There is an interesting article serving an excerpt from First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance by Annie Jacobsen.

This is about Palantir and the PGSS (Persistent Ground Surveillance System) in Afghanistan, and a 72-foot long aerostat roughly half a mile in the air gathering mass amounts of data from the area below.

"…pattern-of-life analysis, an esoteric discipline that involves establishing a person’s identity based on his or her cumulative habits, much of which is captured from overhead surveillance… The first, fundamental premise of activity-based intelligence: You are what you do."

"The power of Palantir lies in the connections it can make between people, searching vast amounts of data, analyzing patterns, and making connections that would take humans a huge amount of time to figure out."

On April 10, 2020, the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entered into a no-bid contract with Palantir Technologies to track the spread of the coronavirus. The goal of the HHS Protect Now program, explains former CIA officer Christopher Burgess, is to “bring disparate data sets together and provide better visibility to HHS on the spread of Covid.”

“I sincerely hope that HHS Protect Now will do nothing resembling finding and fixing certain entities,” she says, using military nomenclature for locating and killing IED emplacers in the war zone.

https://www.wired.com/story/palantirs-gods-eye-view-of-afghanistan