A new report from 972 Magazine lays out how a Palantir program called Maven can pull data from satellites, drones, intercepted calls, and basically the entire digital footprint of Gaza to “shrink the kill chain.” That’s Palantir’s own term.
What does that mean? It means to kill people faster. A soldier sees a target on a screen and an AI instantly sweeps their life, associations, movement, and now their social media history to generate a justification to kill them in real time. The military is also using an AI program called Dataminr, which can scrape social networks to produce what it calls “risk intelligence.” Said something online five years ago? Mentioned the wrong group? Liked the wrong post? Fire!
And as terrifying as this is, the worst mistake you could make is assuming it stays over there. Palantir has openly lobbied to deploy these systems inside the United States during periods of “domestic unrest.” Combine that with an administration that believes “domestic terrorists” are a meaningful internal category, and it’s not hard to guess where this is headed.
Domestic terrorists are not a thing for a reason. The Constitution does not allow the government to label dissenters as terrorists. If it could, that would give federal agencies the same surveillance powers Israel uses against Palestinians to monitor, catalog, investigate, and neutralize political opponents.
The federal government can prosecute crimes and seek warrants for suspected criminals. It cannot prosecute ideology. It cannot target citizens for their beliefs.
But the software exists now and once you build a kill chain, the only thing that changes is the target. Switch “Hamas fighters” to “domestic extremists,” and the machinery stays exactly the same. These systems create permanent, AI-generated enemy lists that never expire. “Optimizing the kill chain” also means automating the propaganda chain and expanding the pool of people flagged as suspicious.
That’s why this is genuinely dystopian.
.svg){kind=logo}
By Independent News Roundup