Despite over a decade of leaks and exposures, the U.S. security state and its private contractors still pretend that mass surveillance of the American people is a conspiracy theory.

At the All-In Summit this past week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp insisted his company has never spied on Americans, even claiming Palantir was turned away by the FBI and NSA because it "defends privacy and civil liberties" too strongly. That narrative—of Palantir as a quirky, libertarian outfit that checks government power—has always been part of the company's branding and has always been a ruse designed only to trick the most gullible people.

As disclosures by the whistleblower Edward Snowden proved in 2017, Palantir's Gotham operating system filtered the National Security Agency's XKEYSCORE data, vacuuming up the private communications of millions of Americans into the ultimate system for turnkey tyranny. Those embarrassing revelations did not help the public image of a company whose reputation had already tanked in 2011 after reports of their corporate conspiracy to surveil and disrupt the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Glenn Greenwald.