The good news is that we will not need to file our tax returns within a few years. That should make former Speaker Paul Ryan happy! The bad news is that a little-known corporation recently energized by Trump and DOGE will know everything about you, and thus, there will be no reason to report to the IRS. I doubt that this corporation will stop with monitoring our tax responsibilities.
In 2011, a television series entitled Person of Interest was first broadcast. It lasted six seasons and won nine Emmy awards. The storyline from IMDB.com is:
A billionaire software-genius named Harold Finch creates a Machine for the government that is designed to detect acts of terror before they can happen, by monitoring the entire world through every cellphone, email and surveillance camera. Finch discovered that the machine sees everything, potential terrorist acts and violent crimes that involve ordinary people. When the government considered violent crimes between normal people “irrelevant”, Finch built a back door into the system that gives him the social security number of a person involved in a future violent crime so he could act—partnered with John Reese, an ex-CIA agent, the two work in secret to prevent violent crimes before they can happen. Eventually their activities lead to being hunted by the New York Police Department, CIA Agents in pursuit of Reese who was listed as dead, a computer hacker named Root who wants access to the Machine, and government officials who want to keep all knowledge of the Machine a complete secret.
The storyline was very futuristic but frightening in 2011. I recall a friend finding the show eerily realistic. Based on the show, he became unnaturally paranoid. I was surprised by his reaction since I thought it would take quite a while for the show’s basic premise to become a reality.
The ominous opening lines during the opening season were:
You are being watched. The government has a secret system, a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people, people like you. Crimes the government considered “irrelevant.” They wouldn’t act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You’ll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number’s up… we’ll find *you*.
Fourteen years later, I discovered that I was too cavalier in my prognosis about the “science fiction” of universal surveillance. My awareness of non-fictional surveillance was gradual. I am sure we have all noticed the cameras, the talk about what Google and Amazon know about us, and identity theft.
A Silicon Valley company is hiding in plain sight, developing “the machine.” Our government and corporations have financed the machine’s development, and I hope it is still in its infancy. However, my continuing optimism or naivete is probably unfounded.
What is this Silicon Valley company? One of Elon Musk’s buddies, Peter Thiel, founded Palantir to develop an AI-powered system resembling the Person of Interest machine. It is probably no mistake that Palantir’s market value on the S&P was higher than Ford Motor’s after Trump’s election. Several of Palantir’s employees were also DOGE consultants.
One of Trump and Musk’s public goals is to get desperate government databases to share information. Several public announcements acknowledged that DOGE had made copies of the many government databases to merge them by skirting privacy laws and security protocols. Integrating and sharing databases sounds pretty innocuous, but what if they merge behavioral data about you and your family? Their initial “discoveries” (e.g., 200-year-old social security recipients) were embarrassingly amateurish, but computer programming is an infinitely recursive process. Their machine will learn.
Palantir executives intend to replace all government information systems with their private, profit-oriented corporation’s solutions. They want to become the government’s “operating system.” They want to build THE MACHINE, and I do not think they have Harold Finch’s morality.
For more information, here is a video about Palantir: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ95Gmvg_D4