Show notes
Do you ever feel like you're being watched? Just asking questions. We're told modern surveillance tech will track criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists while protecting the privacy of innocent Americans. You've got nothing to worry about if you've got nothing bad to hide. Today's guest says that's not true. His latest book, The Triumph of Fear, documents the history of the modern surveillance state and the ways in which it's been leveraged since its inception to target not just terrorists and criminals, but political dissidents. Patrick Eddington was a CIA analyst from 1988 to 1996, but resigned and wrote Gassed in the Gulf, a book alleging that the agency helped cover up the existence of Gulf War syndrome, caused by exposure to chemical weapons. He joins Just Asking Questions today to talk about the power and reach of the modern surveillance state, the growing influence of the AI-powered data firm Palantir—cofounded by Peter Thiel—in the Trump administration, and what can be done to "tyranny-proof" America. Mentioned in this episode: "Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos," The White House Palantir contract modification with ICE "The Scouring of the Shire," an open letter by a Palantir ex-employee "Palantir Is Not a Data Company," by Palantir "American Big Brother," by the Cato Institute "The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and Political Repression From McKinley to Eisenhower," by Patrick Eddington Alex Karp, director of Palantir, address to the Economic Club of Chicago on May 22, 2025 "Why This Palantir Cofounder Left California for Texas," The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie "Purpose-Based Access Controls at Palantir (Part 1)," by Palantir Davos 2023: A conversation with Palantir's Alex Karp Chapters: 0:00—Introduction 2:20—President Donald Trump's executive order "eliminating information silos" is paving the way for a national, unified surveillance database 3:58—Did the Department of Government Efficiency have a "hidden motive"? 12:08—Why the surveillance bureaucracy keeps expanding with little resistance 14:04—Ex-employees have signed an open letter against Palantir. What does it mean? 25:34—What does Palantir actually do? 27:55—Could Palantir actually protect civil liberties? 29:02—What could happen if Palantir's tools fall into the wrong hands? 37:52—Why creating a centralized database is a civil liberties nightmare 42:53—Palantir's CEO Alex Karp on why they defend the West 47:00—Why Eddington wants to take federal law enforcement out of the executive branch 50:32 - Why federal law enforcement has always been politicized 55:17 - The lessons of COINTELPRO's surveillance of activists 55:17 - What was "total information awareness"? 1:10:28 - What is a question Patrick Eddington thinks more people should be asking? Transcript: This is an AI-generated transcript. Check against the original before quoting. Zach Weissmueller: Do you ever feel like you're being watched? Just Asking Questions. The ostensible purpose of DOGE was to cut waste, fraud, and abuse in government. But what if there was also another purpose hidden in plain sight—to make it easier to track your every move? Of course, our government would never outright say that. We're told modern surveillance tech will track criminals, illegal aliens, and terrorists while protecting the privacy of innocent Americans. You've got nothing to worry about if you've got something bad to hide. Today's guest says that's not quite true. His latest book, The Triumph of Fear, documents the history of the modern surveillance state and the ways in which it's been leveraged since its inception to target not just terrorists and criminals, but political dissidents. Patrick G. Eddington was a CIA analyst from 1988 to 1996 but resigned and wrote another book, Gassed in the Gulf, alleging the agency helped cover up the existence of Gulf War Syndrome caused by exposure to chemical weapons. He joins us today to talk about the power and reach of the modern surveillance state, the increasingly prominent role that AI-powered data management firm Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, is playing in the Trump administration, and to offer some ideas about what should be done to tyranny-proof America. Patrick, thank you for coming on the show. Patrick Eddington: It's my pleasure. Zach Weissmueller: Trump issued a curious executive order, and I'm gonna read a little bit about that. The aim seems to be to create a kind of unified national database. It says here that the goal, the purpose, is removing unnecessary barriers to federal employees accessing government data and promoting inter-agency data sharing. The name of this executive order was Stopping Waste, Fraud, and Abuse by Eliminating Information Silos. It goes on to say about these information silos, "agency heads should take all necessary steps to ensure federal officials have full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems. This includes authorizing and facilitating both the intra- and inter-agency sharing and consolidation of unclassified agency records." It says that, "this is to ensure the federal government has unfettered access to comprehensive data from all state programs." So it also is kind of going into the states and saying that the federal government should have unfettered access to state programs that receive federal funding. So I'm trying to put all this disparate data in one place. What kind of problems do you foresee with this approach? Patrick Eddington: "One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them." I'm a big Tolkien guy, in addition to being a big Star Wars guy, so I just can't help but bring that kind of thing into it. Yeah, look, I do think it's really fascinating that, given the fact that the Inspector General Act was passed in 1978—that's almost four decades ago, right—and we have literally years' worth, decades' worth of recommendations from these different inspectors general as well as the Government Accountability Office on where the waste, fraud, and abuse has been in the government. It just seemed to me, and I think to a lot of other observers, that this entire effort by Mr. Musk at the behest of the administration was really designed to try to gather as much data as possible. And, you know, on the surface, that EO sounds kind of cool. It's like, "Yeah, sure, there ought to be—you know, they should be able to—the left hand should know what the right hand is doing and all the rest of that". And they also say unclassified data. And it's like, "Well, what's wrong with that?" Well, you can take an awful lot of unclassified data—data from automated license plate readers, data from cellphone tracking-type stuff, geolocation data, all the rest of that—and you can get an excellent idea of how people live their lives. If you're able to get purchase history, if you can buy that, essentially, buy that kind of data, it can give you enormous insights into what people are doing. Now of course, the regime tries to sell this entire concept, essentially, as being about finding illegals and making sure that they're not on the public dole and so on and so forth. And as a theoretical matter, does that sound like a common-sense kind of policy thing? Sure. But I think it's fairly obvious at this point that it goes well beyond that and that they have a desire to basically try to gather as much data as they possibly can on anybody that they're interested in. And I think that it's really also very telling that when Ed Martin, who was temporarily the acting U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia—when it became clear that he had even less than a snowball's chance in hell of being permanently confirmed to the position—that they moved him over to DOJ to basically engage in this so-called anti-weaponization program or whatever. And they were gonna be calling out regime critics and shaming them and all the rest of that. Which is not an appropriate role for government in any way, shape, or form. It never has been. But if you want to call people out, even if you don't plan to prosecute them, having as much data as you can to try to muddy the waters on folks that's helpful, right? If that's what your fundamental intent is. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah, you know, as pertains to DOGE, I mean, coming from a libertarian perspective, there were a lot of things to like about it on the surface. It obviously—to a degree—it kind of embarrasses the government for wasteful spending. That's a good thing, and transparency. At the end of the day, it didn't cut much money. And, you know, Elon Musk kind of washed his hands of it and walked away. But yeah, I have always wondered about the sort of getting-into-the-systems aspect of it, and if there were two layers operating at the same time. It sounds like you believe that there's evidence that that is the case. That there was more, that there was the kind of surface story and then something going on underneath the surface. Patrick Eddington: Yeah, and I do think there's been a fair amount of press reporting on this, and not just from legacy media outlets by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, Wired, ProPublica, some other outlets, and I think even Reason has done some work on this particular topic as well. And again, I want to come back to this issue of unclassified or otherwise publicly available data, because this is, in a lot of respects, how the Peter Thiels of the world and some others have been making just gobs of money at the end of the day. You collect all this data, you package it up, and then you offer it up to federal law enforcement or the intelligence community or whatever, and it becomes—and it is, has been—a very lucrative business for him. And the thing about this kind of data brokerage, if you will, is that—and I'll just use the FBI because they're my favorite target. If you're gonna have a bad day with federal law—at least in the pre-Trump era for the most part—if you're gonna have a bad day with federal law enforcement it was probably gonna be with the FBI. Because unless you were a fairly frequent foreign,international traveler or all the rest of that, you were going to be more likely to encounter an FBI agent than you would be almost any other kind of federal law-enforcement official. And in September of 2008, in one of his last major official acts as attorney general, Michael Mukasey modified the attorney general guidelines for FBI domestic investigations to create an entirely new category of de facto investigative tool. It was called an assessment. It is called an assessment. And the thing about assessments is they can open one on you, me, they can open one on Reason, they can open one on Cato, and they don't need a criminal predicate to do it. It can just be for an official purpose or an authorized purpose. Well, guess who gets to decide what that authorized purpose is? Well, that's the DOJ and FBI. It's a great gig if you can get it. It's like the ultimate make-work program for government federal agents. And the thing about assessments is, because you don't need a criminal predicate, you can literally go and get this kind of commercially available data and use it. You can also search classified databases like the FISA Section 702 database. You can run confidential informants against you, me, Reason, Cato, et cetera. And you can also conduct physical surveillance of individuals or entire groups of people that are affiliated with a given organization. And again, none of that requires going before a judge. So it's an incredibly powerful, surprisingly invasive tool that has been extensively used by the FBI. And we've been in court for over 5 years now—close to 5 years now—trying to shake loose essentially a bunch of these so-called assessments. And we started out wanting them all. And the FBI came back in their official court affidavit and said, "Ok, well, that would take almost 2,000 years." For real, that's what they said. So we said, "Ok, look, we're going to be super reasonable here. We're going to just ask for all of the closed sensitive investigative matter—or SEM—assessments." And those particular kinds of assessments are the ones that implicate First Amendment–protected activities. So whether you're an academic, a journalist, somebody in a public policy organization like ours—our two organizations—we just want those. And we were relatively narrowly scoped in terms of timeframe and all the rest of that. It worked out to be about 1,100 or so—just slightly under 1,100—of these assessments. And they still came back in yet another court affidavit and said, "Ok, well, that's going to be about 219 years." So we're still going back and forth, trying to get essentially a federal judge to force them to cough this up. And I want to make the point that this is a bureaucratic mentality. This goes way beyond whether it happened under Obama, under Trump 1, under Biden, under Trump 2. This is the professional bureaucracy, most of which is still left. I mean, this regime shaved off the entire top of the FBI. And I don't just mean the political appointees down to the assistant attorney general level. I mean, they went after the SES—or the Senior Executive Service—folks as well. And from what I can tell, they also maybe have gone down to the GS-15 supervisory special agent level. And those are the folks—or special agents in charge, I should say—who actually run FBI field offices. But even with that, there's still the kind of core culture that is there, that's resident at the FBI, that continues to drive this kind of thing. So just absolute, complete, obstinate resistance to making public any of this stuff. And again, we really did scope it down to say, "Ok, give us First Amendment–implicated investigations," essentially. And they're still just fighting us tooth and nail. Zach Weissmueller: Yeah. I mean, what worries me particularly at this moment about that is the asymmetry, where the bureaucracy will grind things to a halt and say, "Unless you're getting radical life-extension technology, you're never going to live to see these documents. But on the other hand, we're going to make the means of collecting all this data much more efficient, and we're going to start injecting AI into the system—so in the collection—and we're really gonna put this into overdrive." But nothing's gonna change on the other side of the equation in terms of making it easier to access the information that you're using against, well, who knows who? And I guess that's where Palantir comes into the conversation. You mentioned The Lord of the Rings in your opening statement there. And creepy enough, Palantir is named after the Palantíri stones in The Lord of the Rings, which are basically these all-seeing stones that can see into, I guess, the past and future and then construct what is gonna… So, I mean, the fact that you would name your company after that is kind of interesting. But there have been some employees that have come out in recent years. They signed an open letter that I'm going to pull up on screen here. It's called Scouring the Shire: A Letter from Concerned Palantir Alumni to the Tech Workers of Silicon Valley, and it mentions the legend of the Palantíri at the beginning here. It says that: The myth of the powerful seeing stones warned o…
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