For Trump, LA is just the beginning. Soon, he’ll monitor every move Americans make

In real time, we are watching the United States of America slide further into authoritarianism. As the administration’s response to protests in Los Angeles escalates, President Donald Trump’s handling of the issue must be understood in the context of his broader assault on democracy and the rule of law.

If deploying the National Guard and the marines to control citizens exercising their democratic right to protest was not a clear enough message, on Monday, Trump said that “it would be a great thing” if Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor of California, was arrested over his opposition to the federal government’s intervention.

President Donald Trump said he would support the governor of California being arrested. Credit: AP

Another alarming example of encroachment on citizen’s rights is the recent news that the Trump administration is engaging the US-based tech company Palantir to merge government data to create one enormous mega-centre of personal information on citizens. Here, it joins China and Russia in the use of mass surveillance to monitor and control its people.

The notoriously secretive tech company already has deep connections to the US government, particularly to the Central Intelligence Agency and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement – the agency that provoked the protests in California as it carried out raids and mass arrests of illegal immigrants across Los Angeles late last week.

In its contract with ICE, Palantir is developing a surveillance platform that will allow the government to prioritise people for deportation, track deportations, and streamline “deportation logistics”.

And in yet another government contract revealed last month, Palantir will scrape, consolidate and analyse federal data on the health, finances and education of Americans for the Trump administration. This could give the government what the New York Times has described as “untold surveillance power”. Critics of the project argue that providing Trump with what amounts to detailed portraits of civilians could be used to silence or punish critics of the administration.

This mass surveillance program potentially encompasses all of American life. And unlike the phone and internet records secretly collected by the National Security Agency (as revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013), this technology is far more sophisticated, far more wide-ranging in scope, less understood, and less regulated.

In J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, the word “palantir” refers to powerful crystal balls. Made by ancient elves and used to see events of the past and future, the empire-building Sauron had one, which he could use to corrupt all others. In the real world, Palantir was co-founded by billionaire activist Peter Thiel, Elon Musk’s erstwhile mentor and a long-term supporter of Vice President J.D. Vance, as well as one of the many far-right tech bros currently propping up and profiting from the Trump administration.

Palantir is unapologetically ideological. The company’s leaders frame its work as a defence of “the West” in response to its decline – a decline driven, as they see it, by “woke” agendas and efforts to redistribute wealth and power. Like Trump, they see oppression and violence as necessary to winning the war against such forces.

In February, Mother Jones reported that Palantir CEO Alex Karp had told investors: “We are crushing it. We are dedicating our company to the service of the West and the United States of America, and we’re super proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”

On the same call, Karp later said, “Palantir is here to disrupt ... and, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies, and, on occasion, to kill them.”

And now, Palantir has been tasked with building the eye of Sauron in America.

The type of surveillance Palantir has been tasked with is not new. America already has mass surveillance.

But what is significantly different here is the nature of that surveillance, and how it will be used to implement Trump’s authoritarian agenda. In a democracy, the rights of citizens, including the right to privacy, are central. But with such detailed information on anybody and everybody available to the administration, it’s feasible to imagine civilians being targeted and tracked for perceived wrongs such as donating to rival political parties, or private health data such as addiction treatment or abortion being weaponised against them (the latter of which recently happened in Texas).

None of this can be understood in isolation. The surveillance empire Trump is constructing sits alongside a concerted effort to suppress both democratic dissent and minority groups. During the Black Lives Matter protests across the US, similar surveillance technology was used to identify and target protesters. It’s also been used in the recent attacks on US universities.

With crackdowns at universities such as Harvard and Columbia, and now with the Los Angeles protests, Trump is simply laying the groundwork for what comes next.

In May, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem made it clear that the president and his administration have no care for constitutional limits on executive power, or for the rule of law. Asked to define habeas corpus, Noem said it allowed the president to unilaterally remove people from the United States. (In fact, it is the fundamental constitutional right requiring the government to present a valid reason for arrest and imprisonment.)

None of this is just a matter for the US, either. As much as we might wish that it was, we cannot draw arbitrary lines between what happens domestically in America and what it does abroad.

Australia is already integrated into the American military industrial complex. Through its membership of the Five Eyes intelligence grouping, Australia was implicated in Snowden’s revelations about NSA spying over a decade ago. Since then, our integration has only deepened.

We can now add Palantir to the long list of reasons to rethink the nature of our relationship with the US. Because Trump’s vision for America, and the rest of the world, is truly dystopian. With the support of Palantir and other tech companies, the administration is undermining all of the institutions and norms of American democracy.

Dr Emma Shortis is director of the international and security affairs program at The Australia Institute.