Latest / FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD / #44 WHEN THE EVIDENCE LIES

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#44 WHEN THE EVIDENCE LIES · FROM THE INSIDE OUT by BETH ARNOLD

• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Pull up a chair.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Beth Arnold, and this is From the Inside Out, where American life, politics, and memory meet as we tiny specks in the cosmos try to make sense of it all.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's May 14th, and it's my darling daughter's birthday.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Happy birthday, Brett.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: I'm reading When the Evidence Lies.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when surveillance no longer records reality but rewrites it?
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: The first episode of the BBC thriller, The Capture, hooked the Lone Wolf and me so hard that we binged all three seasons over a couple of weeks.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: It is crack TV.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_00: And not only because it's a hell of a roller coaster, it feels less like fiction than prophecy, a warning to the world we're now living in.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: One in which AI swallows reality, deep fakes destroy evidence, and surveillance systems track, sort, and predict our lives.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the story.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: The capture is a British surveillance thriller about a former soldier, Sean Emery, who is released after his conviction for murder in Afghanistan is overturned because of flawed video evidence.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: But almost immediately after he walks free, he is accused of another violent crime, and this time the evidence against him appears to be captured on CCTV.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Detective Rachel Carey, a fast-rising detective inspector in London's Metropolitan Police, is assigned to what first appears to be an open and shut case, a straightforward crime caught on camera.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: But the more she looks, the less solid the evidence becomes.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: The show turns on a terrifying question.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: What happens when video, the thing we have been trained to trust as proof, can no longer be trusted?
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's not simply a show about surveillance.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: It is a show about power, narrative, evidence, and the terrifying possibility that reality itself can be edited by people with enough technology and authority.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't this remind you of a company we know?
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: It has the whiff of Palantir, which was established in 2003 long before this show's 2019 debut.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Palantir's business is not simply surveillance in the old sense of someone watching a camera feed.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is data integration, pulling information from many sources, including social media when possible, into platforms that allow governments, police, intelligence agencies, militaries, and corporations to see patterns, make decisions, and act upon them.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Its broader corporate pitches real-time AI-driven decision making for critical government and commercial enterprises, while its Gotham platform is marketed for decision making in dynamic operational environments like wars, which Palantir is quite proud of and markets aggressively.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Think ICE, which has a contract with Palantir.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Question: Did Israel use Gotham to target any or all of the 264 journalists and media workers they've killed?
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_00: Plus 174 injured and 107 imprisoned.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Committee to Protect Journalists, CPJ, says Israel is engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Palestinian journalists are being threatened, directly targeted and murdered by Israeli forces, and are arbitrarily detained and tortured in retaliation for their work.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Israel has systematically destroyed media infrastructure in Gaza and tightened censorship throughout the West Bank and Israel.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Inside Gaza, journalists report harassment and intimidation by Hamas.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And press freedom groups have accused Israel of deliberate targeting.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: George Orwell imagined Big Brother as a face on a screen.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: Gotham suggests something colder, Big Brother as infrastructure.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Gotham is Big Brother militarized.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: In Israel's war machine, Palantir's software is not just watching, it is helping organize the information by which targets are identified, prioritized, and acted upon.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: That's the terrifying leap from surveillance to prediction to execution.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: On Palantir's website about Gotham, quote, powering the kill chain, unquote.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: A kill chain being a military concept which identifies the structure of an attack and includes its outcome.
• 5:21
  SPEAKER_00: Gotham's targeting, offering support, soldiers with an AI-powered kill chain, seamlessly and responsibly integrating target identification and target effector pairing.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_00: Operators experience enhanced situational awareness and effectiveness as Gotham streamlines critical decision making in the modern battle space.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm always keeping an eye out about what Palantir is doing because, frankly, I don't trust the surveillance Palantir is up to, especially with what we've seen happening with ICE.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: I don't trust Christian nationalist Trump enabler Peter Teal or Palantir CEO Alex Carp.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_00: For a little insight about Carp, here's a quote from New York magazine.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: And then there is Alex Carp, Palantir CEO, who has leaned into Palantir's notoriety.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: The only way to save the West and stop war, he told Fast Company, is to scare the daylights out of our adversaries.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: During a talk last year, Carp fantasized about deploying a drone to spray fentanyl-laced urine on analysts who had criticized the firm's valuation.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: The company recently sold T-shirts reading, There are no secrets.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: A brief note: while not every American is under constant active watch, all Americans are subject to extensive systemic and often passive data collection by government agencies and private corporations.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_00: Essentially a pervasive surveillance environment.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_00: This is a subject that would take one or more columns to address, which I will get to in the future.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_00: Also, since Doge took our private information, we don't truly know who has our information and how they're using it.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I include Palantir.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: A few Palantir updates.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: On March 30th, Wired published an article on Palantir and the IRS.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: Documents show the tax agency is testing a Palantir tool to surface highest value audit and investigation targets from a maze of legacy systems.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: In total, Palantir has been awarded more than$200 million in contracts and obligated payments with the IRS.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: The documents show the agency is now interested in deepening its relationship with Palantir.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: The Intercept has a more extensive article about Palantir and the IRS.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Palantir is helping Trump's IRS conduct massive-scale data mining.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: If you're interested in this subject, it's worth your time to read.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: From the Intercept, the real concern is the consolidation of vast amounts of sensitive personal data into a single system with minimal transparency, especially one built and operated by a contractor like Palantir, whose business model is premised on integrating data and expanding surveillance capabilities.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_00: American oversight director Chioma Chukwu said in a statement to the Intercept, its platforms have been used in deeply troubling contexts, from immigration enforcement to predictive policing with persistent concerns about overreach, bias, and weak oversight.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: As Francesca Bria argued in Le Monde Diplomatique last November, the danger is not simply that companies like Palantir and Andarill, another Peter Tilback company, he is Andoril's foundational financial backer and strategic architect since its inception, sell tools to the government.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: It is that core functions of the state, data analysis, military planning, battlefield surveillance, targeting infrastructure, and operational decision making are being absorbed into private technological systems.
• 9:24
  SPEAKER_00: In July 2025, the U.S.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_00: Army announced a sweeping enterprise agreement with Palantir, worth up to 10 billion over 10 years, consolidating dozens of contracts into a single framework for the Army's future software and data needs.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: That is not science fiction.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: That is the privatization of state power.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: The event brought together Palantir executives, intelligence community veterans, and Trump administration officials to outline a vision integrating artificial intelligence with state power.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Speakers strongly rejected government AI regulations, instead, they advocating for radical public-private partnerships and legal theories, like using the Defense Production Act to bypass local authority for national data center construction.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: The conference highlighted Palantir's massive profit growth from federal surveillance and military contracts, such as Immigration OS for ICE and Project Maven for the Pentagon, while demonstrating how high-paying defense tech roles continue to attract Ivy League students despite campus-wide ethical pushback.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: I want to emphasize ethical there.
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_00: If you're not worried about this, you should be.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Palantir is supplying the technology for 21st century authoritarianism.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Once you see the capture, you'll see an AI-imagined future that is already in play.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: On April 23rd, Wired posted an article with the title, Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder If They're the Bad Guys.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: My question is, why do they even have to ask?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: But from what I've read, their company culture is steeped in what I'm going to call mythical indoctrination.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: Remember, all of Peter Thiel's companies echo Lord of the Rings lore.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: The Palantir employees are called Hobbits, and their offices or alumni network is the Shire.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, global executives have posted recruitment calls on social media explicitly pleading for former hobbits to return because the Shire is calling.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that Teal doesn't want to be the protective wizard Gandalf.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_00: His public commentary and ideological views reveal that he aligns himself with the forces of Mordor and Sauron, actively viewing the traditional villains as the rational, technologically advanced heroes of the story.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: This is totally revealing about Teal, his companies, and Carp, who is publicly in like Flint with Teal and the Shire.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: The capture was created by British writer-director Ben Chanan, whose background in documentary and counter-terrorism research gave the series its terrifying plausibility.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: He understood before much of the public did that the central evidence of the modern surveillance state, the video image, was about to become unstable.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Channon was not just dreaming about some random techno-thriller.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: The idea reportedly grew out of his interest in how vital video evidence had become to modern prosecutions, right at the moment when digital technology was making video easier to manipulate.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: It's a truly unnerving premise.
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: We built a criminal justice and security culture around the idea that recorded images are proof, and then technology undermined our trust.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it's more than that.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_00: Chanan captured the power of how AI and deepfake technologies were going to entangle all of us in ways we had barely begun to consider.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: He shows how hard it's going to be to hold on to our independence and how vigilant we'll all have to be to not succumb to powers that seem impossible to defeat.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Powers like Palantir, private companies whose software is increasingly embedded in the machinery of governments, militaries, police agencies, intelligence services, immigration enforcement, and corporations around the world.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: Teal has traveled to San Francisco, Paris, and Rome giving lectures on the Antichrist, warning that a global authoritarian order will seize power by promising to save humanity from catastrophes like climate change, nuclear war, and AI, and then using that fear to stop technological progress.
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: The profound irony, as noted by critics and Vatican advisors, and me, is that Thiel himself is building a corporate authoritarian infrastructure.
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: As a central figure of the anti-democratic dark enlightenment, his ultimate goal is a world where he and his fellow tech bros are unaccountable, and their surveillance empires operate completely unchecked by democratic rules.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now we come to predictive policing.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: An early rudimentary form of predictive analytics was first used in Richmond, Virginia in 2003.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: The Richmond Police Department successfully predicted the timing, nature, and specific locations of future incidents of shots being fired, resulting in a massive drop in gunfire and a major increase in weapons seized.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Santa Cruz tried it in 2011 with software called Predpole, as did Los Angeles.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: LA then considered its highly controversial person-based tracking initiative, Operation Laser.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: The LAPD paid over$20 million to Palantir Technologies, whose data mining platform was used to generate chronic offender bulletins that targeted and surveilled specific individuals.
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_00: New Orleans and New York City began predictive policing with Palantir in 2012.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: When the movie Minority Report with Tom Cruise, Samantha Morton, and Colin Farrell dropped into our consciousness in 2002, this sci-fi story from Philip K.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Dick riveted us.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: Based on technological predictions, minority reports predictive policing arrested people for crimes they hadn't yet committed.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_00: These forecasts came through three mutated humans called pre-cogs, who possessed psychic abilities to see future murders before they happened.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Giving it the human element of these strange abused psychics who were submerged in water where they floated for their divinations is, of course, more interesting than the coldness of technology.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: Tom Cruise plays the lead role of the commanding officer John Anderton of Washington, D.C.'s experimental pre-crime law enforcement division.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: He is fiercely dedicated to pre-crime because his young son was kidnapped and murdered years prior.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: He genuinely believes that preventing crimes before they happen is the only way to save families from his pain.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: The plot hinges on a massive twist.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_00: The precogs suddenly generate a new prediction showing that in exactly 36 hours, Anderton himself will murder a man he has never met.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: And away we go.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_00: The point is, this is a state that could punish you for what it believed you were going to do.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_00: Spoiler, the capture imagines something even more modern.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: A state that can manufacture the record of what it wants the world to believe you have already done.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_00: The genius of the first episode is that it gives us the comfort of righteousness first.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: A man is on trial, video evidence is challenged, a bad conviction is overturned, and the justice system seems to work.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: An innocent man goes free.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: And then almost immediately the show yanks the comfort away and asks the question we are now being forced to ask in real life.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: If images can be manipulated, if cameras can be hacked, if official evidence can be corrected, then what exactly is proof?
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_00: AI can be manipulated.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is anyone safe?