He seems a bit dubious.
From Mr. Thiel's personal website,
Executive Summary
The launch of GIDEON, an AI-driven threat detection platform designed for U.S. law enforcement, signals the entry into an era of algorithmic pre-crime policing. Developed by former Israeli Defense Forces operator Aaron Cohen, GIDEON leverages continuous internet scraping, behavioral profiling, and advanced ontologies modeled on Israeli counterterrorism frameworks.
Its debut (framed in the aftermath of a tragic school shooting) suggests the weaponization of fear and trauma to normalize surveillance practices that resemble a fusion of Palantir-style data analytics with the fictional dystopia of Minority Report.
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- Strategic Context
• Israeli Counterterrorism Doctrine: GIDEON draws on decades of Israeli operational practice, where predictive profiling and OSINT have been applied extensively to manage populations under persistent threat.
• American Tech Ecosystem: By branding itself as “Palantir-quality,” GIDEON situates itself alongside firms already embedded in the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement infrastructure, exploiting both trust and urgency to accelerate adoption.
• Trigger Events: High-profile mass shootings provide the political and emotional leverage needed to deploy such systems with minimal resistance.
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- Core Capabilities
• 24/7 Internet Scraping: Automated surveillance of digital spaces for linguistic and behavioral threat markers.
• Behavioral (Israeli-based) Ontology: Classification frameworks that map online expression into predictive categories of potential violence.
• Pre-Crime Profiling: Translation of online “indicators” into actionable leads for law enforcement prior to any committed crime.
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- Risks & Implications
• Erosion of Legal Norms: Shifts the axis of justice from act to intent, undermining the principle of presumption of innocence.
• Bias & False Positives: Algorithmic classification risks misidentifying vulnerable individuals (e.g., the mentally ill, political dissidents) as threats.
• Normalization of Thought Policing: The system effectively institutionalizes “surveillance through psy-ops”, reframing dissent, deviance, or frustration expressed online as latent criminality.
• Threat Inflation: The incentive structure, where contractors and agencies profit from the identification of threats, creates systemic bias toward over-detection.
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- Historical & Cultural Parallels
• Palantir Technologies: Like Palantir, GIDEON operates at the nexus of data integration and security. Both present themselves as indispensable tools against terrorism and crime, yet critics highlight their opacity, reach, and political entanglement.
• Minority Report: Philip K. Dick’s fiction envisioned a world where “Pre-Cogs” predict crime before it happens. GIDEON operationalizes this narrative, replacing psychics with AI ontologies and machine learning.
• Psy-Ops Surveillance: The platform represents not just technical surveillance but cognitive control—shaping behavior by instilling the knowledge that one’s digital expression is constantly monitored, classified, and judged....
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