CITIZENFOUR (the Edward Snowden story) screened in Sydney this evening, ahead of its release in Australian cinemas on February 12th. What an amazing film. Yeah, it’s a documentary, but it felt more like a spy-thriller from the edge of my seat. As the film unfolds, the (real-life) revelations about global surveillance are of red-pill proportions – both on and off-screen – and change forever your perceptions of the world we live in, even when you’ve been interested in this area for some time. Take Glenn Greenwald’s reaction, for example. No spoilers, except to say that Big Data is watching you.

The avant premiere and Q&A was presented by Senator Scott Ludlam, our strongest parliamentary voice in Australia against the Surveillance State. He was questioned at length by the Aussie audience, about recent plans by our right-wing government to introduce mandatory data retention for all Australians. Of course we suspect that the reason for doing this is more about business than security, and after seeing CITIZENFOUR, it’s clear that the NSA, a partner of our spooks in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, has got us all under their eye already. Our boys can tap into that dragnet, for genuine National Security reasons. But the NSA too collects a lot of information that doesn’t assist national security.

Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam presents CITIZENFOUR by Laura Poitras

Senator Ludlam’s remarks this week in parliament, suggested that the government’s version of Mandatory Data Retention is a pretty ineffective tool of surveillance, since it doesn’t capture data from offshore mail services, like Gmail. Nor does it retain online chat, on platforms such as Facebook. But it is good for driving us away from Australian ISPs (Internet Server Providers), and catching people who illegally download copyright material.

The package is stamped ‘National Security’, but the contents monitor consumers; not terrorists. And this tool serves to police legislation that relates to the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP). There is a clause that more or less obliges the governments of member States to protect each other’s corporate interests. In fact governments can be sued by overseas business entities, if they are seen to legislate in a way that harms trade.

We must see of great significance, concurrent moves to make copyright violation no longer a civil, but criminal matter. That would mean that our government would have to pursue breaches, rather than an individual plainiff, as has always been the case. In the longer term, metadata retention may be used to monitor and restrict what we buy online, especially if a foreign corporation in a member state claims that our choice – of pharmaceuticals, for example – harms their business. Word is, that US business entities actually write the legislation you need to join the TPP, and USG rubber stamps that, before passing it on to applicants.

Scott Ludlam will be talking in more detail about these issues on Thursday evening at another Sydney event, Politics in the Pub, in a session entitled ‘The Meaning of Metadata’. Joining him for an explosive expose and one-hour Q&A, will be National Security journalist and ex foreign affairs policy advisor, Dr Philip Dorling; as well as Samantha Castro, former spokesperson and National Council member of the Wikileaks Party and co-founder of WACA (the Whistleblowers, Activists and Citizens Alliance). The event will be viewable on the Politics in the Pub website on February 7th.

That may sound unreliable… but it sells! Welcome to Big Brother meets Big Data!

Palantir Technologies, is a premium Silicon Valley start-up, whose business it’s been to write clever software to track digital footprints, then ‘join the dots’ to predict who you are and what you might do next. Its directors are Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook, and Alex Karp, an “eccentric philosopher” (with a PhD in neoclassical social theory) who turned their Palo Alto* headquarters into a replica of The Shire from ‘Lord of the Rings’. If it sounds like a fairy story, it is not. Palantir’s software has been labelled the Killer App. It was allegedly used to hunt down and kill Osama Bin Laden.

[Editor's update: In 2020 Palantir moved its headquarters to Denver.]

Palantir is ‘well in’. Its advisors are Condoleezza Rice and George Tenet (ex CIA). It was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm and the CIA became a client of Palantir back in 2004. Other government clients are the NSA, the FBI, the NYPD, and a number of counter terrorism and military agencies.

This baby was valued at five to eight billion dollars in 2013 and predicted to earn another billion in private sector deals in 2014. Forbes Magazine reported:

“Palantir is emerging from the shadow world of spies and special ops to take corporate America by storm. Private-sector deals now account for close to 60% of the company’s revenue.”

[Editor's update: Palantir went public in 2020 as PLTR. As of late April 2026, it has a market capitalization estimated in the range of $300 to $375 billion, largely due to its AI-enabled software platform. Its share value has seen a downturn in 2026, after peaking in 2025.]

The identities of corporate clients are usually kept secret, but in 2014 they have included J.P. Morgan, various hedge funds, News Corp and Bank of America – as some will recall from Palantir’s dealings with H.B Gary Federal in a thwarted plan to destroy Wikileaks and its media partner Glenn Greenwald, who instead went on to report on the disclosures of Edward Snowden. The plan may have succeeded, had not Aaron Barr, an employee of H.B. Gary, bragged about and published a list of alleged members of Anonymous, which in reality was a list of artists, writers and musicians who had taken an interest in the movement. The injustice of this blunder unsurprisingly triggered a revenge attack on H.B. Gary’s servers from real hackers, who uncovered a Powerpoint file outlining the steps the partners would take to discredit Wikileaks and its associates.

When Anonymous gained access to thousands of emails on H.B Gary’s servers, they found that Palantir had worked with HB Gary Federal to develop proposals for attacking WikiLeaks’ infrastructure, blackmailing its supporters and identifying donors. One idea was to submit false information to the organisation’s drop box, which would later be exposed as such. When the plot was exposed, Palantir put an engineer on leave, apologised for his role in the plan, and cut ties with HB Gary. After that they installed a “Batphone” in Karp’s office, allegedly to receive reports about “unethical clients”, and reinstated their engineer.

One might ask at this stage if these people are elves or the Black Riders.

Palantir Technologies is a perhaps a pioneer in an upcoming consumer industry of selling private information for profit, and they are cheap as chips compared to Booz Allen, IBM and Lockheed Martin. But Forbes Magazine suggested Palantir restrict their services to the top end because some people wouldn’t be happy if they went totally public. Quote: “It helps its customers see too much”.

Really? Alex Karp claims his “turn-key” service (as he calls it) helps the Government go after bad guys. Who those bad guys are he often doesn’t know or succeed in finding out.

“It’s tough”, he says, because his targets don’t leave behind any tangible evidence such as fingerprints or DNA.

Whether they actually are bad guys he takes on faith from his Government or whichever client he is working for, and of course the Batphone. According to former employees, Palantir has sought work in Saudi Arabia despite the staff’s misgivings about human rights abuses in the kingdom, but Karp doesn’t seemed to have picked up on any calls about that issue.

In an interview on the Palantir website, Karp assures us that Palantir are the good guys and he showcases a high profile project where they chased the infiltrators of the Dalai Lama’s computer. He stumbles however when asked who it was and has to admit that it wasn’t really clear in the end whether it was a foreign government or teenagers. That’s a pretty wide margin of error.

Palantir’s so-called predictions hinge on assumptions and probabilities – no light, just shadow – and as it turns out, the “bad guys” are not always bad guys. Sometimes they’re activists; sometimes journalists. Karp loves to drop in the word “turn-key” when he’s selling his crystal ball kit. The irony he doesn’t see is that it is the perfect tool for turn-key totalitarianism. You put all of this surveillance into place and then someone, a new President or Prime Minister, flips the switch to tyranny.

Click! Suddenly the technology is not being used as intended. Click! Anti-war activists are raided by the FBI. Click! Refugee activists are threatened by the Department of Immigration and Border ‘Protection’.

[Editor's update: In 2026 a Palantir AI-powered platform called ImmigrationOS is used for identifying, tracking and removing deportation targets - so that an officer can green light a raid, generate a warrant and trigger deportation within a few clicks.]

Alex Karp claims to be an advocate for civil liberties. He assured a talk-show host that innocent people would not be “swept into the dragnet”; that the “patterns” his software detects only relate to the activities of terrorists. He says that the data Palantir supplies is “tagged” for one use only, giving the impression that his company has control over who sees what, or how the information will be used.

The US Justice Department’s Inspector General, in a series of reports on FBI practices found systematic disregard for the required procedures for demanding records. False statements in affidavits to telecommunications companies and the FISA Court; improper acquisition of journalists’ phone records; use of national security authorities in cases unrelated to national security; and attempts by superiors to retroactively conceal these improprieties. Speaking of patterns, a pattern of failure to report potential violations to the proper oversight board was also “noted”.

William Binney, a former NSA official, who led a team to develop ThinThread, the agency’s selective and effective pre-911 surveillance tool, resigned because he saw the whole thing spin out of control and his country turn into a police state. Binney baulked when he saw that NSA data was being used to prosecute petty crime, and not many terrorists. Not many at all. Palantir’s director admits that real terrorists are apt to change their patterns and cut their ties as soon as anyone in their circle is arrested. Going after ordinary citizens, on the other hand, is a much more fruitful, easy and lucrative process.

FBI Director Robert Mueller argued that the entire body of phone records is “relevant to an investigation” because it plausibly contains records that will be relevant to some investigation at some point in time. Since these investigations were not only being used to pursue petty criminals but dissidents too, Binney realised that his Government’s actual use of data gathered through spying had become “a Totalitarian Process”. The American Civil Liberties Union describes Palantir as “a true totalitarian nightmare”.

Julian Sanchez from the CATO Institute articulated a problem that possibly none of the hobbits from The Shire had foreseen:

“Such an architecture of surveillance, once established, would be difficult to dismantle and prove too potent a tool of control if it ever fell into the hands of people who — whether through panic, malice, or a misguided confidence in their own ability to secretly judge the public good — would seek to use it against us.”

Unscathed by the plot to destroy his career, Glenn Greenwald worked with Edward Snowden to reveal that this architecture is in place. Mass surveillance of all citizens, an unprecedented level of eavesdropping, with all the dirt ready if your name comes up, to prosecute you for any kind of crime or misdemeanour. And if you happen to be living in ‘The Lucky Country’ of Australia, you might already be getting into strife for criticising your Government, even if you use a pseudonym because you happen to work for it.

The more innocent citizens are spied upon and intimidated, if they get lippy, the more secretive Governments must become to get away with it. Besides an erosion of civil liberties that inevitably becomes unconstitutional, there’s another ‘technical’ issue that makes the whole process dubious:

Evidence stops being ‘forensic’ when it’s only a digital footprint.

Alex Karp admits that and one can only conclude that his company sells nothing but hunches, and that around these hunches his clients have cultivated a devout belief in the stoned philosopher’s Palantiri – and word has it he often is stoned. A cloud of secrecy then prevents sceptics, lawyers and moralists from reality-checking the ‘vision’, and inducing them to assume that a well-paid, well-hidden job is being well done. Copies of NSA documents are not even allowed to be passed on for analysis by another Palantir client, the NYPD. And thus, the circle of trust is hermetically sealed, around an irrational, self-serving seat of power that is frightened of mere shadows.

Peter Jackson should make a film about that!

Sydney PRISM-BREAK protest - Photo Jarek Gasiorek

Freedom of the Press Foundation Publishes Leaked Audio of Bradley Manning’s Statement

Tuesday March 12, 2013: Today, Freedom of the Press Foundation published the full, previously unreleased audio recording of Private First Class Bradley Manning’s speech to the military court in Ft. Meade about his motivations for leaking over 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks.

While unofficial transcripts of this statement are widely available, this marks the first time the American public has heard the actual voice of Manning.
Trevor Timm, Executive Director and founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, stated: “Transparency is vital for an informed public, whether we’re talking about the courtroom, Congress, or the executive branch. We hope this release will shine light on the plight of whistleblowers everywhere.”

In the audio file, Private First Class Manning explains to the military court in his own cadence and words how and why he gave the Apache helicopter video, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars Logs, and the State Department Diplomatic Cables to WikiLeaks. Manning explains his motives, noting how he believed the documents showed deep wrongdoing by the government and how he hoped that the release would “spark a domestic debate on the role of the military and our foreign policy in general as well as it related to Iraq and Afghanistan. ”

In conjunction with the statement, Private First Class Manning also pleaded guilty to 10 of the 22 charges against him.

Daniel Ellsberg, famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower as well as a founder and board member for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted the similarities between Manning’s situation and his own prosecution: “Manning faces some of exact same charges I faced forty-two years ago when I leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and eighteen other papers. The only difference is I was a civilian, so I could stay out of jail on bond while the trial was going on, and was able to talk to the media throughout.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation’s mission is to support and defend cutting-edge transparency journalism by supporting those organizations that publish leaks in the public interest. It often reports on news surrounding government secrecy, educating the public about the important relationship between leaking and independent journalism. This recording presented a unique opportunity to bring some small measure of transparency directly by allowing the world to hear for itself the voice of someone who took a controversial and important stance for government transparency.

John Cusack, famed actor and activist who is also a founder and board member for the organization, said: “Growing up with the living legacy of the Berrigan brothers and fellow board member Daniel Ellsberg, I deeply and profoundly respect the sacrifice made by those heroic individuals who speak their truth no matter what price they may pay. We hope this recording inspires more participation in a broad-based movement to restore and protect the First Amendment.”

Freedom of the Press Foundation was founded in the winter of 2012 to crowd-fund a variety of journalism institutions—both start-ups and established organizations—who are dedicated to aggressive, uncompromising journalism in the vein of Watergate and the Pentagon Papers. The Foundation’s Board of Directors is comprised of journalists and free expression advocates, including John Perry Barlow, Daniel Ellsberg, Xeni Jardin, Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Josh Stearns, Rainey Reitman, Trevor Timm, and John Cusack.

Press Statement, Freedom of the Press Association March 12 2013