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Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
- noomerikal 13y agoI love how their hypothetical reads like an episode of 24.
- potatolicious 13y agoNot really a surprise. Palantir has always been secretive about what exactly it is they do every day, though it's always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work. Also the reason why I've ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater.
- mraj 13y agoI agree with your point here. I wont be surprised if Palantir is associated with PRISM.
- lallysingh 13y agoPalantir Rakes In Stupendous Money?
- dclowd9901 13y agoWell you can't deny that their developers probably take on some pretty novel and interesting challenges.
- acchow 13y agoWhat kind of challenges? Please elaborate.
- joezydeco 13y ago"The problem space we tackle is wildly diverse and growing every day. We enable the discovery of new financial relationships and strategies in capital markets. We uncover fraud rings and cyber attacks. We develop strategies for optimizing home lending default strategies. We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts." http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000000gtfMAAQ http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPosDetail?id=a0m80000000...
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y ago> We are not domain experts; we are problem solving experts Eeek!
- thenipper 13y agoSounds like my granddad's job he had in the 30s. He was a troubleshooter. It wasn't a euphemism.
- rollo_tommasi 13y agoOut of curiosity, what sparked this reaction? Is "problem solving" a euphemism for technical drudge-work? Glorified IT contracting?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 13y agoBecause it seems to emphasize doing over thinking. Maybe not a bad idea, but in the context of the comments about blackwater, immoral and illegal things, and indoctrinating fresh grads it sounded spooky.
- brown9-2 13y agosomething that isn't marketing recruitment speak would be more illuminating.
- dclowd9901 13y agoI was thinking since they are probably on the fringes of legality, but with government sign-off, they probably get a lot of free reign to solve problems you typically wouldn't delve into, for fear of legal backlash. So basically you become a legal hacker. That would be kinda neat, and appealing, from a geek perspective.
- w1ntermute 13y agoYou could say that about a lot of immoral/unethical jobs.
- wslh 13y agoYes: solving drug trafficking routes with several constraints, making the best scams, exploiting vulnerabilities to install a botnet. All are very interesting challenges.
- scarmig 13y agoDrug trafficking is a relatively honorable occupation that delivers a highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society. It's unfair to compare it to the Stasi or consumer scams.
- freehunter 13y agoExcept for all the people killed by the gangs involved in smuggling this highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society across the borders.
- CamperBob2 13y agoThose are all consequences of illegality, not of the trade itself.
- bigiain 13y agoNot just immoral/unethical jobs either - but sometimes other jobs which some classes of people consider "less desirable". It's the social network guys these days, but back in the late '90's I learnt more about large-scale highly-available and secure web development from people working in the porn industry than anywhere else. (I remember a long and fascinating/educational series of conversations with Sudicide Girls tech people at the Open Source Convention in San Diego back in 2000 or 2001.)
- Anderkent 13y ago>Also the reason why I've ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater. Is this because you would not like to work at a company handling such data, or because you think you are making a difference by not doing so? If the former, fair enough. If the latter, you might want to rethink the approach - refusing the job only means someone else will take it, and is likely to be 'worse' according to the values that prevent you from taking the job (less likely to blow the whistle, less likely to challenge sales on projects that are evil etc.)
- runjake 13y agoI think you need to rethink your argument. As far as i can tell, you're essentially saying "Take this job that's against your ethics or somebody else will".
- Anderkent 13y agoNo, I'm saying "Take this job that is against your ethics and do the best thing you can, because otherwise someone who is not concerned about this job being unethical will take it, and do much more damage than you will".
- jboggan 13y agoYou sound like Boromir. Now that I think about it, calling it Palantir is ridiculously apt.
- _delirium 13y ago> refusing the job only means someone else will take it If he's the only person who refuses the job, yes. But the overall effect depends on how many people refuse the job. If a significant percentage of technologists with in-demand skills refuse to do a particular kind of work, it will become harder for a company to hire that kind of employee. Lots of companies in the Valley are already having trouble hiring enough skilled staff, and competing on intangibles, ranging from perceived interestingness of work to perks like gourmet lunches, is one axis they use to try to get employees.
- nimish 13y agoThey're pretty upfront with the fact that a major portion of their business is from the US government, especially intelligence analysts. The other chunk is financial (hedge funds and the like as well as banks looking for fraud). Not that it excuses any of it but they really don't try to hide it.
- joezydeco 13y agoIt seems a quick run through the open positions at Palantir can tell you a lot more... http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPositionLanding http://www.palantir.com/careers/OpenPositionLanding "Embedded Analyst, Government: Canberra" "Embedded Analyst, Government: London" "Embedded Analyst, Government: New Zealand" "Engineer, Developer Support Team (McLean, VA)" "Forward Deployed Engineer: Singapore" "Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Government: Berlin" "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Denmark" "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Finland" "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Norway" "Forward Deployed Software Engineer: Stockholm"
- bane 13y agoUgh, a quick review on glassdoor makes their hiring practices sound soul sucking http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-Interview-Questions-E236375.htm http://www.glassdoor.com/Interview/Palantir-Technologies-Int...
- rdl 13y agoThey have a really strong college recruiting organization, which seems to be how they hire most of their people, so glassdoor probably isn't as representative. For the "FDE" positions, it's much closer to being onsite support/tech/contractor. I assure you Palantir is less shitty to interview for/work for than virtually any "traditional defense contractor", which is their comparison (I've never interviewed at Palantir, but know a lot of people there, including their recruiters, and have worked for the alternatives.) This is all independent of their "mission". (I support national security but not unlimited monitoring of US citizens; It's annoying that stuff like PRISM deters good people from working for government, lowering our capability to respond, and thus hurting national security...)
- Spooky23 13y agoBe careful with moral judgements like that. You basically work in an industry that exists due to it's role in preparing for nuclear war.
- EthanHeilman 13y agoWhats wrong with preparing for nuclear war, especially if preparation is an effective deterrent to actual nuclear war. Ensuring a credible second strike ability is probably one of the more rational ethical actions someone can take outside of pacifism. Of course creating a credible second strike ability is so easy ( merely hide x weapons with delivery systems controlled by PALs ) that it has been a solved problem from the 1960s.
- rayiner 13y agoI'd go further than that. A bunch of people are expressing surprise/outrage that a bunch of companies that spy on for profit you at the service of the advertising industry are sharing the fruits of that spying with the government for national security.
- bernardlunn 13y agoThe greatest minds of our generation are figuring out how to get a sated consumer to click
- rayiner 13y agoNo, the greatest minds of our generation are still working where they always have: in academia, research labs, etc. The people figuring out how to get consumers to click are the top 5-0.5% minds. When I look back at people from my high school, most of the tippy-top people are getting PhD's and figuring out how to do nuclear fusion. It's the next rung down that are working on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.
- adventured 13y agoSpeculating about who has the bigger brain seems pretty silly. There's no way you could ever realistically prove your position (ditto the parent).
- Permit 13y ago>Palantir has always been secretive about what exactly it is they do every day, though it's always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work Wow. That's just as bad as saying since a person uses TOR, they're being secretive and must have something to hide. You must be able to see the hypocrisy in all of this.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> That's just as bad as saying since a person uses TOR, they're being secretive and must have something to hide. People who use TOR are being secretive and have something to hide. They may have very good reasons to want to hide it because of threats from bad actors (including, potentially, their own governments), but if they didn't have something to hide, they wouldn't be expending additional resources to actively hide things, which is exactly what using TOR is .
- Makkhdyn 13y agoSemi related: http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/745547_re-ct-tactical-palantir-software-.html http://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/745547_re-ct-tactical-pala...
- bane 13y agoit's a stronger link than the article supposes
- welp 13y agoWhile links are never impossible, I am ever optimistic and hope that their employees actually do watch out for the red flags they just spoke about on their blog two months ago. "Every Palantirian is trained to look out for “red flags” at deployments that might indicate activities that are antithetical to our commitment to privacy and civil liberties." http://www.palantir.com/2013/04/dont-just-trust-us/ http://www.palantir.com/2013/04/dont-just-trust-us/
- randomfool 13y agoAnd are the employees told to report these red flags directly to independent third-parties for investigation? It's an easy thing to say but I'm extremely skeptical about it in practice. For instance, red flag- government is scaling up for 1000x the capacity that lawful warrants would generate. You report this, but who at Palantir would take action?
- maxcan 13y agoAnd every elected federal official in the United States takes an oath to defend the Constitution.
- dragonwriter 13y agoThat's not limited to "elected" or "federal" officials. U.S. Constitution, Art. VI, Clause 3 (emphasis added): The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.
- zht 13y agois this what stands for journalism now? taking random anonymous reader email, googling it casually, and then writing a story on it behind the facade of "oh please don't hold us responsible, we're just quoting random anonymous email"
- scarmig 13y agoWell, when the government keeps tens of billions of dollar worth of activities totally secret--not just the details of, but the very existence of--what are you supposed to do? Wait until the NSA does a press release of everything it's doing?
- blendergasket 13y agoThis is our future. A fascist with asymmetrical hair standing in front of a hip, edgy bit of art, who's funded by a fascist who calls himself a libertarian, waxing eloquently about how good a person he is because the company he founded is protecting the shire by injecting the increasingly unaccountable security apparatus into every single aspect of our lives where they will enforce conformity.
- pekk 13y agoI can't tell what you even mean by "fascist". The word has a specific meaning. A good example of a fascist was Mussolini. An example of a fascist view is that the nation (which should be holy) has been taken over by degenerates, liberals, the weak and people of impure ancestries or ancestries which don't belong here, and that it must be purified through violence such as purges and wars of glory.
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- javert 13y agoPersonally, I consider the left-wing leadership of the country to be nihilists: they seek to gain self-esteem by destroying others' values (e.g. wealth, rights, etc.). They do it via egalitarian ideology. Hence, egalitarian nihilists. If you have noticed a subtle ideological change between Democrats of the previous "generation" (such as Bill Clinton) and the "Young Turks" of the party (like Obama), this is the difference. That said, I don't think this applies to the rank-and-file of intelligence community at large. They're too close to mainstream American culture to be nihilists. Any theories on why they would work to implement these kinds of spy systems would be appreciated. Maybe they have simply been drained of all critical thinking by the education system and just do what they're told since that's their job.
- asveikau 13y agoSuch Randian nonsense. If the dems are such egalitarians and want to destroy the wealth of others, why do you have growing disparity and retain the Bush tax rates? And if you say Obama has more of this than Clinton, why are wealthy people paying less taxes now than they did in the 90s?
- jmngomes 13y agoHmmm, that makes it clearer why their CEO is at Bildeberg this year (http://news.rapgenius.com/The-bilderberg-group-list-of-attendees-for-2013-bilderburg-group-meeting-lyrics http://news.rapgenius.com/The-bilderberg-group-list-of-atten...). I once had a startup project (shot down by internal "concerns") to spin-off an intelligence software for social network exploration & analysis that I build at the company I worked for, I remember browsing through Palantir's portfolio and thinking they had quite the arsenal for surveillance and intelligence. PS: Does this information being on RapGenius indicates something significant about their mid-term strategy?
- tpowell 13y agoI haven't seen this interview with him on Charlie Rose yet: http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10549 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10549
- gohrt 13y agoYeah, the whole 'news' section is a cool use-case pivot on the unerlying tech/UI: http://news.rapgenius.com/ http://news.rapgenius.com/
- bri3d 13y agoIt's already well known that RapGenius are trying to expand into a more generic document annotation service (see "Enterprise Genius").
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- merinid 13y agoI cannot believe the link between palantir and prism is by the mere NAME of the software package as alleged in this article. That's some weak journalism. I mean, just check out github while you're at it: https://github.com/search?q=PRISM&ref=cmdform https://github.com/search?q=PRISM&ref=cmdform
- freyr 13y agoI think the link is that, in addition to creating software under the same name, they received early funding from the CIA, and their software serves the same general purpose of sifting through large amounts of disparate data from various sources.
- Permit 13y agoI attended a conference in Montreal where Palantir demoed their software. They used a large amount of data on an ecoli outbreak to map out and track the point of origin. Simply because a company isn't public about all its activities and deals with "large amounts of disparate data" is not grounds to call for their cruxifixion. This story had brought out the absolute worst in HN commenters.
- freyr 13y agoIt's great that they showed a demo tracking a disease outbreak, but that doesn't really mean anything. The company readily admits that their software has primarily been used in the defense and finance industries. They don't hide this fact, nor should they feel pressured to. I'm not crucifying anybody, I was just pointing out that the OP's speculation was based on slightly more than just the name alone (but I agree, it's still pretty weak).
- natch 13y agoPalantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something. There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don't engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and are just out in California for a short time, and don't see themselves staying here. Like expats in their own country. Maybe they are from NSA families. Maybe Palantir functions effectively like an internship program for future NSA employees.
- bri3d 13y agoI don't think Palantir is a sinister NSA conspiracy so much as a manifestation of a certain kind of corporate culture present both in and outside of the intelligence community. At least from my interaction with employees there, it's not an NSA feeder nor an NSA nepotism apparatus, just a corporation that hires aggressively out of Ivy Leagues and then indoctrinates into a specific culture. In my experience Palantir employees tend to work late and party with other Palantir employees. A friend lived with a Palantir employee and I worked in one of their buildings (100 Hamilton). In my limited observation I noted a definite "wake up, go to Palantir, work, go out with Palantir, go back, after-party at Palantir, sleep" lifestyle that many Palantir employees subscribe to. It's very "corporate cult"-esque: they hire inexperienced fresh grads from top-tier universities, and put them all together so that they foster relationships with each other, then build social events and in-office parties so people are reluctant to go out.
- SkyMarshal 13y agoA lot of them also obtain US Govt security clearances, and it's a bit of a process to obtain and something of an achievement in and of itself. But the ones I know also take the responsibility seriously, and I can't help but wonder if that influences some of them to spend more time with each other where they don't have to watch what they say, and less with the "outside" world where they have to be a little more on guard.
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- aridiculous 13y agoI told my sister-in-law (a very level-headed economist) about Palantir and she just referred to them as paramilitary thugs. It hadn't occurred to me to phrase it like that because they are a young, hip group that borrows from Lord of the Rings and evidently posts cartoons on their walls. Karp's M.O. is to simply list off all the possible use cases of data inference, including good ones. It makes him sound like a wise judge who will exercise restraint. However, these use cases are sometimes simply incompatible with each other, no matter how you slice it. Even IF he's a well-intentioned judge (which I doubt), political forces are likely to overrule his control when the kitchen gets hot enough. We must stop excusing bad behavior from our elites.
- wavefunction 13y agoJust keep in mind who abused the Palantir.
- jacoblyles 13y agoIt's striking how much of modern political thinking comes down to branding.
- garry 13y agoThis is the first time I've heard Palantir being called paramilitary thugs. Are there specific claims that would substantiate that? (I was an early employee.)
- aridiculous 13y agoNope. Admittedly, kind of a cheap shot. Especially the thugs part. However, more broadly, I believe a lot of problem is the asymmetric abuse of rhetorical language by the clever silicon valley execs. Once you have the public using your terms, they're on your terms. It's why the word "surveillance" is so critical to the discussion: People know what it means. "Analytics" and even "privacy" are euphemisms that keep average people uninformed or placated. Fighting fire with fire, I'm simply trying to get some terminology inserted into the discussion that isn't from Palantir's website or the (PR) media.
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- Permit 13y agoWhy would you disclose that publicly? That pretty much reads as: "Don't use Repustate" to me.
- mratzloff 13y agoPalantir uses Linux, too. So I guess you can't use Linux now.
- Permit 13y agoI wasn't boycotting his company because Palantir used them. (I'm not in his company's target demographic anyway) I was saying that it seems like a poor business strategy to badmouth clients because of an anoymous comment that somehow made it into a blog post. Especially when the evidence against Palantir consists of: 1. They have a project that happens to be named Prism. 2. They don't publicly disclose their own clients/operations.
- endlessvoid94 13y agoRemind me not to ever buy something from you.
- joering2 13y agoOkay I may be nighmar-ishing here, but is it possible that since Peter Thiel owns/owned large chunk of Facebook and also owns Palantir that works for government contracts, is it possible that Thiel could have been passing by info from Facebook servers via Palantir to the Government? Wouldn't that make sense? I mean, lets say you own Facebook so what you say needs to be programmed or Facebook employees get pink slips, simple. Is it possible that Government does not tap into Facebook servers, BUT it does contract Palantir that the owner owns Facebook at the same time and thats how Governement gets up to date access to Facebook servers?
- akiselev 13y agoThe CIA's venture arm invested in Facebook and the political pressure is probably far greater than any pressure that small owners could generate (Thiel/In-q-tel owned a few percent by the time of the ipo)
- malandrew 13y agoI'd like to see that blurb about Fikri at the bottom rewritten multiple times over for each of the 205 people on the list that McCarthy bandied about during his Wheeling speech in 1950. That story sounds very different when it can be used to describe the escapades of a free citizen, especially when the details of those escapades can be used as blackmail against them by another individual with an agenda. What stops a politician with ties to the intelligence community from using this system to coerce others around him. This is the conversation we should be having, because this very real possibility is what makes these systems sound reprehensible to red-blooded terrorist hating 'mericans who generally defend these actions by the government in day-to-day conversations.
- ryanx435 13y agofinally a topic comes up on HN that I'm an expert in, and yet I'm legally unable to talk about it. ... crap.
- HudsonMauer 13y agoWhich is also why Palantir folks don't talk about what they do.
- icedchai 13y agoyou can talk about it... anonymously.
- wilfra 13y agoThat's what throwaway accounts and VPN's are for.
- HudsonMauer 13y agoOf course there's a link. Palantir basically allows for analysis across federated data sources. It's a data fusion platform along the lines of other C4ISR programs. One of those federated sources is now SNA (Social Network Analysis) and/or other Internet sources. One way for Facebook to share information the gov't requests is through this: https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/ https://www.facebook.com/safety/groups/law/guidelines/ This next part is speculation, but if you were servicing many of these requests, wouldn't you just create an API to help you out? You aren't getting paid (much? Note: "Cost Reimbursement" section in above link) to help them out.
- jelkins 13y agoThe link between the U.S. government's program codenamed PRISM and Palantir's internal software called Prism is completely coincidental. If you take a look at their site, you will learn that Metropolis is Palantir's alias for their finance product[1]. This is obvious just looking at the page in question as it [2] describes how to add Timeseries data. Timeseries data is usually composed of information about stocks or derivatives. I don't dispute that Palantir deals with much of the nation's intelligence, but attempting to draw a link between two pieces of software that happen to be named the same seems like pretty bad reporting to me. Even if there is a disclaimer at the top of the page. Full Disclosure: I'm an ex-Palantir employee. [1] http://www.palantir.com/platforms/#metropolis http://www.palantir.com/platforms/#metropolis [2] https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html#PrismOverview-AddTimeseriesData https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html#...
- mullingitover 13y agoI was about to post, "Nice try, Palantir employee." Then I got to the full disclosure bit. Fair enough. I would assume that PRISM is an internal codename for the project within the NSA. Just a wild guess, but perhaps it stands for "Palantir's Repeated Interception of Society's Metadata."
- apetresc 13y agoGuys, guys. Listen. They both start with a 'P'. We've cracked it. It's them. We can all unclench now.
- ng12 13y agoThat's not how Palantir works. Palantir is a platform, if it were part of Prism the government would still be the one collecting and storing the data. They may have had a hand in setting the system up so that it integrates with that data but at the end of the day it would be no different than the government using IBM's or Oracle's big data tools.
- c4urself 13y agoSeriously, there's a lot of FUD on this thread. Right now it's anecdotal evidence at best that there is a relationship there at all. But most people here seem to be talking about it as if it's already proven fact. Come on HN.
- Permit 13y agoIt's absolutely unbelievable how groupthink manages to take over here sometimes. There are 296 repositories on Github when you search for PRISM. People need to stop and think for a minute about how generic of a name that is. It's certainly doesn't serve as any kind of useful evidence against Palantir.
- jacoblyles 13y agoMeanwhile, it is a public fact that Cisco helped build the great firewall of China[1]. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_People's_Republic_of_China#Enforcement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peo...
- Stratego 13y agoAnomaly Hunting: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anomaly-hunting/ http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/anomaly-hunting...; Not to be confused with investigating.
- advice4u 13y agoAlexander Karp was interviewed by Charlie Rose[1]: "Most of our business is in government, and it all involves both sides of this equation -- finding people who are up to essentially bad things..." "So, let’s say you go to the market and you buy something. You talk on your cell phone, and you send an SMS. You send every little -- you write a report. All those are data, and massive scale, it is very hard for you to see that as a pattern. So what is the pattern of Charlie Rose? Each Charlie Rose interacting with people that are up to no good? And then it is very hard for me, the citizen of America, to look at the government and say, did they look at Charlie Rose because he was up to no good or did they look at Charlie Rose because they didn’t like his hair color? And by the way, did they use Charlie Rose as a way to look at Charlie Rose’s audience and find out who is in the audience?" [1]http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10549 http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10549 [2]http://www.charlierose.com/download/transcript/10549 http://www.charlierose.com/download/transcript/10549
- jboggan 13y agoA few months back I met a building contractor at a party outside of SV who was going on and on about installing "bullet proof glass" inside various areas of a tech company headquarters. I asked a few questions about the environs and it was clear it was the Palantir office he was talking about. I've never heard a single good thing from my friends who had interviewed or had brushes with the company. Do the employees get stock options or just U.S. Treasury bonds?
- trxblazr 13y agoA decent number of Stanford CS undergrads/grads end up there.
- kjackson2012 13y agoDo they hire H1B's? That would be a really quick clue as to whether or not they are doing work for NSA. None of my Indian friends know any H1B that works at Palantir, which is really odd, but maybe other people have different anecdotes.
- mikegreen 13y agoI would not use that for blanket decision making. The technology, just like much of IBM's entity relationship/NORA stuff that you can download via the IBM customer portal, is mostly declassified stuff that has applicability to fraud detection, pandemic/health outbreaks, and plain ole data analysis. Anyone could work on that stuff. Where you need people with a clearance is to actually touch the data - which means implementing/deploying the software, training their users with real data, and supporting it.
- dsl 13y agoIt could also just be a moral choice. I don't hire H1Bs because I believe we have a sufficient talent pool here in America.
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- curiousDog 13y agoHow's that a moral choice though? If anything it's a nationalistic choice, which is totally fine. To the OP, they do hire H1bs for their commercial products. I know an Australian and Indian working there.
- etjossem 13y agoSomeone at Palantir has just explicitly denied this connection, for what it's worth. http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup... Relevant bit: "Palantir’s Prism platform is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name. Prism is Palantir’s name for a data integration technology used in the Palantir Metropolis platform (formerly branded as Palantir Finance). This software has been licensed to banks and hedge funds for quantitative analysis and research."
- marcamillion 13y agoWhenever Thiel talks about Palantir, I get a bit confused. I wonder if he suffers from cognitive dissonance. One of his most successful companies is a company that does big data analysis for the DOD (likely the Intelligence Community)...yet he is stridently libertarian - to the point where he is a Seasteader. So I can't quite reconcile the two.
- gohrt 13y ago1. Many Libertarians give defense spending a free pass, calling defense the only essential function of government. 2. Libertarians are opposed to giving money to govt, not taking money from govt.
- marcamillion 13y agoYes...but the core of a libertarian is that they value their LIBERTY over anything else. It can't just be that Thiel wants to make money. Would he be involved in a company that is systematically eroding the very liberties that he publicly claims to cherish, all for a few more hundreds of millions of dollars? I doubt it. So there must be something else going on - and I am genuinely interested.
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- garry 13y agoI can personally confirm Palantir Prism is not NSA's Prism. I helped build that team and write that software in 2006. It was Palantir Finance, and it was built for use at hedge funds and financial houses as a quant analysis platform for traders.
- markhall 13y agoIn case you missed it. UPDATE: Startup Palantir Denies Its 'Prism' Software Is The NSA's 'PRISM' Surveillance System http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup...;
- tptacek 13y agoWhat an embarrassing thread.
- gregors 13y agobeen watching their repos for awhile now https://github.com/palantir https://github.com/palantir
- neuro 13y agoPalantir did develop a database to store scraped data from social media sites. According to Chamber of Commerce meetings, data was uploaded to it from HBGary and Berico.
- gregors 13y agoI've been following their repos for awhile now https://github.com/palantir https://github.com/palantir what exactly is SYSMON anyway! monitoring tools indeed.
- jchonphoenix 13y agoFull Disclosure: I'm ex-Palantir Government Dev Ok guys. Let's use Occam's Razor for a second. What's more likely? 1) A company that purposefully goes around blackmailing people to make deals, uses underhanded tactics, and spies on the people, yet is able to hire amazingly talented (and opinionated supporters of the EFF) engineers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT. Or 2)a company that builds a data analytics platform that is useful to a lot of people and honestly believes they're helping the world by finding missing children, tracking terrorism, and fighting fraud. Although this article is just ludicrous. All because I think up the same domain name as someone else doesn't mean I hacked into their computer and stole their code.
- laurenia 13y agoThose options aren't mutually exclusive.
- clicks 13y agoThere are subsections within large companies; it's usually unclear to most employees what that subsection really does (that is, if they're even aware of the existence of the subsection to begin with). Companies try to gauge level of "trustworthiness" and transfer folks higherups feel are trust-able into the subsections where work is done that some may feel is ethically dubious.
- draq 13y agoIf I wrote a screenplay, then Palantir is exactly the name I would give the evil Mega Corp (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MegaCorp http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MegaCorp).
- moconnor 13y agoThis is a ridiculous suggestion. The NSA employs an incredible concentration of some of the smartest people in their fields to work on analysis. I am certain they don't outsource their core purpose.
- rwhitman 13y agoWhether its Palantir or not, it does make perfect sense that the NSA would subcontract this work to a 3rd party. Someone is out there with this contract
- kevinpet 13y agoPalantir may not be printing this on t-shirts, but they aren't that secretive about what they do. Let's say you're an FBI agent with a warrant that allows you to spy on Joe Schmo, and any of his foreign contacts (not named individually). And maybe you're doing this because of ties to drug smuggling, so you're allowed to ignore the fourth amendment when dealing with some particular data source, but other sources are only allowed within the scope of the warrant. Palantir (or at least one of their products) allows querying across those data sources within the bounds of the warrant. So rather than the good old days when "secure in their persons and papers" meant that you could actually keep your data private, with Palantir, the government has moved the position that until a human sees it, it doesn't count.