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Peter Thiel, PayPal co-founder, early Facebook investor, and founder and current chairman of Palantir Technologies, visited Buenos Aires and met with far-right President Javier Milei. Thiel’s visit has not gone unnoticed in the South American country, especially given the enormous economic and political power accumulated by Palantir, a data collection, integration, and analysis company that, according to New York Times columnist Michael Steinberg, received funding from the CIA through In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the US security agency.

Furthermore, Palantir is arguably the most powerful company when it comes to analyzing data generated by electronic devices. It has signed major agreements with the US government, meaning its activities are driven by powerful geopolitical interests.

Thiel, a collaborator and friend of Donald Trump and JD Vance, arrived in Argentina with his family and plans to stay for several days. He has already purchased a home valued at around USD 12 million in the exclusive Barrio Parque neighborhood, one of the most expensive areas in the city.

But his visit to South America does not appear to be purely for tourism. Last week, he had lunch with Santiago Caputo, a personal advisor to the president. However, the meeting that has generated the most anticipation is Thiel’s with Milei, who received the tycoon at the presidential headquarters (the Casa Rosada) to discuss matters that have not yet been disclosed, as the meeting was declared confidential. Thiel and Milei first met each other in 2024, at a forum in Los Angeles.

According to the media outlet La 100, a source with access to the presidential office stated that Thiel expressed interest in the “Milei phenomenon” and that he has considered Argentina to be a potential refuge in the event of a global crisis. The tycoon, who has said on several occasions that “technology must surpass politics”, did not engage with the press due to a recent restriction by the Argentine executive branch temporarily banning accredited journalists from the Casa Rosada.

What is the real purpose of Thiel’s trip?

During his recent trip to Israel, Milei signed an agreement with Netanyahu, known as the Isaac Agreements, which provides for information exchanges and collaboration on artificial intelligence – something Palantir is highly skilled at using to process the enormous amount of data it collects and delivers to the governments with which it has agreements.

Read more: In visit to Tel Aviv, Milei affirms support to Israel and declares Marx was “satanic”

Some media outlets have speculated that Thiel’s visit could be a prelude to an agreement between the Argentine government and the tech company – something that was already attempted under Milei’s own administration through the efforts of former Security Minister Patricia Bullrich.

“Peter Thiel is in Buenos Aires. It looks like he’s going to set up shop in Argentina for a while with Palantir. That’s not an ‘investment.’ We’re facing an overwhelming digital colonization: our data, our lives, and our rights in the hands of an American black box,” Argentine engineer Ariel Garbarz said. “Palantir… sells massive data cross-referencing, surveillance, profiling, and power. They wrap it up in buzzwords like ‘efficiency,’ ‘security,’ and ‘innovation,’ but it’s unprecedented social control with a whiff of Silicon Valley.”

He added: “In 2020, Amnesty International was already warning that Palantir was up to its neck in technologies that could facilitate human rights violations against migrants. They weren’t tapping phones: they were organizing the hunt… Palantir uses and processes mountains of data so that those in power can profile you, track you, analyze you, and brainwash you more effectively. That is techno-feudalism: some hack you, others classify you, others sell you as a target.”

Techno-fascism or techno-feudalism?

And while Garbanz’s predictions may seem far-fetched, he is not the only one warning of the dangers of Palantir. The company’s ceo Alex Karp and top advisor Nicholas W. Zamiska, published the book “The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West”, which the company summarized in a social media post with 22 theses. It calls for the creation of an alliance between Big Tech and the US government to promote “national defense”, thereby merging large corporations – including those developing artificial intelligence – with the state military-industrial complex.

This militarization of artificial intelligence technology should be accompanied, according to the recently published text, by the acknowledgment that liberal democracy has significant limitations for effective governance, and that technology must play a fundamental role in correcting these governance shortcomings until the creation of a “technological republic” – a notion that has led many to speak of an implicit technofascism in the text.

In this sense, Thiel’s visit to Argentina shows that the involvement of Big Tech companies – not only in the US government but also in states that have clearly aligned themselves with US foreign policy – appears to be more of an ongoing reality than a utopian (or dystopian) technopolitical aspiration.

The post Peter Thiel has private meeting with Argentine President Javier Milei appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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The raids coincided with large and violent settler attacks on a village south of occupied Nablus

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cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/45606697

The Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) has issued a ruling that makes it easier for the Trump administration to deport people with DACA — that’s the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The new precedent decision by a three-judge panel outlined that DACA no longer guarantees deportation relief for thousands of people. The BIA operates within the Department of Justice.

Just got into UB, Mongolia.

First time having horse jerky since Italy a decade ago. I still like it.

The Black Hole is a 1979 American science fiction film directed by Gary Nelson and produced by Walt Disney Productions. The film stars Maximilian Schell, Robert Forster, Joseph Bottoms, Yvette Mimieux, Anthony Perkins and Ernest Borgnine, while the voices of the main robot characters are provided by Roddy McDowall and Slim Pickens (both uncredited).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Hole_(1979_film)

Pretty old apple tree in the garden which produces hundreds of not-great-tasting apples every year looks like it’s in a bit of a state. I had to cut back a weird branch that had been cut before, presumably because it shot out horizontally, and there’s a ton of rot.

It’s not in danger of hitting any buildings if it ever does fall, although could maybe take out a distracted child or two if I’m lucky.

Is there anything I can do to save it?

An exchange of gunfire between an armed suspect and law enforcement outside the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday came days ahead of a deadline for extending far-reaching government surveillance powers, and President Donald Trump wasted no time in claiming that the attempted attack on the event proved that the FBI must be permitted to spy on Americans without obtaining warrants.

In an interview with Fox News Sunday, Trump repeated his previous remarks that he is "willing to give up [his] security" in favor of extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is set to expire on Thursday—and suggested other Americans should do the same for "the safety of our nation."

Section 702 allows US intelligence agencies to surveil the electronic communications of foreign nationals overseas without a warrant. Since some of the nearly 350,000 foreign nationals whose communications have been collected under the law are in touch with Americans, Section 702 allows for the collection of emails, text messages, and phone calls of US citizens.

Fox anchor Jacqui Heinrich emphasized that "we don't know right now" whether the suspect in Saturday's shooting, Cole Tomas Allen, "was radicalized" by a foreign individual or group, but asked whether the attack drove home "the importance of having these tools to protect our country from these kinds of threats."

The president responded by complaining that former FBI Director James Comey used FISA to obtain warrants to surveil a former Trump aide as part of the agency's investigation into the 2016 Trump presidential campaign's communications with Russia, before saying FISA has been used in the US-Israeli war on Iran and in the US military's invasion of Venezuela earlier this year.

"It's really needed for national security," said Trump. "Iran is decimated, and we got a lot of information by using FISA... I'm willing to give up my security for the military because ultimately that's to me the highest cause is, you know, the safety of our nation."

Pres. Trump, under prodding from Fox News, exploits White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting to push for Congress to approve FISA domestic spying program: "It's really needed for national security…"

He reiterates that he's willing to give up his liberties for safety. pic.twitter.com/tmcepp0Wgn
— Chris Menahan 🇺🇸 (@infolibnews) April 26, 2026

Jordan Liz, an associate professor of philosophy at San José State University, wrote last week in a column at Common Dreams that while Trump, Republican lawmakers, and US intelligence agencies "make sweeping claims about the terror attacks that Section 702 has prevented, there is little publicly available evidence to support this."

"According to the Cato Institute, there is only one well-documented, independently corroborated case of Section 702 preventing a terrorist attack on American soil: the 2009 New York subway bombing plot," wrote Liz. "In that case, Section 702 was used by the [National Security Agency] to track an exchange between an al-Qaeda courier and Najibullah Zazi, who was living in the US. The NSA passed this information to the FBI, which identified Zazi and disrupted the attack before it took place. Importantly, however, the NSA allegedly received the courier’s foreign email address from the government’s British intelligence partners. At best then, this success was a byproduct of productive intelligence sharing between allies. Rather than proving the necessity of Section 702, this incident underscores how Trump’s inane attacks against key US allies undermine our national security."

The suspect in Saturday's shooting is believed to have acted alone, and no evidence has been released that he was in communication with any foreign entities. A document he wrote alluded to his Christian beliefs and to reports of the administration's abuse of immigrants in detention centers, its boat-bombing operations in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, and the bombing of an elementary school in Iran.

The president has been pushing in recent weeks for an extension of Section 702. The program was last reauthorized in 2024, and earlier this month two efforts to extend the program—one for 18 months and the other for five years—failed, with opponents objecting to a lack of privacy reforms and to a loophole allowing data brokers to sell private information about Americans to government agencies that have not obtained judicial approval to seize the data.

After those proposals failed, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) last week unveiled a new bill to extend Section 702 for three years and require the FBI to submit monthly reports on its reviews of Americans' private data to an oversight official, as well as imposing penalties for abuse—provisions that were dismissed by privacy advocates.

The House Rules Committee was set to convene on Monday, a step toward advancing the new bill toward a vote in the House, and according to NPR, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) circulated a memo late last week urging his colleagues to reject the Republicans' latest proposal.

The bill, he wrote, "continues the disastrous policy of trusting the FBI to self-police and self-report its abuses of Section 702 and backdoor searches of Americans' data... FBI agents can still collect, search, and review Americans' communications without any review from a judge."

Four Democrats in the House—Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Tom Suozzi (D-NJ), Marie Gluesencamp Perez (D-Wash.), and Jared Golden (D-Maine)—broke with the party and joined the GOP earlier this month in supporting a procedural vote to advance the reauthorization of Section 702, and privacy advocates are ramping up pressure on them to oppose the latest proposal for an extension.

"It all comes down to those four and where they are going to land,” Hajar Hammado, a senior policy adviser at Demand Progress, told The Intercept Monday, “and if they are going to continue to try to hand Trump and [White House homeland security adviser] Stephen Miller warrantless surveillance authorities without any sort of checks or reforms that make sure they’re not violating civil liberties.”

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The frequently cited claim that 60% to 90% of transgender and gender-diverse children and young adults ultimately identify as cisgender—or their gender assigned at birth—is not supported by statistical analyses of published scientific research, according to a new study from Virginia Commonwealth University. The study, which analyzed 11 studies compiled in a commonly referenced 2016 blog post as well as five more recent publications, instead found that almost any stance on gender-affirming care for minors could be supported by different statistical analyses of the same data.

In a Truth Social post last week, President Donald Trump referred to Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson as a “low IQ person.” Trump repeated that line of attack in a separate post this past weekend, directed at former MAGA ally Candace Owens. His post included a doctored image of Time magazine labeling the conservative pundit as “Vile Person of the Year.” Trump’s use of the…

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