5 ms·

I used to be intelligence analyst that utilized Palantir on a daily basis. Ask me anything.

• chillingeffect 8y ago
  What kind of search filtering options are available for fishing expeditions?
  • ideophobia 8y ago
    You can search on or around nearly anything. That's one of their selling points to customers. The search function is multi-faceted, in that 1) it can index the data of any files you upload to Palantir (making everything text searchable), 2) Analysts can indicate specific attributes of an entity just by highlighting text in a file and marking it as a DOB or SSN or whatever. 3) The # of attributes is nearly limitless. One of the primary screens in Palantir is a simple search page designed to work (and look) like Google, to search upon your entire database however you'd like. You can enhance the search function via the various attributes built into your installation or using advanced search tools. So I guess a "fishing expedition" in the traditional sense is very easy, as it's limited by the data you have, not the system itself.
    • zrobotics 8y ago
      Are there options to restrict search space (i.e. limit data sources that could potentially contaminate an investigation)? And if so, is that a common practice, or is it more typical to search through all avaliable data for anything potentially useful and weed out later?
      • ideophobia 8y ago
        I don't specifically remember an option to weed out searching, but I'm reasonably certain there were advanced options that included "does not equal" or "does not contain" type boolean searching. From my experience though, it wasn't common practice to weed out from the start, but rather to start with a general search and slowly narrow it down to the targeted data. A lot of data sources weren't automatically imported, they were more like extended queries. So if I wanted employment records, for example, I had to initiate that as a custom search to query that external system, and pull back the data for the specific individual I was investigating, it was not available in the database by default. But once it was imported and tagged, it was available in any future searches for the remainder of the data retention period.
• 2close4comfort 8y ago
  Why did you quit?
  • ideophobia 8y ago
    I was frustrated with management in my department and ended up leaving for private sector.
    • dx034 8y ago
      Is Palantir not considered to be private sector?
      • ideophobia 8y ago
        It is. I did not work for palantir though, I worked as an intelligence anaylst in public sector who used Palantir in my job. Palantir does not provide analysts, generally, they just sell the software. The forward deployed engineers help install and instruct, and sometimes they have people come on site to walk through analytical use cases, but generally they don't employ many, if any, actual full-time intelligence analysts, from what I saw.
      • CamTin 8y ago
        Palantir is private sector, but they sell to governments.
    • 2close4comfort 8y ago
      I have heard it was pretty rough. I extricated myself after the technical interview after reading up on process and conditions seemed like interesting work but not remotely altruistic in its goals. I hope you found something much better.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• opportune 8y ago
  To what extent are searches/queries/data-accesses performed by analysts logged and audited? Were there actual and official repercussions for looking at the data of family members and romantic interests?
  • ideophobia 8y ago
    From what I recall all activity is logged. We also had numerous external databases/tools that were essentially API connections to reduce the number of separate logins we'd have to do, and each of those databases had their own audit mechanisms. Long before we ever had Palantir in my department, we did have an employee who had misused a database for personal reasons. They were initially terminated but that was undone upon appeal. They were reprimanded either way and lost access to various tools/databases going forward for a long time. I know of many stories of police, for example, getting fired for abusing the NCIC databases for personal gain. Sadly it often falls on the agencies to self-police these issues, and most don't have anyone dedicated to this effort. So it really falls on the first line supervisors, of which some are great about it and some couldn't be bothered. I am of the opinion that all security, intelligence, and LE agencies should have an internal team solely focused on audit & review actions for internal abuse/misuse/privacy concerns, but that is a minority opinion from my experience.
    • narag 8y ago
      From what I recall all activity is logged. My apologies in advance to offtopic haters. But this is too good to overlook. Did anybody else notice how this question relates to the origin of the name?
• fulafel 8y ago
  How effective a tool was it compared to other tools at your disposal?
  • ideophobia 8y ago
    This is probably my favorite question, and the reason why I like Palantir, but tell everyone not to bother buying it. The most common "low-tech" tools used by analyst's across the board are IBM's I2 Analyst's Notebook, ArcGIS (or something similar), Excel, various external databases, and Microsoft word. To super dumb-it-down: You use external data bases and excel to collect initial data, you use i2 to visualize it, you use ArcGIS to map it, then you use Word to write a report about it. Palantir does all these things on it's own, so in theory you'd only need to buy and utilize one product vs multiple. The problem is that it does each one fairly sub-par as compared to the more common "low-tech" options. You have to deeply invest in Palantir, and have them build in the customization necessary to really make it shine within your department. Unfortunately that ups the price significantly, so many agencies are buying essentially the off-the-shelf version and then complaining that it doesn't do what they need it to do.
• ikmujn 8y ago
  How do you sleep at night?
  • ideophobia 8y ago
    Not drinking too much. Regular exercise at the gym, three days a week.
• cezart 8y ago
  What kind of databases were used in your case for the analysis? Was it only the databases you provided them? Or are there also some generic sources Palantir provides by default? Or do they even cross-reference data from different clients?
  • ideophobia 8y ago
    We used a variety of 3rd party records databases (think Lexis Nexus, TLO, etc.), government/police databases (NIPR, SIPR, HSIN, NCIC, LEO.gov, etc), internal databases, and state public records systems (think DMV). We only had databases which we owned or had access to. Palantir did not provide any actual data for my department. They did have pre-built connectors for certain data sources, and pre-built attribute models for tagging data, which I assumed were developed for previous customers. But the initial install of Palantir was empty, and only populated with our data sources. To my knowledge Palantir does not provide any data. I actually recall walking into a room and finding 3-4 Palantir engineers doing nothing but migrating data from our old intelligence software into the new Palantir system, mostly by hand. I can say with 100% certainty that they did not cross-reference our data with other customers, because the software not sending any data back to Palantir was a primary stipulation of our purchase. I was always under the impression that no data was shared across customers, just code, connectors, and best practices. Our installation of Palantir was 100% local, none of the infrastructure sat in a vendor cloud environment or on Palantirs home servers.