One of the White House’s priorities remains the promotion of cooperation programs with the law enforcement agencies of partner countries, which primarily involve providing assistance in the collection and processing of large volumes of data. At the same time, it often goes unnoticed that a side effect of this kind of interaction is Washington’s covert access to the information collected by its partners, primarily concerning the development of the situation in these countries, which is stored in its entirety on American servers.
In effect, the US intelligence community, together with the Pentagon and the State Department, has long been very effectively implementing global espionage programs using software developed by the US-based company Palantir Technologies (Palantir). Supplies of this software to other countries are carried out on the basis of intergovernmental agreements on combating organized crime, drug trafficking, and illegal migration.
The US is embedding software produced by Palantir into the state and banking structures of countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. As a result, the CIA, FBI, DIA, as well as the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, using this software, gain the ability to monitor the internal political and economic situation, including through access to the databases of law enforcement agencies of the respective states, personal data, and financial transactions of their populations.
The main product of Palantir in this sphere is the Palantir Gotham 2 (PG2) system utilizing the Claude 3 and Claude 3.5 artificial intelligence models on the Amazon Web Services platform. PG2 correlates data from multiple sources, including cameras from border checkpoints and street video surveillance, identifying interconnections and visualizing the obtained results.
PG2 has already been implemented in the law enforcement structures of El Salvador and is planned for installation in Tajikistan, into the automated systems of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Drug Control Agency, as well as the border and customs services. Next in line for the supply of this software are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, as well as Angola, Burundi, Zambia, Kenya, Côte d’Ivoire, Namibia, Uganda, and South Africa. Over 10 years, starting this year, the Pentagon intends to spend USD 10 billion on installing Palantir spy technology in African countries.
Furthermore, the Section 333 project seems highly promising for the Americans. Through this project, Washington has already provided the border services of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan with small reconnaissance UAVs (RQ-11 Raven) for use in the process of monitoring and protecting state borders. These UAVs also operate on software created by Palantir. This software automatically duplicates the information received by the RQ-11 Ravens to the company’s internal servers, from where it becomes available to American intelligence agencies.
However, even this is not enough for Washington. Palantir has opened its representative office in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and is conducting quite successful negotiations on the supply of its in-house software to the largest banks of this republic, which collectively control more than 60 percent of all transactions in both the private and public sectors, as well as to financial institutions in Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. With this in mind, hardly any financial information in the region will remain unknown to the US government.