Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on the Privatized Surveillance State

Investigative journalists Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on how the surveillance state was deliberately routed through the private sector, from Palantir as privatized Total Information Awareness to legalized pre-crime, and why the surveillance dollar runs on the exact same trick.

Marty Bent

July 19, 2024Updated June 7, 20269 min read

Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin on the TFTC podcast discussing Palantir, pre-crime, and the privatized surveillance state

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Whitney Webb opened this conversation with the sentence that organizes everything that follows. The dystopia people fear, she argues, can't be built by the government alone. It has to be routed through the companies everyone already uses.

"They can't do it without digital ID. They can't do it without implementing this whole surveillance panopticon. And they're relying hugely on private-sector partners to build that."

This episode was recorded in July 2024, the week of the first assassination attempt on Donald Trump and days before the Bitcoin 2024 conference, so it opens on the news of the moment. But the durable spine has nothing to do with the election. It's Webb and Goodwin's core thesis: the surveillance state was deliberately moved into the private sector to escape the constitutional limits a government program would hit, and the surveillance dollar is being built the exact same way. Understand how Palantir happened and you understand how the digital dollar is happening.

That makes this the surveillance-state companion to the piece on how the digital dollar arrived without a CBDC. That piece traces the money. This conversation traces the machine the money plugs into.

Key takeaways

Palantir is privatized Total Information Awareness. The post-9/11 DARPA mass-surveillance program was killed by public outcry, then rebuilt as a private company. Webb's reporting is that the CIA was Palantir's only client until 2008 and the intended client from the start.
The private route is the point. A government surveillance program faces constitutional challenges and public backlash. A private company doing the same thing faces neither, and can also sell the data. That asymmetry is the entire design.
Pre-crime is already here. Webb walks through how the first Trump administration pushed mass-surveillance-for-mass-shootings, how AG Barr's DOJ advanced "pre-crime," and how the HARPA/Safe Homes proposal became ARPA-H.
The surveillance dollar uses the identical trick. A programmable, surveillable, freezable dollar doesn't need to be a Fed CBDC. JPMorgan, PayPal, or Tether can issue it, and a private issuer can freeze and blacklist where a government currency would hit constitutional friction.
The Treasuries engine makes it inevitable. Regulated stablecoin issuers must hold US debt, which makes them a king-made new buyer of Treasuries, which is exactly why Washington wants them.
The exit is Bitcoin-native, not dollar-on-Bitcoin. Goodwin's warning is against "orange-washing." The defense is ecash and Bitcoin-backed dollar instruments that never touch Treasuries.

Palantir is privatized Total Information Awareness

The documented core of the episode is Webb's long-running reporting on Palantir, and it's worth separating from the news cycle because it's the part that holds up. After 9/11, DARPA stood up a program called Total Information Awareness, a mass data-mining effort meant to combine with AI to predict terror attacks, and eventually pandemics and crimes, before they happened. It was run by John Poindexter, the Reagan official convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal. Public outcry got it formally defunded. Webb's argument is that it didn't die, it privatized.

Palantir, she lays out, was spun out of PayPal and built by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp to be exactly what TIA was supposed to be. Its earliest backer was In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, the CIA was its only client until 2008, and its engineers logged more than 200 visits to Langley in the early years. Karp has said on the record the CIA was always the intended client. The same pattern repeats across Thiel's portfolio: Facebook, whose earliest outside investor was Thiel, launched the same day DARPA shuttered a strikingly similar program called LifeLog, and Clearview AI, also Thiel-linked, boasted about scraping Facebook photos to identify January 6 participants for law enforcement. During COVID, Palantir held US and UK health data, helped determine vaccine allocation, and ran wastewater surveillance, reviving a 2003 TIA component called BioSurveillance.

You don't have to accept every adjacent claim to see the load-bearing one: the surveillance apparatus the public rejected as a government program came back as a set of private companies, and almost nobody noticed the swap.

Pre-crime, already legalized

The reason this matters now, in Webb's telling, is that the pre-crime layer is no longer hypothetical. She traces how the first Trump administration called on big tech to build software to surveil Americans and flag potential mass shooters before they acted, how Attorney General William Barr's DOJ moved to normalize pre-crime while simultaneously pushing for encryption backdoors in consumer apps, and how a proposed health-focused DARPA equivalent called HARPA, whose first program "Safe Homes" would have data-mined social media and devices like Fitbits for signs of "neuropsychiatric violence," resurfaced under the next administration as ARPA-H. Same agenda, she notes, different letter moved to the end.

The hardware is being built too. Palmer Luckey's Anduril, backed by Thiel, is constructing the biometric "virtual border wall," and the administration has floated biometric entry-exit systems at all ports and even face scanning to vote, at the same time Thiel protégé Sam Altman's Worldcoin is scanning eyeballs for a global biometric ID. The point Webb keeps returning to is that the philosophy underneath all of it is the original Panopticon: people who know they're being watched police themselves. The surveillance doesn't even have to be accurate to work.

The same trick, applied to money

Here is where the episode becomes a Bitcoin story rather than a surveillance one. The thing people fear about a central bank digital currency is that it would be programmable, surveillable, and freezable. Webb's point is that none of those properties require the Fed to issue it.

A bank-issued stablecoin is just as programmable and surveillable as a CBDC would be, and a private issuer has an advantage the government doesn't: it can blacklist and seize an account as a matter of business, where a government currency would face constitutional challenges and far more paperwork. The receipts are on the table. Bank of America handed account records to the federal government for people near the Capitol on January 6 without a warrant. Canadian banks froze trucker-protest funds, including private GoFundMe donations, under government pressure. Tether has integrated Chainalysis (itself In-Q-Tel-funded) and freezes wallets for the FBI and Secret Service. The off switch already exists. Routing the dollar through private issuers just makes it cheaper to use and harder to challenge.

Goodwin adds the structural reason Washington actively wants this: a regulated stablecoin issuer has to hold its reserves in US Treasuries, which turns "innovation" into a king-made new source of demand for government debt. He ties the politics directly to the people in the room, noting that JD Vance's former firm Mithril Capital, a Thiel vehicle, invested in Paxos, the issuer behind PayPal's PYUSD, and that PayPal can flip Venmo's installed base onto tokenized dollars with a switch. The surveillance state and the surveillance dollar aren't two stories. They're the same network running the same play in two domains.

Orange-washing, and the exit

The conversation doesn't end in doom, and the constructive half is aimed squarely at bitcoiners. Goodwin's warning is about a failure mode he calls orange-washing.

"There's a lot of orange-washing, frankly. Bitcoin's a freedom tool, so everything associated with Bitcoin must be freedom. And that's absolutely not true. You can build a whole bunch of things on Bitcoin that are very bad."

The same base layer that secures self-custodied Bitcoin can just as easily carry tokenized debt, surveilled stablecoins, and immutable identity systems, and Goodwin's read is that the BlackRocks of the world understand a public, immutable ledger is perfect for exactly that. The defense he and Marty land on is to build dollar-like instruments that don't perpetuate the Treasury machine at all: Chaumian ecash through Cashu and Fedimint for private, Bitcoin-denominated balances, and "stable channels" that synthesize a stable unit of account over a Lightning channel using a price feed, with no token and no Treasuries underneath. That privacy-preserving cash layer is the subject of our later conversation with Calle. The job, as Goodwin frames it, isn't to put the dollar on Bitcoin. It's to keep Bitcoin from becoming the settlement rail for the surveillance dollar.

Why a Bitcoin show is covering Palantir

The reason a two-and-a-half-hour Palantir conversation belongs on a Bitcoin podcast is that the surveillance state and the surveillance dollar are built by the same people, with the same logic, for the same reason. Both route through the private sector to escape the limits a government would hit. Both are sold as safety and convenience. Both depend on enough people consenting that the alternative never gets built. Webb and Goodwin's case is that the financial layer is where it all eventually lands, because financial deplatforming is the enforcement mechanism for everything else, which is why the people who care about Bitcoin should be the ones paying closest attention to Palantir.

More on the surveillance dollar

The machine this conversation describes is the one the synthetic CBDC plugs into. The full account traces how the GENIUS Act folds private stablecoins into the Bank Secrecy Act and requires issuers to freeze and block transactions, turning the most surveillable money in history into a product built on top of the privatized panopticon Webb and Goodwin map here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did the government route surveillance through private companies instead of building it directly?

A government surveillance program runs into constitutional challenges and public backlash the moment it becomes visible. A private company doing the exact same thing faces neither of those friction points, and it can also sell the data as a line of business. That asymmetry is the whole design.

How is a bank-issued stablecoin just as dangerous as a government CBDC if it isn't issued by the Fed?

The properties people fear in a CBDC, programmability, surveillance, and the ability to freeze or blacklist an account, don't require a government issuer. A private company can freeze your account as a matter of business, where a government currency would face constitutional challenges and far more paperwork. Bank of America handed account records to the feds for people near the Capitol on January 6 without a warrant. The off switch already exists, and private issuers just make it cheaper and easier to use.

What does it mean that regulated stablecoin issuers have to hold US Treasuries?

It means that every dollar of stablecoin issued requires the issuer to buy US government debt, which turns the entire "financial innovation" pitch into a king-made new source of demand for Treasuries. Washington isn't permitting stablecoins despite the surveillance risk. Washington wants stablecoins partly because of the Treasury demand they create.

What is "orange-washing" and why should bitcoiners care about it?

Orange-washing is the failure mode where people assume that because Bitcoin is a freedom tool, everything built on top of Bitcoin must also be a freedom tool. That's not true. The same base layer that secures self-custodied Bitcoin can carry tokenized debt, surveilled stablecoins, and immutable identity systems. The BlackRocks of the world understand that a public, immutable ledger is actually useful for exactly that kind of infrastructure.

How does Chaumian ecash through tools like Cashu and Fedimint actually defend against the surveillance dollar?

The goal with ecash is to build dollar-like instruments that don't perpetuate the Treasury machine underneath them, giving people private, Bitcoin-denominated balances without holding reserves in government debt. Stable channels take a similar approach, synthesizing a stable unit of account over a Lightning channel using a price feed, with no token and no Treasuries involved. The point is to keep Bitcoin from becoming the settlement rail for the surveillance dollar.

What is the connection between Total Information Awareness and Palantir?

Total Information Awareness was the post-9/11 DARPA mass-surveillance program run by John Poindexter. It was formally defunded after public outcry. Webb's argument is that it didn't die, it privatized into Palantir, which was backed from the start by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture arm, and whose engineers logged more than 200 visits to Langley in the early years. Alex Karp has said on the record that the CIA was always the intended client.

Why does financial deplatforming matter to people who care about free speech and political dissent?

Because financial deplatforming is the enforcement mechanism for everything else. You can be debanked, have your fundraising frozen, or have your wallet blacklisted far faster and with far less legal friction than you can be jailed or censored through the courts. The Canadian government got private banks to freeze trucker-protest funds, including private GoFundMe donations, without any of the due process a formal criminal proceeding would require. Control the money layer and you control the behavior.

About Whitney Webb and Mark Goodwin

Whitney Webb is an investigative journalist and the author of One Nation Under Blackmail. Mark Goodwin is her co-author at Unlimited Hangout and the author of The Bitcoin Dollar. Together they have reported extensively on the public-private surveillance state, stablecoins, and the synthetic-CBDC thesis.

Sources mentioned

Total Information Awareness: the DARPA program Webb argues Palantir privatized
In-Q-Tel: the CIA venture arm that was an early Palantir backer
ARPA-H: the agency Webb ties to the earlier HARPA / "Safe Homes" proposal
Anduril: the Thiel-backed contractor building the biometric "virtual border wall"
The digital dollar, explained: how the synthetic CBDC plugs into this machine
Calle on the ecash defense: the privacy-preserving alternative

Watch the conversation

Timestamps

0:00 - Intro
0:57 - Trump shooting and media aftermath
9:33 - River & Bitkey
10:56 - JD Vance and Palantir
23:40 - Trump's image & public/private partnership
47:12 - Controlled media
1:02:35 - Using Bitcoin for evil
1:07:51 - Nostr, ecash & stables
1:25:06 - Framing Bitcoin as money
1:34:20 - All things are used to justify surveillance
1:52:52 - Law enforcement
1:58:53 - Stop complying, solve from the ground up
2:10:43 - Keep calm against the emotional manipulation