The US State Department is partnering with Palantir and Anduril, tech companies known for providing mass surveillance and AI weapons technologies, on a project to protect “freedom of expression,” Foreign Policy (FP) reported on 20 August.

Under the Freedom Tech Excellence Program (FTEP), employees from Palantir and Anduril will work limited-term assignments at the State Department, according to a statement on the agency's website.

Assignments will include work in areas related to “digital freedom and freedom of expression,” including “cybersecurity, emerging technologies, data privacy, child online protection, artificial intelligence, and technology policy and governance,” an anonymous State Department spokesperson told FP.

The partnership is Orwellian, given that Palantir is known for developing software enabling mass surveillance by government, including “allowing users to track, detain and, in the context of war, kill people at scale with the help of AI,” The Guardian wrote.

Its programs use vast amounts of “publicly and privately sourced data to detect patterns, and are particularly helpful in projects of mass surveillance, forced migration and urban warfare,” The Guardian added.

Meanwhile, Anduril is known for manufacturing weapons systems, including drones, missiles, and unmanned aircraft.

The company's core product is its Lattice software, which uses “AI to operate nearly autonomous drones, surveillance cameras, and underwater vessels,” Forbes noted.

“It isn't clear why these initial private-sector partners have any expertise on freedom of expression,” said Chris Painter, a former cybersecurity official at the FBI, State Department, and White House.

“For the [US President Donald] Trump administration to recruit from the same firms that are under scrutiny for their surveillance practices – I find the whole thing totally head-scratching,” said Steve Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Palantir and Anduril employees will work at the State Department for one year, with an option for an extension, and will not receive a salary from the State Department, the anonymous spokesperson said.

Two NGOs are also listed as partners in the program: the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and the Bitcoin Policy Institute.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation was established in 1993, with a mission to commemorate what it claims are the “more than 100 million people killed by communism around the world” and to pursue the “freedom” of those living under communist governments.

The State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor provided the foundation with a massive $40 million grant in July.

In a statement to FP, the foundation said it was excited “to build new tools and policies that advance online freedom of expression, enhance privacy, and counter digital surveillance.”

The Bitcoin Policy Institute is a Washington, DC-based think tank that researches the societal, economic, and policy implications of Bitcoin and emerging monetary networks. The Institute has claimed that China is conducting a “foreign influence campaign against American AI” involving efforts to discourage the construction of data centers in the US.

The institute claims the influence campaign is led by Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based Marxist activist known for funding anti-war groups and alternative media outlets, including the People's Forum, the ANSWER Coalition, BreakThrough News, and the Justice and Education Fund.

The institute's head of research, Sam Lyman, is a former senior advisor to US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

“We believe decentralized, privacy-preserving technologies advance American interests by empowering global citizens and weakening the grip of authoritarian states,” the institute said in a statement to FP.

The State Department project is reminiscent of the “Internet Freedom” agenda promoted by former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, which involved developing technologies (such as Tor) and training activists to launch color revolutions to destabilize governments known as opponents of the US, including Iran and Syria.