A former elite gymnast who claims he “tracked ISIS recruits with Palantir in Syria” now wants to be the definitive judge of “where criminals come from” in America. Let’s talk about what his Peregrine-themed company really means…

Adrenaline. Not calm and reasoned thought. Not justice and transparency. Adrenaline.

His Peregine code has leaked, revealing the same dangerously flawed logic as used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria… to create ISIS.

def surveillance_feedback_loop(population):
while True:
# Step 1: Deploy mass surveillance
# Just like COINTELPRO watching breakfast programs
targets = identify_potential_threats(population)

# Step 2: Create pressure on communities
# See: Every failed counterinsurgency campaign ever
surveilled_groups = apply_monitoring(targets)

# Step 3: Generate radicalization
# Creating tomorrow's threats ensures today's profits
new_threats = fragment_communities(surveilled_groups)

# Step 4: Use new threats to justify expansion
# Capitalism meets Kafka
population = expand_surveillance(population, new_threats)

# Results: Mission Accomplished
yield {"surveillance_expanded": True,
"threats_increased": True,
"public_safety": None,
"quarterly_profits": "Record Breaking"}

To put it plainly, there were four Palantir profit models used abroad to increase dangers, which are being transferred domestically to America by a spin-off called Peregrine.

1. Initial Deployment
   • Claimed: “Identify ISIS recruits”
   • Actually: Targeted entire communities
   • Result: Created collective punishment… PROFIT!
2. Community Impact
   • Claimed: “Prevent radicalization”
   • Actually: Fragmented social structures
   • Result: Increased isolation and alienation… PROFIT!
3. Threat Generation
   • Claimed: “Reduce extremism”
   • Actually: Created conditions for recruitment
   • Result: Generated the terrorists they claimed to be tracking… PROFIT!
4. System Response
   • Claimed: “Adapt to threats”
   • Actually: Expanded targeting
   • Result: Accelerated the cycle… PROFIT!

The playbook is clear:

• In Syria: Label communities as “ISIS suspects”
• In America: Rebrand activists as “extremists”
• The result? Same as Nixon’s era, just with AI-generated PowerPoint slides.

The rising cost of floggings will continue until morale improves.

Peregrine isn’t just replicating an abroad failed system domestically. They’re replicating a system that succeeded at:

• Generating own justification — the infamous self-licking ice-cream cone (SLICC) of military history
• Creating the threats it claimed to prevent
• Expanding control through manufactured crisis

The Syria deployment revealed an unstated goal of expanding surveillance infrastructure through threat generation.

A User’s Guide to Hidden Success in Overt Failure

Hey Peregrine people, let’s talk about this exciting new “integrated law enforcement platform” vacuuming up citizen data across the nation like Woodrow Wilson’s nationalization of telephone lines to disenfranchise his opponents (e.g. non-whites, labor unions) from government.

But first, a quick pop quiz about how integrated law enforcement platforms work in practice:

Q: The FBI had MLK under comprehensive surveillance for years. How’d that work out?

A: They recorded his conversations, tracked his movements, infiltrated his organization… and completely failed to prevent his assassination. But hey, they did manage to send him a letter suggesting he commit suicide, so there’s that “data-driven impact” for you.

Speaking of surveillance and psychological manipulation, do you remember when Russian intelligence surveilled Olympic athletes and sent them targeted messages to destabilize their mental health and knock them out of competition?

In 2016, Russian military intelligence selectively leaked medical records and sent personalized messages to athletes, trying to push them to mental breakdown or even suicide.

Can your system yet convince people to kill themselves? Russia really wants to know.

They’ve already demonstrated how surveillance plus competitive targeting equals psychological warfare. I mean I’m very sure a hyper-aggressive competition-minded gymnast’s “integrated law enforcement platform” would never be used in such a way that we already have seen over and over again…

Greatest Hits of Peregrine Predecessors

Let’s review some other spectacular examples of safety technology succeeding at being used for oppression while failing at… safety:

COINTELPRO (1956-1971): Meticulously documented Black Panthers feeding children breakfast

SHAMROCK (1945-1975): Read millions of telegrams to harass civil rights leaders

Today: Exxon contractors hack climate activists. Because nothing says “public safety” like targeting people trying to prevent planetary disaster.

Technology Changes, Patterns Don’t

The Palmer Raids (hat tip to a comment by “Not Nick Noone“) used then-cutting-edge telephone surveillance and census data to round up political dissidents while actual bombers remained at large. Sound familiar, Peregrine?

Remember when IBM’s punch cards made the Holocaust more “efficient”? But don’t worry, this time the data lives in micro services not punch cards, so it’s totally different.

Austria’s census data enabled perfect targeting of Jewish communities. But hey, at least their data integration was on point.

Syria’s surveillance infrastructure came with great Western tech support. Those monitoring centers had excellent uptime!

Peregrine’s Innovation in White-washing

Now here’s Peregrine, with glossy brochures selling a shiny future of policing like nobody remembers:

• Multi-agency data sharing (like Operation MINARET’s illegal intel sharing)
• Automated targeting (like Japanese internment’s IBM cards)
• Real-time surveillance (like COINTELPRO’s activist tracking)
• Predictive analytics (like McCarthy era blacklisting)

But don’t worry, this time it’s different because… failed disastrously in the Middle-East first? Cloud computing? Machine learning?

A nicer font?

Show me some actual safeguards against abuse. None of their story adds up to a better future.

The Peregrine Product: Foreign Spying Failures Applied at Home

Want to know what this technology is actually really good at, and not by accident?

• The census helped round up Japanese Americans for internment
• Telegraph monitoring helped harass civil rights leaders
• Phone tapping helped suppress labor movements
• License plate readers helped target immigrant communities
• Exxon’s hackers helped disrupt environmental litigation

Watch the Peregrine CEO, a former elite gymnast, start to tell press that he really wants to push beyond rushing criminal convictions through courts and into becoming the definitive judge of all societal ills, defining “where criminals come from“…

I try to have a lot of adrenaline for the competition.

Historians, this is your cue. We’ve studied this many times before, and it never ends in happy ever after or “and then everything was fine.” A former gymnast honed in adrenaline-fueled competition… applies his training and “embedded” militarized experience into mass domestic surveillance and predictive policing. What could possibly go wrong?

Notice the tired and sad pattern here? Every single adrenaline-driven “innovative” surveillance system excelled mainly at controlling targeted populations to “win” in rushed competitions, while failing at its stated security purpose.

The gymnastic co-founder proudly boasts he tracked ISIS recruits with Palantir in Syria, which means he hasn’t been held accountable yet for creating the terrorists he claimed to be preventing.

No joke. Not an exaggeration.

The Peregrine co-founder literally could be charged with unsubstantiated accusations abroad. Just think, if he hadn’t been able to get away with Palantir harms like causing a rise in terrorism, and instead held accountable, he wouldn’t be hawking a domestic version of the same system expected to end in yet another societal disaster.

Learn History or the Results Never Change

1950s: “Wire taps will stop communists!”
Result: Blacklisted actors, missed spies

1960s: “Surveillance will prevent violence!”
Result: Harassed civil rights leaders, missed terrorists

2024: “Peregrine will transform data into impact!”
Coming Soon: Targeted activists, missed threats, record profits

The Only Thing We Learn…

The NYPD’s demographic unit spent years mapping Muslim communities after 9/11. Did it prevent any terrorism? No. Did it destroy community trust and create detailed data for targeting minorities? You bet!

Now Peregrine wants to “optimize resource allocation” with the same capabilities that have consistently optimized oppression while failing at safety.

Peregrine’s Future is Written in the Past

Every single time we’ve built these systems, they’ve failed at their stated purpose while succeeding spectacularly at political control. But I’m sure Peregrine’s version is so different because they were born out of Palantir’s total failure and pivoted on terms like domestic “data-driven” and “real-time analytics” to more quickly incarcerate citizens into a Kafkaesque fever dream.

Here we are in 2024, watching a gymnast who helped create the threats he claimed to prevent in Syria perform his next routine: selling that same failed system to control Americans. The military-industrial-congressional-complex judges might give him perfect scores, but history already knows how this performance ends.

But hey, at least the dashboards destroying society are pretty.

…right?

Just ask Syria.

Remember: These systems don’t fail at threat detection.
They succeed at threat creation.
That’s not a bug.
That’s the business model.