court records are MJMA, if I'm recalling correctly. And she was detained along with around 30 other people during an immigration raid in Oregon in October, I think. She was briefly detained, taken to a facility then released with no conditions by ICE in the testimony she said that she entered the U.S.

11:18repeatedly on a tourist visa she's now seeking asylum so that's sort of the context of this case and she's suing the government because to protect her constitutional rights I believe that's all well and good that's the context but there's a ton of interesting stuff in the testimony of that case from ICE officials, from officials from Customs and Border Protection as well. And there are mentions of elite in there where they say, this is the ICE official, I believe, yes, you use elite to find densely populated areas. Like you're not going to go to a house that just has one pin on it. You're going to, say, go to an apartment complex with a load of pins on it because there's probably going to be more people to arrest or detain there.

12:07And in text messages... Sorry, so when you say density, though,

12:11Emanuel:when you say density, it's not density of just like people living there. It's like density of suspected, undocumented immigrants. It's like density of potential targets, right? Yes, density of potential targets. That's absolutely it. Now, you know, there are, of course, some questions it raises such as, well, how reliable is the data? that ICE would have on undocumented people. If they're getting data from, you know, DHS and USCIS, isn't that going to be people legally in the country? And it's going to be very case by case. And frankly, it's quite messy. But they have a lot of data here to go on.

12:51And that's apparently what they're using it for. So that case, MJMA's case, It was actually reported briefly by local Oregon media in December, because there was a hearing that month. And there was a very brief mention of the mobile Fortify app being used on that woman and returning the wrong name twice. You know, we picked up on that and fleshed that out with some additional reporting as well. And of course, it tied into the elite Palantir piece here as well. and I should just say that you know we left Vice well because the company was falling apart obviously and it was going bankrupt but one of the catalyzing events for me to you know leave and then make this with all of you was that one day I tried to get some court records for my job at Vice looking up some court case which you do every single day and it's supposed to cost 10 cents and couldn't do it because Vice wasn't paying his credit card bills, apparently.

13:59In this case, I email the court, I get a quote for$650 for these court transcripts, which is a lot of money. That's just how much transcripts cost. But we could just do it because we own the company now. If we're like, it's probably worth paying$650 to get this very, very important transcript, which has already resulted in two really, really important stories. It's just refreshing that we're able to do that. I just wanted to mention that.

14:28Emanuel:And we published the transcript too, so you don't have to pay$600, which is nice. Yes. So you mentioned Palantir a lot. Palantir's in the headline. We know Palantir made this. But the user guide you have actually doesn't say that, I don't think. So you had to sort of establish that link. Can you talk how you did that? Yes. So in the testimony and when I heard about Elite, it was just spelled either as a single word or an acronym or just by itself. But this user guide spelled it out. And it's a really, really complicated one. I'm actually pulling up the Wikipedia. Somebody has added our article to the Palantir Wikipedia because I can't access the site right now on this screen.

15:17But it stands for Enhanced Leads Identification and Targeting for Enforcement. That is the spelled acronym that was in the user guide. And I thought, well, what exactly does that relate to? So I googled it, literally that phrase. The only result on the internet at the time was an additional piece of information in a Palantir contract, where it said Palantir was being paid$29.9 million for work on a few other things, but including configuration of enhanced leads identification and targeting for enforcement. So it is clear that Palantir is working on this in some capacity. Now, did Palantir originally design the system?

16:05Did Palantir build it from the ground up? Are they just setting it up and then somebody else is going to take over? That isn't clear. It just says they provided some sort of continuing configuration on this system. But for me, that's an incredibly strong link where I've never seen the acronym anywhere else except in this Palantir contract. I mean, I think the connection is pretty clear.

16:28Emanuel:Yeah, I guess just to round this out, what comes next? Like, what's your takeaway from this? And then, I mean, presumably we're going to continue to follow the use of this and other related tools. But yeah, what do you think this shows? I think for what comes next, presumably they'll put more data in there. Part of the user guide says it's integrating new data sources. So it sort of leaves open the possibility of adding more. But my main takeaway is that I kind of touched on it a little bit earlier. but we've been covering for months that there's all of this abstract technology being built and it's sort of happening over there in the background or in the shadows.

17:16And even when we've got leaks from inside Palantir describing the company's work with ICE, it's always been quite abstract and obscure. And you can't really put your finger on it because it's just dressed in all of these very confusing acronyms and technical jargon and all of that. This story, I think, is the clearest example yet of what Palantir is building and what ICE is actually doing on the ground. It is clear that this tool is part of ICE's mass deportation effort, because that is literally what it's designed for. And now we've seen that there is a through line between the tech that Palantir is making and what is happening on the ground.

17:59It's a combination of all those things. It's the user guide. It's the testimony from Oregon. It's the public procurement records. And yeah, I just think this is the clearest link between the company and what is actually happening.

18:10Emanuel:All right. Let's leave that there. Yeah. Yeah. And when we come back after the break, we're going to talk about one Emanuel worked on about... Well, maybe just wait and see. We'll be right back after this.

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22:42All right, and we are back. Emmanuel wrote this one, as I said, and the headline is Instagram AI Influencers Are Defaming Celebrities With Sex Scandals. Honestly, I had to read the lead like a couple of times just to get my head around it because I'm sure it's very clear to you, Emmanuel, very simple, but I've been out of the loop of what these AI influencers are doing for a minute and this kind of spun me out. To start, can you give us some examples of some of these images that are being posted? Then we'll get into the how and the why. But what are we looking at when we're talking about this?

23:19Yeah, that's fair. It is confusing. I kind of had the same experience when I tried to write it down. uh we all look at instagram and i think jason and i especially get a lot of ai generated content and ai generated influencer content and i look at it every day so i'm steeped in it and it all seems very obvious and regular to me until you try to describe what is actually happening and then it's extremely weird and convoluted. But to your question, I think a good example for one of these images is, or the post rather, is it's an Instagram reel. You will see a very realistic looking image of a woman courtside at a basketball game taking a selfie with LeBron James and it will say how it started and then it will play a song and cut to an image of the same woman and LeBron James in bed, under the cover, with their shirts off, all sweaty, hair tussled, obviously seeming like they've just had sex.

24:43And again, very convincing image. Sometimes it's an image, Sometimes it's a slightly animated video. And that is just one example of many. Like any celebrity that you can imagine, there is a video of them with the exact same format. And they are all over Instagram Reels. Gotcha. But just to clarify, obviously, the Mike Tyson or the LeBron James or whoever the celebrity is, they're not real. obviously that is an AI generation of that celebrity but also the other person who is allegedly taking a selfie with LeBron or whoever is also not real I think that is as you say you know somewhat obvious to all three of you where you've looked at this AI stuff a lot but maybe people who are just coming to this might be scratching their heads being like wait the the influencer is not real either can you just briefly explain that yeah in the vast majority of cases, I think there are outliers and we can maybe talk about those, but in the vast majority of cases, the personality behind the account that is posting this content is itself an AI generated woman, female character, almost certainly created by a man.

26:12And Jason and I have done a ton of reporting about the people who create these accounts and looks very realistic. But yes, entirely AI generated. Gotcha. Well, on that, who is making these AI images then? Is it grifters? Is it people trying to make money? Is it people just looking for cloud? What's a profile of somebody who is making this? Yeah, so I think it was a year ago now, Jason and I wrote this article and have done a few follow-ups since. But I think we're due for a refresher or a couple new stories about what's happening in this space. But it is a community of people who are kind of like in this hustle bro culture, get rich quick scheme culture who are just into this latest fad in the same way that they are into drop shipping or cryptocurrency or what have you.

27:21You can plug into this whole community that exists on Instagram and Discord and other places and learn how to AI generate a personality, gain traction with that personality on Instagram, and then funnel users via that attention to other places online where you can monetize that same AI generated personality by selling AI generated nude photos of them. So that's the play. It's to basically entice people with, oh, look, I have a sex tape with Mike Tyson or whatever. I know they don't say sex tape necessarily, but you see what I'm getting at. They say that and then drive them to an OnlyFans or an OnlyFans equivalent.