A company that can combine pictures of you with your cell phone location data, emails you've written, your health records and credit card purchases and thousands of other pieces of electronic data to paint an intimate portrait of your life—a portrait that any would-be investigator can pull up with a few keystrokes. A company that can target you anywhere in the world at any time.

Now stop imagining that company, because it already exists. It's called Palantir Technologies.

Founded by billionaire PayPal co-founder and Facebook early investor Peter Thiel, this plucky little Silicon Valley startup has long been the darling of the US military and the intelligence community, and it's increasingly the darling of the corporate world. And—given Palantir's ability to surveil, track and, ultimately, control every aspect of your daily life—it isn't hard to see why.

Even so, few in the general public have ever heard of it, and those who have know little beyond the fact that Palantir is a bad company that does creepy things.

But this is The Corbett Report. We can do better than that.