I acknowledge that they aren’t exactly doing the Lord’s work.

But really what I’m saying is detached from that. I’m saying that they are a run of the mill government contractor. If it wasn’t them it would be someone else or maybe it would even be software developed in-house.

Peter Thiel isn’t some kind of evil genius Bond villain for deciding to leave the ruthless competition of the private sector where you actually need to deliver a good product and instead live off of government contracts where vendor choices are more limited.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Target had more sophisticated data profiling tools than Palantir.

This misses the motive. PT is motivated by way more than money and his goals are entirely undemocractic. Target's data profiling is banal greed and myopia, while it constructs an apparatus that is dystopian, PT has dystopian goals.