ce is just around the corner,” my friend said, looking up from his phone. We were writing at a coffee shop in one of the oldest neighborhoods of New York City, where schools and churches support thriving migrant communities as they have since long before the United States existed. Now the agents of this rogue federal agency – recognized for civil rights abuses like racial profiling, wrongful detention, medical neglect and inhumane detentions – were just footsteps away, shaking down our neighbors in their homes and at the park across the street.

A day earlier, I had met with foreign correspondents at the United Nations to explain the AI surveillance architecture that Ice is using across the United States. The law enforcement agency uses targeting technologies which one of my past employers, Palantir Technologies, has both pioneered and proliferated – tools I was once charged with illustrating as a graphic designer and writer, yet the consequences of which I am just coming to understand. Although largely invisible, technology like Palantir’s plays a major role in world events, from wars in Iran, Gaza and Ukraine to the detainment of immigrants and dissident students in the United States. But despite its ubiquity, lawmakers, technologists and the media are failing to protect people from the threat of this particular kind of weaponized AI and its consequences, partly because they haven’t recognized it by name.

Known as intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance (Istar) systems, these tools, built by several companies, allow users to track, detain and, in the context of war, kill people at scale with the help of AI. They deliver targets to operators by combining immense amounts of publicly and privately sourced data to detect patterns, and are particularly helpful in projects of mass surveillance, forced migration and urban warfare. Also known as “AI kill chains”, they pull us all into a web of invisible tracking mechanisms that we are just beginning to comprehend, yet are starting to experience viscerally in the US as Ice wields these systems near our homes, churches, parks and schools.

The invisible nature of these surveillance structures – and how they influence our lives – is part of the reason the public understanding of what these tools do is so murky. It is also, however, what drew me to work for Palantir as an architecture writer. It was a chance to get to know the digital spaces where many people spend most of their lives today. Working with cloud software in offices, driving new cars in our commutes, doom-scrolling on social media at home – we all feed vast amounts of data to surveillance and targeting programs created by big tech which we often don’t recognize until it’s too late. This is why I continue trying to convey and illustrate how these Istar applications violate our civil rights and autonomy in increasingly perverse and violent ways.

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