Another glaring example of the authoritarian impulse inherent in the modern state: the embrace of Palantir's surveillance machinery by German law enforcement. The state, ever eager to expand the machinery of coercion, justifies its latest foray into mass data analysis with tired moral panics—terrorism, child abuse, organized crime—as if perpetual existential threats excuse any violation of individual liberty. The logic is always the same: we must trade our freedom for the illusion of security. Hayek warned us that such collectivist justifications are the path to serfdom, where the state—unrestrained by principle—slowly chokes all private space, all dissent, in the name of "safety."

Palantir's software is not simply a tool; it is the very embodiment of centralized, technocratic social control. The ability to sift through the population’s private data at machine speed transforms every citizen into a potential suspect. Here we see the "night-watchman state" Nozick advocated—limited to the protection of rights—transmogrified into the panopticon, monitoring, predicting, and dissecting our lives without limit or warrant. When state agents claim the tool is "without alternative," they reveal their own bureaucratic nihilism: they cannot imagine a world where civil society, competitive private security, or community action might solve these problems without giving up our autonomy to data czars.

The spectacle of German politicians wringing their hands over "foreign influence" or pushing for a "European alternative" misses the point entirely. It does not matter whether some American billionaire, a techno-nationalist German, or Brussels bureaucrats are the ones manning the server rooms. The problem is not who administrates the database, but that the power exists at all. As Rand warned, the right to life and privacy are absolute; to surrender these rights to a faceless algorithm wielded by law enforcement is to grant the state a blank check on tyranny, rebranded as "data-driven policing."

Those who trust the state to draw neat lines—more oversight, European sovereignty, constitutional review—display the fatal conceit Hayek described: the belief that one can harness arbitrary power for “good” without it metastasizing into oppression. The fact that Palantir has supposedly thwarted crimes does not excuse the wholesale destruction of privacy. Even if innocent people are not directly harmed—though, rest assured, they will be—it is a moral travesty to put them at risk simply because the state’s appetite for information is insatiable.

A free society must reject this logic. Personal data belongs to the individual, not to the Leviathan. Security achieved through the total abolition of rights is nothing but another word for slavery. The answer to violence is not omnipotent surveillance; it is a society founded on voluntary cooperation, property rights, and contracts—where justice is rooted not in algorithms, but in the sanctity of each person’s sovereignty. Burn the databases, privatize the police, and consign the Palantirs of the world to the ash heap of statist history.