3 ms·

Palantir: The War on Terror's Secret Weapon

21 points by gatsby 15y ago

bane 15y ago
This would be a great advertisement if it were marked "special advertising section". I've always wondered what it would take, money-wise, to get Businessweek to write a non-researched fluff piece like this. Palantir has a hell of a sales/marketing department. There's not any mention at all of any of the recent, and quite public, controversies surrounding this firm, HBGary, Industrial espionage against a competitor, Glenn Greenwald and others. I'd almost flag this if it were just a blog, but this is really pathetic reporting and worth seeing for the crap article it is.
- tansey 15y ago
  I have to admit, this article is really awful. I initially upvoted this too quickly, after only reading the first page and seeing that there were five more to go. After reading most of the article, you're right-- it's pure fluff. I suppose it's tough to actually discuss how this technology works since there are so many security issues involved, but I feel like I learned almost nothing about Palantir's system. All I learned was that they have a bunch of fun anecdotes about their founders and CEO, and that it apparently has been used to somehow solve cases. Pretty weak. I wish I could take back my upvote.
  - dmaz 15y ago
    The article is lacking, but keep in mind the publication is Businessweek; the focus is not so much on the technology. The government contracting market is open for disruption, Karp makes clear what they are doing when he says “You will be getting results right away instead of waiting two to three years with our competitors.” The business model of massive contracts to design software from the ground up for each need of the government must die.
  - brown9-2 15y ago
    Their main products are oriented towards integrating structured and unstructured data from lots of different data sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_Government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_... Other articles on the company make it more clear that the reason why they need so many "forward-deployed engineers" are because they heavily customize the installed software for each customer, i.e. you have to do a lot of custom work pulling data out of Proprietary Customer Database X to feed it into the system (and back out). See "Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt" http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/ http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hu...
  - bane 15y ago
    Right "crazy skinny guy with bad hair, can't drive a car, but studied under a Marxist and funded by a rich Libertarian, can solve crimes and fight terrorists". Sounds like a pitch for a bad 80's tv show.
- GiraffeNecktie 15y ago
  That's not entirely fair. The article does have the following "Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, worries that Palantir will make these agencies ever hungrier consumers of every piece of personal data. “I don’t think Palantir the firm is evil,” he says. “I think their clients could be using it for evil things.” Soghoian points out that Palantir’s senior legal adviser, Bryan Cunningham, authored an amicus brief three years ago supporting the Bush Administration’s position in the infamous warrantless wiretapping case and defended its monitoring domestic communication without search warrants. Another event that got critics exercised: A Palantir engineer, exposed by the hacker collective Anonymous earlier this year for participating in a plot to break into the PCs of WikiLeaks supporters, was quietly rehired by the company after being placed on leave."
  - bane 15y ago
    Good point, I had more or less stopped reading when it started looking like too much of an advert. All three of the things you pointed out, particularly the last two, speak slimeball-ville to me. I mean, really? An organization that speaks so often of civil liberties hires Bryan Cunningham? "From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties." - Palantir's apology regarding the HBGary fiasco. It's almost not possible to think of a legal advisor more at odds with that statement. There's a few, but not many. It actually saddens me knowing that they generally hire really smart, clever, creative people on the engineering side, but have such an immense ability to tolerate clear ethical problems in the corporate management side...it seems to me that it's only a matter of time before that place blows up in a scandal like the ticking time-bomb that it appears to be.
ggwicz 15y ago
Palantir: One Step Closer to 1984 Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither. - Benjamin Franklin
twelvechairs 15y ago
> None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. [snip] Taken together, though, they suggested that Fikri was up to something. What an objectionable statement. Taken together, they don't suggest that Fikri was up to anything more than the sum of their parts (which pretty much seems to rely on the one piece 'hanging around alone in the plazas of disneyland'). If this is the best example they can come up with, I hate to think what the marginal ones might be...
psychotik 15y ago
What sort of influence does the government have on the actual algorithms/data mining done by Palantir? Basically, it feels like a way for the government to spend a bunch of taxpayer money to provide a false sense of security, while making folks at Palantir rich. Feels a lot like a digital version of those airport scanners we love so much.
- MattLaroche 15y ago
  Disclaimer: I used to work at Palantir. However, I never used the Government product, and never as much as saw a demo of the Government product. I'll talk mostly about the Government product, but much of this goes for the Finance product too. Seems like there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what Palantir does. Palantir Government does not do data mining natively. The best explanation of this is from Palantir themselves: http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-do/ http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-do/. There's impressive algorithms under the hood of Palantir Government, but the insight and analysis is provided by government analysts. Palantir provides software, services, and support. The services are mostly data integration, training, and some custom software built on top of the Palantir Government product. Palantir isn't providing analysis for money, they're providing a product that enables analysts to analyze.
brown9-2 15y ago
As he does every day, he walked to work. “I never learned to drive because I was busy reading, doing things, and talking to people,” he says. “And I’m coordinated enough to bike, but the problem is that I will start dreaming about the business and run into a tree.” I love CEO anecdotes like this: too busy to learn to drive, but not too busy to learn to ride a bike? Palantir also has a permission system to make sure that workers in agencies using its software can access only the data that their clearance levels allow. “In the pre-Palantir days, analysts could go into file cabinets and read whatever they want,” says former NCTC director Leiter. “Nobody had any idea what they had seen.” It's amazing how the former NCTC director, who is now a lobbyist for this company, seems to be unaware of the simple method of placing locks on file cabinets and/or secretaries that log who has checked out which files - methods I am sure intelligence agencies in the US have had since their founding.

21 points by gatsby 15y ago

bane 15y ago

This would be a great advertisement if it were marked "special advertising section". I've always wondered what it would take, money-wise, to get Businessweek to write a non-researched fluff piece like this. Palantir has a hell of a sales/marketing department. There's not any mention at all of any of the recent, and quite public, controversies surrounding this firm, HBGary, Industrial espionage against a competitor, Glenn Greenwald and others. I'd almost flag this if it were just a blog, but this is really pathetic reporting and worth seeing for the crap article it is.

tansey 15y ago
I have to admit, this article is really awful. I initially upvoted this too quickly, after only reading the first page and seeing that there were five more to go. After reading most of the article, you're right-- it's pure fluff. I suppose it's tough to actually discuss how this technology works since there are so many security issues involved, but I feel like I learned almost nothing about Palantir's system. All I learned was that they have a bunch of fun anecdotes about their founders and CEO, and that it apparently has been used to somehow solve cases. Pretty weak. I wish I could take back my upvote.
- dmaz 15y ago
  The article is lacking, but keep in mind the publication is Businessweek; the focus is not so much on the technology. The government contracting market is open for disruption, Karp makes clear what they are doing when he says “You will be getting results right away instead of waiting two to three years with our competitors.” The business model of massive contracts to design software from the ground up for each need of the government must die.
- brown9-2 15y ago
  Their main products are oriented towards integrating structured and unstructured data from lots of different data sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_Government http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_... Other articles on the company make it more clear that the reason why they need so many "forward-deployed engineers" are because they heavily customize the installed software for each customer, i.e. you have to do a lot of custom work pulling data out of Proprietary Customer Database X to feed it into the system (and back out). See "Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt" http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/ http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hu...
- bane 15y ago
  Right "crazy skinny guy with bad hair, can't drive a car, but studied under a Marxist and funded by a rich Libertarian, can solve crimes and fight terrorists". Sounds like a pitch for a bad 80's tv show.
GiraffeNecktie 15y ago
That's not entirely fair. The article does have the following "Christopher Soghoian, a graduate fellow at the Center for Applied Cybersecurity in the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University, worries that Palantir will make these agencies ever hungrier consumers of every piece of personal data. “I don’t think Palantir the firm is evil,” he says. “I think their clients could be using it for evil things.” Soghoian points out that Palantir’s senior legal adviser, Bryan Cunningham, authored an amicus brief three years ago supporting the Bush Administration’s position in the infamous warrantless wiretapping case and defended its monitoring domestic communication without search warrants. Another event that got critics exercised: A Palantir engineer, exposed by the hacker collective Anonymous earlier this year for participating in a plot to break into the PCs of WikiLeaks supporters, was quietly rehired by the company after being placed on leave."
- bane 15y ago
  Good point, I had more or less stopped reading when it started looking like too much of an advert. All three of the things you pointed out, particularly the last two, speak slimeball-ville to me. I mean, really? An organization that speaks so often of civil liberties hires Bryan Cunningham? "From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties." - Palantir's apology regarding the HBGary fiasco. It's almost not possible to think of a legal advisor more at odds with that statement. There's a few, but not many. It actually saddens me knowing that they generally hire really smart, clever, creative people on the engineering side, but have such an immense ability to tolerate clear ethical problems in the corporate management side...it seems to me that it's only a matter of time before that place blows up in a scandal like the ticking time-bomb that it appears to be.

ggwicz 15y ago

Palantir: One Step Closer to 1984 Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither. - Benjamin Franklin

twelvechairs 15y ago

> None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. [snip] Taken together, though, they suggested that Fikri was up to something. What an objectionable statement. Taken together, they don't suggest that Fikri was up to anything more than the sum of their parts (which pretty much seems to rely on the one piece 'hanging around alone in the plazas of disneyland'). If this is the best example they can come up with, I hate to think what the marginal ones might be...

psychotik 15y ago

What sort of influence does the government have on the actual algorithms/data mining done by Palantir? Basically, it feels like a way for the government to spend a bunch of taxpayer money to provide a false sense of security, while making folks at Palantir rich. Feels a lot like a digital version of those airport scanners we love so much.

MattLaroche 15y ago
Disclaimer: I used to work at Palantir. However, I never used the Government product, and never as much as saw a demo of the Government product. I'll talk mostly about the Government product, but much of this goes for the Finance product too. Seems like there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what Palantir does. Palantir Government does not do data mining natively. The best explanation of this is from Palantir themselves: http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-do/ http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-do/. There's impressive algorithms under the hood of Palantir Government, but the insight and analysis is provided by government analysts. Palantir provides software, services, and support. The services are mostly data integration, training, and some custom software built on top of the Palantir Government product. Palantir isn't providing analysis for money, they're providing a product that enables analysts to analyze.

brown9-2 15y ago

As he does every day, he walked to work. “I never learned to drive because I was busy reading, doing things, and talking to people,” he says. “And I’m coordinated enough to bike, but the problem is that I will start dreaming about the business and run into a tree.” I love CEO anecdotes like this: too busy to learn to drive, but not too busy to learn to ride a bike? Palantir also has a permission system to make sure that workers in agencies using its software can access only the data that their clearance levels allow. “In the pre-Palantir days, analysts could go into file cabinets and read whatever they want,” says former NCTC director Leiter. “Nobody had any idea what they had seen.” It's amazing how the former NCTC director, who is now a lobbyist for this company, seems to be unaware of the simple method of placing locks on file cabinets and/or secretaries that log who has checked out which files - methods I am sure intelligence agencies in the US have had since their founding.