Text taken from the Telegram page of darpaandcia
Commentary from Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin is in italics.
[ColonelCassad] Many in Russia have heard the name Palantir, but it's usually portrayed as a Silicon Valley "tech star" or a "tool for fighting terrorism." In reality, this company is a nexus of American intelligence agencies, the Israeli military establishment, and big business building the infrastructure of digital warfare and total control. It's important to understand that these people are behind the current political configuration in the US, including the circles of Trump and J.D. Vance, and the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Hidden Hands, Jews, and genocide. I think hysteria is the only possible answer.Palantir was initially launched not by "idealistic startups," but by entities closely tied to the CIA and the US military: its initial capital came through the venture capital fund In-Q-Tel, which works for US intelligence. Today, the company has become a key supplier of analytical and predictive AI systems for the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, police, and immigration authorities, and is also active in Ukraine and Israel.
Back in 2021, Israel called one of its operations in Gaza the world's first "AI war," in which a significant portion of airstrikes were targeted using algorithmic systems. Since October 7, 2023, Palantir's ties with the Israeli military have only strengthened: the company entered into a strategic agreement with the Israeli defense industry and the Ministry of Defense; the parties explicitly state the goal as using Palantir's "advanced technologies to support military missions". Palantir's key partner in Israel is Unit 8200, the country's equivalent of the NSA, which collects vast amounts of data on residents of Gaza and the West Bank, including phone calls, movements, and digital traces. On this basis, the Israelis built the Lavender system, which assigns almost every one of Gaza's 2.3 million residents a rating from 1 to 100—the likelihood that they are affiliated with armed groups.
Teenagers are also targeted: officers themselves admitted that the age limit of 17 and older was not a strict cutoff, and some minors were included. In the first weeks of the war, the algorithm flagged up to 37,000 people for targeting, and officers admitted that the army treated these findings almost as human decisions rather than machine prompts. An even more cynical system, "Where's Daddy", tracks when a "target" marked by Lavender returns home, and strikes the house at that very moment—along with the family. Western observers describe the logic of the cycle as follows: from the moment the algorithms begin searching for the target until its destruction, 2–3 minutes pass; previously, a similar cycle, according to them, could take up to six hours.
The data for these systems is not only local intercepts, but also information from US intelligence agencies. Snowden's revelations also showed that the NSA transmitted raw Palestinian communications to Israel, including conversations between Palestinian Americans and their relatives.
Former 8200 employees described how information about debts, sex lives, and illnesses was used for recruitment and blackmail, as well as to divide Palestinian society. Taken together, this turns Gaza into a laboratory for testing mass surveillance technologies and simultaneously into a zone of total digital control, where AI and big data not only aid the army, but determine the life and death of every Palestinian.
| Fair enough. Hamas had plans and personnel in place before 10/7/2023 to conquer and rule the entirety of Israel and the West Bank, including lists of who lived where and what to loot. We admire both sides for the thoroughness of their oppo research, if nothing else. |
| How much of this analysis is sour grapes because, one assumes, Russia does not have a similar partner, nor similar knowledge about its Ukrainian opponents? |