Edit: I overstated the first sentence. It wasn't In-Q-tel, just someone who might have been sympathetic.
Always; yet at the same time, because of those shadows, almost all specific claims of some specific face being spotted in those shadows isn't correct.
Thiel personally, and the name "Palantir", gives off Bond Villain vibes (yes I know it's LOTR). How much of that is the actual threat, vs. an unmarked shipping crate owned on paper by "Dave's Shrimp Inc."?
A secretive governing process can overstep, undermining democracy or subverting constitutional rights.
If the crate blows up, generally the public will know about it.
If important calls are made without public oversight, then the public won’t know about them. This might deprive the electorate of a chance to shape those processes democratically or to go through the courts, where their rights could be defended or where they could be compensated for harms.
Fortunately, I can’t think of any examples of when secretive organizational processes have harbored abusive dynamics. Not even in more mundane organizations with far less authority, like the Boy Scouts of America. Public officials and their reports can always be trusted to do the right thing, so public oversight is never necessary.
Given that the opponents of your government can use the same information as the general public to determine the blind spots of your intelligence agencies, I'm not sure what to do about that, though I am hopeful that we're rapidly approaching the point where any motivated teenager can sucessfully spy on a government and at that point there's much less benefit for agencies to be secretive.
I hope.
But all that aside, my point was that conspiracy theories are often wrong even when there's an actual conspiracy in the same general area.
The way this always worked was the government would sponsor research into new tech, get it and use it, and then the patents and licenses would be disseminated into the private sector and be re-packaged as products. Think of the first iPhone; the LCD screen was a result of DARPA projects looking to reduce the beefy CRT displays to something more usable in vehicles and aircraft; the multi-touch screen was developed by CERN; the GPS system was originally conceived to track deployed materiel in warzones, etc. That doesn't mean Apple did no work of course, combining all of these things is no trivial matter. I'm just saying that most tech has it's roots in defense/intel grants that fund the research, because building new technology is fucking expensive and most corporations won't do it because it's terrible ROI.
Edit: I remembered the note I wanted to add for corner cutters:
[1]: The primary exception being a corporation that does not yet need to make profits, which is where you find investor-funded startups and incubator arrangements like Google had during their early time.
