Antinuclear

Robodebt on Steroids. Palantir eyes NDIS

Palantir has been lobbying the Government to control the National Disability Insurance Scheme”s (NDIS) data, potentially exposing Australia’s most vulnerable. Claudia Weisenberger reports.

If the NDIS Amendment Bill passes this week — and it will — a computer program will have the authority to cut a disabled person’s funding. If the program gets it wrong, section 59E(3) of the Bill provides that the decision stands anyway.

by Claudia Weisenberger | Aug 18, 2026 |

“There is no appeal.”

What the documents show

In 2023, Samuel Porter, then Deputy CEO and Chief Operating Officer of the NDIA, took a personal meeting with the Australian President of Palantir. The NDIA’s own security architect flagged that Palantir did not hold the required government security clearance. The engagement continued anyway.

Freedom of Information documents, obtained by disability advocate Sam Connor, show it ran from April 2023 to February 2024 — spanning a Proof of Concept, Palantir’s Foundry Cloud Architecture Diagram and Security Whitepaper, multiple documents titled ‘Palantir Technologies — Failed Payments NDIA,’ follow-up sessions on SAP integration, and a Palantir Terms of Service.

In November 2025, Palantir received its Protected-level security clearance — the level at which NDIS participant files sit.

“The NDIA declined to release all 22 documents,“

citing business information exemptions — protecting Palantir’s commercial interests rather than the public’s right to know.

Whether the engagement proceeded to a contract remains unknown. The NDIA is exempt from Commonwealth Procurement Rules and does not publish its contracts on AusTender — making independent verification impossible.

In response to questions from Michael West Media, a NDIA spokesperson said: “The NDIA has not used Palantir technology and has no plans to do so.”

The statement did not address the Freedom of Information documents showing extended engagement between the NDIA and Palantir from April 2023 to February 2024, including a Proof of Concept, a pitch on failed NDIS payments processing, and a Palantir Terms of Service document. It did not address why 22 documents relating to that engagement were refused in full.

What can be confirmed: AusTender records show AUSTRAC — one of 24 agencies sharing participant data with the NDIA through the Fraud Fusion Taskforce — holds an active Palantir contract for ‘Data Analytics capability’ worth $8.83 million, running to June 2027.

Participant data shared with AUSTRAC is therefore already being processed on Palantir infrastructure.

The government has committed $442 million to rebuild the NDIS’s digital infrastructure. The new PACE payment platform is already live. The $358.5 million digital enrolment and payment system will introduce automated real-time

“checking of every claim for 800,000 participants.“

Nobody asked those 800,000 people whether they consented to their data being processed this way. No privacy impact assessment has been published. No consultation with disabled people has taken place.

When automated systems get it wrong — and at this scale, they will — a participant loses funding they depend on to live. To eat. To get out of bed. To breathe. There is no human on the other end of the phone. There is no appeal. There is a computer program and a decision that stands.

What the Bill does

For the first time in Australian law, the Bill expressly permits a computer program to make decisions involving ‘discretion’ and ‘evaluative judgment’ — decisions previously reserved for humans. Section 59E(3) goes further: an automated decision stands even if the required safeguards were not followed.

Schedule 1 removes review rights. New section 34A makes a ministerial funding cut non-reviewable.

Here is what that means. A participant in a wheelchair receives an automated notice — her funding for home modifications has been cut. The computer got it wrong. Her occupational therapist’s report was filed under the wrong support category. Under section 59E(3), the decision stands anyway.

Under section 34A, she cannot challenge it. She has a wheelchair and a house she can no longer live in safely. And nowhere to go.

The Robodebt Royal Commission described exactly this architecture — automated decisions, delegated authority, reduced oversight — as the precondition for unlawful harm at scale. The NDIS is five times the size of Centrelink’s debt-raising program. The people affected are among the most vulnerable in the country.

Parliament is handing a Commonwealth agency the power to automate decisions, conduct coercive investigations and share data across 24 agencies — without telling the people affected who is building the system, or what will happen when it gets it wrong.

The questions that need answers this week

First: FOI documents show the NDIA engaged with Palantir for nearly a year, including a Proof of Concept and Terms of Service discussions. Did that engagement proceed to a contract — and if not, who did?

Second: 800,000 disabled Australians have not been told what data is being collected about them, who holds it, or what it will be used for. When will they be?

Third: section 59E(3) provides that an automated decision stands even when the required safeguards were not followed. In plain English — the system can break the rules and the decision still counts. Who approved that, and why?

In the shadows of Robodebt

The last time a Commonwealth agency built this kind of automated decision architecture — with delegated authority, reduced oversight and no meaningful right of appeal — a Royal Commission found it unlawful.

People lost their homes. People took their own lives. Nobody was prosecuted. The architects faced no legal consequences whatsoever.

The NDIS is five times the size. The people affected are among the most vulnerable in the country. When this goes wrong — and people are harmed — will the architects of this system face criminal prosecution? Or will history simply repeat itself?

According to disability advocate Sam Connor, the embedding of Palantir into the NDIS is the result of Labor associates lobbying the government.

“The President of Palantir is a former Labor Defence politician, Mike Kelly AM – one of their chief lobbyists is another, former autoelectrician turned Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon. More than 14 of Palantir’s 42 staff appear to have come from Labor political or public service backgrounds.”

The NDIA was contacted for comment at 11am AEST on 17 August 2026. An NDIA spokesperson responded prior to the 5pm AEST deadline; their statement is incorporated in the article above

Claudia Weisenberger

Claudia Weisenberger is a management consultant with deep experience in pharmaceuticals, hospital transformations, and strategic due diligence across four continents. She combines sharp analysis with hands-on execution.

August 22, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment

Today In Dystopia: Burning Books For Israel, Burning Books For AI

Caitlin Johnstone, Aug 20, 2026

I’ve been putting out more and more of these “today in dystopia” write-ups because our society is plunging into iron-fisted authoritarianism and AI-induced idiocracy so rapidly that it’s hard to keep up with how it’s unfolding day by day without shoveling multiple stories into a single essay.

Today in dystopia they’re really going after books. A library in Sydney has removed the book “How to Sell a Genocide” by Adam Johnson from its shelves after Zionists complained about its criticisms of Israeli mass atrocities in Gaza.

The Guardian reports:

“A Sydney library has removed a book critical of Israel called How to Sell a Genocide, following a complaint reportedly from a survivor of the Bondi beach terror attack.

“Waverley library at Bondi Junction is in the same council area as Bondi beach.

“A Waverley council spokesperson said: “The book has been removed from library shelves for review, and council will further consider processes to ensure closer oversight of book selection.”

“They seem to be objecting largely based on the title using the word ‘genocide’,” Johnson commented. “But ‘genocide’ is not my word, or my finding. The fact of genocide in Gaza is the overwhelming consensus of the human rights world, and it is a wholly mainstream opinion among those tasked with studying and determining such matters.”

So in Australia they’re now banning books for Israel. I guess it was only a matter of time.

Also today in dystopia, Amazon is buying and destroying rare books in a secret facility to train AI.

404 Media has been doing some great reporting on how companies like Google and Anthropic have been buying up rare and out-of-print books to train their LLM models before destroying them, and now 404 has a new article out describing how its reporters placed a tracking device on a shipment of books and followed it to an Amazon warehouse where the books are being scanned and shredded.

Here’s an excerpt:

“That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.”

That’s right: the logo for Amazon’s book-destroying location is an angry tyrannosaurus preparing to rip apart a book…………………………………

Today in dystopia, the Israeli government is working harder and harder to manipulate the information AI chatbots feed their users about Israel and its myriad military projects in the middle east.

Politico reports:

“Israel has launched a new campaign to influence how large-language models like ChatGPT are answering questions about Gaza and the Israel Defense Forces amid declining public support for the country across the U.S. political spectrum.

“French PR firm Havas Media, which runs the lion’s share of Israel’s FARA-registered foreign influence work in the U.S., appears to have stood up an ‘institute’ aimed at feeding LLMs positive information about Israel via one of its subcontractors, boutique ad agency Piro, Inc.”

This builds on previous reporting from Drop Site News about FARA revelations showing that former Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale secured a lucrative deal with Israel to set up dummy pro-Israel websites designed to be read not by humans, but by the web crawlers that LLMs get their information from. Drop Site found that Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, and Perplexity were the AI companies most vulnerable to Parscale’s manipulations.

Today in dystopia it’s becoming more and more common for online commenters to accuse me of using AI to write my essays, which I have never done and will never do.

I hate that this is a thing now. I’ve been writing essays every day for a decade, and nobody who’s been reading me for a long time believes I use AI. But now that so many people are using these creepy chatbots to do everything for them, people believe it’s impossible for a human brain to produce a few paragraphs of text.

I don’t mind the accusations, I just hate what it says about where we’re heading as a species. These things have only existed for a few years, but some people are already forgetting what it was like to be able to use your own mind to complete simple cognitive tasks. I find it deeply disturbing.https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/today-in-dystopia-burning-books-for?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=211937785&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

August 22, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets and lies | Leave a comment