This article was originally published by Mariano Quiroga on the Tiempo Argentino website. Read the original here: [URL].
The government of LLA is building the most complete data architecture in its history and it is not to protect its citizens. Who are the candidates for patrolling.
On January 2, 2025, while the country looked the other way—which is precisely when this government makes its most important decisions—the decree that created the National Information Community was published. A system that concentrates the data of Renaper, migrations, customs, the foreign ministry, the ministries of Justice and Security, nuclear regulation, CONAE, ARCA. In a single administrative act, Milei built the menu that Palantir Technologies needs to operate in the country. He built the table before the diner arrived. He decorated the room before the guest arrived. He signed the contracts of Trump’s “Shield of the Americas” as if adhering to the imperial surveillance architecture were a gesture of national sovereignty.
Two months before the decree, in November 2024, Javier Milei had traveled to Silicon Valley on his first official visit to the heart of U.S. technological power. There he met with Peter Thiel. Thiel praised him with the condescension with which a majority shareholder praises a regional manager who is doing his job well: ‘He is on the right track.’ And Milei smiled. As he always smiles whenever someone more powerful than him tells him he is right.
Thiel is not just an eccentric millionaire with libertarian ideas. He is the co-founder of Palantir Technologies, the data analysis and artificial intelligence company that the CIA funded in its early days through its investment arm, In-Q-Tel. A company conceived, from day one, as a tool of state surveillance. It did not reach the State after succeeding in the market: it was born from the most powerful state in the world to serve it. The market came later, as an alibi, as a story of legitimation, as the tale that anyone can build such a company if they work hard enough.
Patricia Bullrich, before the internal dispute over the million-dollar contracts stopped her, had negotiated an agreement with Palantir to implement it in a Migration Security Agency. The same Palantir that the U.S. immigration service — ICE — uses for its anti-immigrant raids. The same one that coordinates deportation lists. The same one that profiles, classifies, and selects bodies according to their usefulness to the established order. The project did not fail due to ethical objections or respect for civil rights. It failed because someone on the other side of the aisle wanted to control the business. The moral difference between the two positions is exactly zero.
Now the door is ajar again, and this time with decree, with signed international agreements, and with the ideological blessing of Thiel. What is a nation that hands over its citizens’ data to the same corporation that carries out anti-immigrant raids in Minneapolis? What is a state that dismantles its national scientific-technological system and hires surveillance from companies with direct ties in Langley? It is not a sovereign state. It is a franchise of the global order, with its own flag and foreign servers.
The use of artificial intelligence for social media patrolling and predictive behavior analysis is not a neutral technology deployed over a neutral society. It is a tool that amplifies the biases of those who program it and the objectives of those who hire it. The international evidence is consistent and overwhelming: wherever Palantir operates, the first to be profiled are those who protest. The first classified as a ‘risk’ are those who organize. The first on the list are those who ask out loud what those in power prefer that no one ask in silence.
To understand where this may go, it is worth looking at where it has already gone. In Gaza, since October 2023, artificial intelligence algorithms called Lavender, Gospel and – here the language becomes a historical document itself – Where’s Daddy, have been operating as autonomous targeting systems. The latter is not a metaphor: it locates the man identified as a target at the moment he returns to the family home, maximizing the likelihood that the impact will reach the largest number of people present. Efficiency is optimized. The death of children is listed in the parameters as “acceptable cost”. Not as a tragedy. As a statistical variable within an approved margin.
The UN special rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, directly pointed to Palantir as complicit in what she described as a ‘collective crime’ of genocide. CEO Alex Karp did not defend himself. He brags. He speaks proudly of the ‘strategic alliance’ with Israel’s Ministry of Defense, of the honor he feels in supporting the occupation ‘in every way we can.’ The transparency of the crime does not stop him. It legitimizes it. In this business model, modesty was the first operational cost to be eliminated.
Technology tested on Palestinian bodies is then sold to the world with a catalog, price, and guarantee of functionality. “Tested in real combat,” says the implicit sales pitch in every corporate presentation. The real combat was someone’s home. The real test was their family. The product that is now being offered to Argentina is the result of that calibration. The Israeli spyware Pegasus appeared on the phones of journalists and activists in more than forty countries. In March 2026, the Italian prosecutor’s office confirmed its use against Italian activists and journalists. European cybersecurity is increasingly subcontracted to Israeli companies. Europe has become, without declaring it, a surveillance appendage state. Argentina seems determined to follow the same path, but at cruise speed and with the autopilot of ideological alignment.
The deployment of the global far-right agenda has a very precise cultural strategy: to replace the language of criticism with the language of the market. One does not say ‘inequality’; one says ‘allocation inefficiency.’ One does not say ‘mass surveillance’; one says ‘smart security.’ One does not say ‘surrender of sovereignty’; one says ‘integration into cutting-edge platforms.’ Whoever controls the vocabulary controls the horizon of what is thinkable. And when that horizon exactly coincides with the interests of whoever designed it, it is called common sense.
Milei speaks in memes. Karp speaks in data. Thiel speaks in investments. But all three speak the same underlying language: the language in which people are variables, rights are inefficiencies, and power is the natural consequence of being better than others. A language where the question ‘Who benefits from this?’ is not asked, because the answer is given beforehand and does not belong to the vocabulary of what can be said.
The machinery of destruction is not inevitable. It is a choice. And choices have authors with names, positions, and responsibility. The contracts that will enable surveillance in Argentina are not geopolitical fatalisms nor technological imperatives: they are signed by people in the exercise of public functions, with their own names, with power delegated by a society that can still, if it sets its mind to it, hold them accountable.
Lula da Silva, at the summit on artificial intelligence held in New Delhi this year, said it with the clarity of someone who no longer has time for euphemisms: “When only a few control the algorithms and digital infrastructures, it is not about innovation, but domination.”
The difference between innovation and domination is not technical. It is political. It is ethical. It is the difference between a technology that serves those who use it and one that serves exclusively those who own it.
This article was originally published by Mariano Quiroga on the Tiempo Argentino website. Read the original here: [URL].