Recently on Hide & Speak, host Chris and Nathan from [vp.net](http://vp.net) brought back The Hated One to break down how Palantir embedded itself in the federal government.

The timeline he walked through is the part that stuck with us:

* March 20, 2025: Executive Order 14243 required every federal agency to grant access to unclassified data across the government, including state programs funded federally. The walls between IRS, HHS, CDC, and ICE data were decades-old privacy protections, not paperwork accidents.
* April 2025: ICE awarded Palantir a $30 million no-bid contract to build ImmigrationOS. Its existing ICE deal has now grown past $145 million.
* A tool called ELITE pulls home address data from HHS and produces a map of deportation targets with a confidence score on each person's location.

Palantir was founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel with seed money from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm. CEO Alex Karp named it after the seeing-stones in Lord of the Rings, the objects the story itself describes as a path to corruption.

The Hated One's read on fighting back is local, not federal. Ban facial recognition in your city. Drop surveillance contracts. Move public computers to open-source software, the way one German state is doing.

Full write-up and our sources: [https://s.vp.net/s6TWw](https://s.vp.net/s6TWw)

Watch the full discussion: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2iZuSsnJYk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2iZuSsnJYk)

Palantir went from a two-page executive order to a working ICE deportation-mapping tool in five months