
by Bonnie Flaws

The big news this last week or two, at least in some circles, has been the news reported in the New York Times, that data analytics company Palantir (founded with CIA money), has been tapped by Donald Trump to build a master data base on every US citizen.
This has resulted in concern about the huge data sets that the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), formerly headed by Elon Musk, has accessed and what could happen to it.
Sound familiar? If you have already read my four part investigation into Stats NZ – One Register to Rule them All – it should. Because New Zealand is already doing this.
Stats NZ is in the process of linking a number of databases into one real-time database, with the power to know everything about a person from birth to death. And our government agencies already have a lot of inter-agency data sharing agreements in place. None of this information is common knowledge.
As you may have noted, I borrowed from Tolkien for my series title. So has Palantir. In The Lord of the Rings, Palintiri are seeing stones – surveillance technology for Middle Earth.
While the world is discussing Trump’s Palantir deal avidly, and there are appropriate levels of outrage and concern being expressed – for example the UKs Independent even asked: “Has Big Brother arrived? Inside the secretive Trump effort to centralise government data on millions of Americans” – there has been nothing but a resounding silence when it comes to One Register to Rule them All.
No one has showed any interest, people did not share it online or talk about it on X or Facebook. It was a big fat nothing burger, despite the gravity of what was exposed. I obviously need to improve the clickbaity-ness of my headlines.
Or perhaps it’s that there is something ‘legit’ sounding when Stats NZ is doing it, so people just assume there is nothing to worry about. But if it was legit, Stats NZ would have started telling the public long ago. Instead it has been operating in stealth mode.
In response to questions I put to Stats NZ about what public awareness campaigns it had done to tell the public about its integrated statistical data system, I received a list of papers it had published on its website, which also included the consultation on the admin first census that it ran last year (which received under 500 submissions).
Hardly the well-resourced and widely publicised campaign most of us would expect for something with such profound changes to the social contract.
But back to the similarities between Palantir and Stats NZ …
What is Palantir?
Palantir describes itself as a data analytics company, but its more accurate to say it’s an incredibly powerful and well connected data-mining and surveillance company that works with governments and the private sector globally, to use people’s data against them.
The Silicon Valley firm is co-owned by New Zealand citizen and US billionaire Peter Thiel.
The brilliant Whitney Webb has written about Palantir and the PayPal Mafia ad nauseam, including its links to Jeffrey Epstein. And of course she has been warning for some time about the PayPal Presidency – a reference to the many Peter Thiel acolytes and associates connected to the second Trump administration – which you could say has just exposed itself manifestly.
Palantir will now get access to US government agencies’ individual data sets on every person, and compile it. Tax returns, student loans, benefits, bank accounts, medical insurance claims and immigration status. And no doubt more.
Keep in mind that Palantir has:
- deployed predictive policing systems in New Orleans and LA to predict which people are likely to be drivers or victims of violence
- has served as an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) contractor since 2011, and is now used to deport legal and illegal immigrants to an El Salvadorean gulag without due process
- is building a biometrics platform for migrant identification to track their movement in real time
- supported the US Department of Health and Human Services' and the UKs National Health Service pandemic response with Covid tracking (and used private health records to train its AI)
- pitched its Covid tracking software to the NZ Ministry of Health early on in the Covid era (May 2020)
- developed software that is used by the Israeli Defence Force to strike targets in Gaza
- It’s executives, in recent days, have been given Army Reserve lieutenant colonels status in a first-of-its-kind partnership with the US Army (along with Meta and OpenAI) in what’s called Detachment 201, intentionally fusing tech and military expertise to advise targeted projects
Palantir’s Financials
On a side note, the Financial Times points out that Palantir’s financials currently look like a “one-stock bubble” – one of the most expensive US large-cap stocks ever to exist.
“It’s over three times more expensive than the next most expensive company (excluding Strategy) and is forecast to deliver sales growth that’s unprecedented for a company of its size, yet it is no better than what’s available elsewhere for much cheaper,” the FT reports.
This growth is largely driven by US government contracts.
For a deeper dive into Palantir’s military and government connections, a chilling but very informative 15 min documentary featuring a former Palantir staff member rings some serious alarm bells, claiming Palantir wants to be “government’s central operating system”. You can watch it here.
What is Stats NZ?
Stats NZ is New Zealand’s Data and Statistics agency. It has inordinately permissive data acquisition powers that enable it to request data from government agencies and non governmental organisations, and the private sector as well.
On top of this, New Zealand’s government agencies already have substantial data sharing agreements, or Approved Information Sharing Agreement (AISA), under the Privacy Act that are approved by Order in Council. Orders in Council are the main way, apart from legislation, to put legal force behind government decisions. They are not intended to be used frequently because they lack parliamentary oversight, but are popping up quite often these days.
Stats NZ is building an ‘Integrated Data System’ or ‘statistical register’ that will use a ‘persistent unique identifier’ to tag all government data on a person into one place. Previously, each agency had a unique identifier for each person (say your drivers license number, your passport number, your IRD number etc).
Like Palantir’s master database, it will include tax returns, student loans, benefits, bank accounts, ACC claims, immigration status.
Like Palantir, it has already done a pre-crime project to map out the likelihood of a person to engage in criminal activity or be the victim of criminal activity, based on individual data sets.
If Stats NZ chooses to acquire your social media data, or your supermarket loyalty card data, or your numberplate tracking data, or your road user data, or your smart meter data … it has the power to do so.
And there is some evidence (see part three of One Register to Rule them All), that they would like to do this. And the fact that the power is granted in legislation begs the question – why is it there?
Stats NZ and Palantir not ‘illegally’ surveilling people
Stats NZ has advised me that the data it is gathering is purely for research and statistical purposes. For there to be any kind of enforcement or compliance powers attached to these nearly complete data sets, a law change would be needed.
A recent OIA response states that: “Stats NZ is not developing a ‘real-time statistical register’. As previously mentioned, legislative change would be needed before a population register for the purpose of civil administration could be introduced in New Zealand.
“However, both the Data and Statistics Act 2022 and the Privacy Act 2020 provide for the work Stats NZ is currently doing to increase the use of administrative data … We seek to ensure we are operating in ways consistent with good privacy practice.”
This is merely a talking point to take with a grain of salt. The surveillance they are doing is legal. As they point out, a law change would be needed for ‘civil administration’ purposes (enforcement and compliance).
Similarly, when Palantir chief executive Alex Karp was asked about the master database it has been contracted to build in an interview with CNBC, he went into all kinds of conniptions, claiming the New York Times article that revealed this arrangement was full of inaccuracies.
More telling was this X post from June 3:
“The recently published article by the New York Times is blatantly untrue.
“Palantir never collects data to unlawfully surveil Americans, and our Foundry platform employs granular security protections. If the facts were on its side, the New York Times would not have needed to twist the truth.”
Lawful ≠ not sinister
So both entities – Stats NZ and Palantir – claim they do not collect data unlawfully and therefore it’s not sinister.
In that case I can only point to how quickly and undemocratically the Covid emergency legislation was passed in May 2020: overnight, and with no consultation, inviting a kind of hell into our lives from which we have yet to recover.
A similarly undemocratic piece of legislation, the Severe Weather Emergency Recovery Act was passed very quickly in 2023 after Cyclone Gabrielle. Like the Covid-19 Public Health Response Act, both relied heavily on the use of un-transparent secondary legislation (Orders in Council).
Checks and balances didn’t work in the face of coordinated global propaganda, or against real and apparent emergencies.
The lesson of the story is: once the infrastructure for the surveillance state is in place, the law change needed to legitimise it, is merely a formality.
Originally published on Byline Babylon.