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How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut
- diydsp 13y ago>Not long after obtaining his doctorate, he received an inheritance from his grandfather >“How could it be the case that this person is cofounder and CEO since 2005 and the company still exists?” The answer dates back to Karp’s decades-long friendship with Peter Thiel, >Thiel had cofounded PayPal and sold it to eBay in October 2002 for $1.5 billion. >Enter Karp, whose Krameresque brown curls, European wealth connections and Ph.D. masked his business inexperience. And thus we enter the Establishment's presentation of hippie-cum-suit stories, presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars [1]. Sound familiar? It's the same story that worked on the baby boomer generation. "First I was a hippie, then I was a stock broker, now I am a hippie again." [1] Let's see them give the token opposing community activist on page 4 the same photography treatment instead of photographing him on the margins of the frame so he looks even more obese and distended.
- VladRussian2 13y ago>presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars [1] these jobs and these companies are cool. You want to work for them. You want to be cool.
- ethanbond 13y agoThey are cool, though. Why the snarkiness?
- andrewcooke 13y agonot everyone agrees with you, i'm afraid. more generally, this is something you'll learn as you get older - a lot of things you thought were cool, aren't. not even one direction. reality's a bitch, son. sorry.
- VladRussian2 13y agoyep, the article is thoroughly seeded with absolutely not subliminal "cool" stimuli especially effective for young males. Living in the Valley, that one struck home with me, was hard to stop laughing. Aura of danger and secrecy... Dragging with you a 6ft+ 270lb ex-Marine bodyguard _conspicuously_ in Palo Alto. Friday night on University: I'm Dork, James Dork. Well, everybody has his own way to overcompensate.
- ethanbond 13y agoOr maybe the tech company has, Idk, cool tech. Although I guess appreciating it would take more than a reactionary pants-pissing any time a writer happens to mention 'PRISM' and another (unrelated) company in the same article.
- ethanbond 13y agoHave you ever seen a Palantir product demo? It's technologically damn cool, regardless of your take on a Forbes writer's take on one employee. If someone watches their demos or tours their offices and doesn't walk out at least slightly giddy, they're either paranoid of the solutions or ignorant of the problems. Or both.
- VladRussian2 13y ago>It's technologically damn cool, regardless of your take on a Forbes writer's take on one employee. If someone watches their demos or tours their offices and doesn't walk out at least slightly giddy, they're either paranoid of the solutions or ignorant of the problems. Or both. i guess this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209907 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209907 explains maximalism and arrogance of your statements. As i said - "cool" stimuli for young males.
- ethanbond 13y agoMy comments are arrogant? You clearly know nothing about neither the company nor the product, yet you assume the allure of it comes from the "cool" stimuli? Maybe you and I have different definitions of "cool," because Palantir's offices certainly aren't "cool" in any "stereotypical young male" type of way. The entire company is filled to the brim with nerdy Tolkein references - not "cool". One of their product lines is versioned by Carebears for god's sake - not "cool". What makes them cool is the fact that their products solve actual problems (and create some, sure) instead of selling ads or trying to conquer to-do lists. Also for me as a designer, I like their product development structure and cycle. I guess it would take more than a Forbes article-worth of exposure for you to see something appreciable.
- samstave 13y agoThey may be "cool" - but they are morally unscrupulous. Just because you can get drunk on the tech power of the NSA doesn't mean you're right.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- applecore 13y agoI laughed at the notion of a Ph.D. (in social theory, no less) masking one's business inexperience.
- badman_ting 13y ago"presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars" Yes, this really bothers me as well. We should believe in the power this tool has, and that should cause us to be afraid. Biz-mag dorks are always going to eat up such things, but who cares about that. The adulation by people who seem like they should know better is what rankles.
- saraid216 13y agoBe afraid, be very afraid!
- dylangs1030 13y agoTo be fair, I don't think you have to do much propaganda to sell people on the idea of emulating Palantir. Movies and novels like the Bourne series do that for you. The idea of a brilliant government agent who understands science, math, and law and who frequently has to skirt the murky waters of government intrigue is kind of a sexy zeitgeist in America.
- badman_ting 13y agoSomething about Palantir has creeped me the hell out ever since I lived in DC and used to see their ads in areas close to the Pentagon. I am sure its founder is every bit as brilliant as people In this article say.
- VladRussian2 13y ago> the millions of pictures collected by San Leandro’s license plate cameras are now passed on to the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC), one of 72 federally run intelligence fusion organizations set up after 9/11. That’s where the photos are analyzed using software built by a company just across San Francisco Bay: Palantir. it is beyond creepy, Stasi/KGB could only dream about it.
- purplelobster 13y agoExtremely creepy: http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks-2011-2#-1 http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-wikileaks-2011-2#-1 Their recruitment also reeks of creepiness, sending "confidential" letters to my work place (don't have that address listed anywhere, company has many buildings in the same city).
- tmarthal 13y agoThat document is from 2010. ArsTechnica and other places wrote about what came about when the shit hit the fan in 2011: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-plan-to-attack-wikileaks/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-pl... From the article: "I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary," said the CEO of Palantir.
- purplelobster 13y agoAfter getting caught. The fact is that the business they're in and the technology they're developing will continue to push them to do questionable things. They rely on large contracts with government and big corporations. They will have to judge (secretly) whether the use of their technology is moral or not. Do you think they will turn down hundreds of millions because their technology is being used for questionable moral purposes?
- bsenftner 13y agoWhy to all Forbes articles read like flaming propaganda bullshit?
- voodoo123 13y agoBecause they are.
- gergles 13y agoBecause these aren't actual Forbes articles. Anything on forbes.com/sites/XYZ is somebody's blog, not content that is actually vetted by Forbes.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- pvdm 13y agoBecause it is run by people disconnected from the real world. Walled-garden of rich people who like to read about people liked themselves.
- logn 13y agoAs someone who's worked in text analysis, I'm comforted to see this story told. It's what we should be talking about. Please take the time to read this full article, then go out and do something useful for our world, we're going to need it.
- shiven 13y agoLike catching 'potential' terrorists, you mean? Sorry for the snark, but I call BS on glorification of a technology company that so far has not done anything but strip away almost everyone's privacy. Fat comfort in that.
- cinquemb 13y agoLike these 'potential' terrorists : "Nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twenty-somethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years." Is this the narrative that needs to be sold now?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jivatmanx 13y agoYou should have also put terrorists in quotes. We already know that the NSA is going after drug crimes.
- Vivtek 13y agoTo be fair, the DEA is going after drug crimes using secret information supplied by the NSA, and lying about it.
- rdl 13y agoThere are some drug crimes which actually are terrorism. In Mexico, the cartels/Zetas/etc. are an existential threat, and that's spilling over. There are towns in the US where MS-13 is a locally existential threat, at least within immigrant communities. The drug gangs in the inner cities in the 1970s-1990s were, too. I'd be ok with some use of some military force (intelligence, or just straight up infantry and MPs) in certain counter-drug terrorism contexts. (I say this as someone who is in favor of immediate legalization of MJ, and decriminalization of all other drugs, with extensive treatment available for addiction or sub-optimal drug use.)
- asgard1024 13y agoIn a way, this is a sad story. It reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber But some people will never learn. Fortunately, he decided not to have kids.
- darkarmani 13y ago> who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. The food production for half the world's current population depends on this method for producing fertilizer. Or are you talking about his development of chemical weapons? Surely, they weren't as devastating as nuclear weapons which were developed by an astonishing array of celebrated scientists.
- smacktoward 13y ago> Surely, they weren't as devastating as nuclear weapons which were developed by an astonishing array of celebrated scientists. Who were all working under the fear that Nazi scientists would develop it first and give it to Adolf Hitler. It's hard to fault them morally for thinking that it would be best for someone else to get to it first.
- jacquesm 13y agoIn this same thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6212695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6212695
- smacktoward 13y agoExcept that Hitler actually managed to conquer half the world instead of being a powerless figure used as a convenient bugaboo to scare people into rationalizing immoral acts. You know? If you're a scientist in, say, 1942, when all of Europe from Spain to Moscow is under Hitler's control, and then someone comes to you and tells you he's working on an atomic bomb, should that prospect not scare you? Almost all of the scientists who made the A-bomb (with a few notable exceptions like Edward Teller, who never met a bomb he didn't like) agonized over the morality of it. Many organized after the Nazi threat had receded to try and put the genie back in the bottle. It's a smear to categorize them as "good Germans" who were just using Hitler as an easy way to rationalize away unjustifiable behavior.
- jivatmanx 13y agoI wonder what logic Karp has used to convince Peter Thiel that he's still a libertarian? I mean, talk about cognitive dissonance. “If we as a democratic society believe that license plates in public trigger Fourth Amendment protections, our product can make sure you can’t cross that line” The majoritarian argument - That's a popular one amongst libertarians /s. On the other hand, Jimmy Wales considers himself an Objectivist... I guess, forget the mumbo-jumbo and judge people by their works?
- saraid216 13y agoI'm pretty sure most libertarians think that a lot of people who call themselves libertarians aren't actually libertarians.
- sbirchall 13y agoNow THAT is cognitive dissonance. Bravo, sir (although I'm pretty sure you did that by accident).
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoOf course, that never crosses his mind - or of it does, is easily ignored. Principles quickly go out the window when you stand to double your wealth.
- smacktoward 13y agoPeople can always find ways to convince themselves that whatever they're doing fits their personal ideological beliefs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_%28making_excuses%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_%28making_excus... It's not hard. Self-interest and/or the desire to avoid trouble are powerful motivators. Ideology is much less so. If the two conflict, we find ways to bend the ideology to fit, even if to an outside observer it looks like we've turned it completely inside out. It gets even easier when the outside forces that are compelling us to go along give us pre-written rationalizations for doing so. "You're serving your country." "You're stopping terrorists from hurting innocent people." All we have to do then is just decide to not think about the rationalization we've chosen too hard.
- paulbaumgart 13y agoGiven our (somewhat irrational) risk-aversion towards things like terrorism, the success of this sort of tech seems pretty much inevitable. The stable state we'll probably reach is a more extreme version of what Karp mentions: next to zero privacy, but also high levels of transparency into the operations of our authorities, and, as a result of both, much more cultural acceptance of "deviancy". Their civil liberties controls seem like a fairly sane attempt to smooth out the transition to that sort of society (but admittedly of unclear effectiveness). They're trying to avoid a detour into a totalitarian police state while our laws and cultural norms catch up with the reality of our growing data collection and data mining capabilities. Edit: To clarify the logic of my first sentence above: if we keep voting out elected officials who fail to stop terrorist attacks (which are almost always disproportionately sensational compared to their actual death tolls), we're basically evolving our set of politicians into people who will stop at nothing to prevent them.
- Zigurd 13y agoThat's a dreadful vision. I expect a lot of people got into technology because it's "clean." There little chance of harming people or the environment with what you do. It will be interesting to see if people become disgusted by technology, in general.
- smacktoward 13y agoOr at least, we've managed to push the unclean parts of it into places far away where we don't have to personally see it -- assembly lines in China, coltan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan) mines in the Congo, etc. It's not like the old days of, say, the garment business, where the abuse was happening right in New York City for everyone to see (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fir...). It's been shuffled off to places where customers and cameras can't go. This makes it easier to pretend to ourselves that what we do is not tied up with the human costs in those places. It's easy to not think about something you never see.
- paulbaumgart 13y ago
- denzil_correa 13y agoPalantir's organizational framework will make an excellent case study for whistle blowing, secrecy and privacy. I found the bat phone pretty interesting. In particular, I liked the fact that after a security related incident Palantir retained the employee and strengthened their system; rather than the textbook "we fire you" without any acknowledgment of the issue with the system. Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team created an ethics hotline for engineers called the Batphone: Any engineer can use it to anonymously report to Palantir’s directors work on behalf of a customer they consider unethical. As the result of one Batphone communication, for instance, the company backed out of a job that involved analyzing information on public Facebook pages. Karp has also stated that Palantir turned down a chance to work with a tobacco firm, and overall the company walks away from as much as 20% of its possible revenue for ethical reasons.
- arh68 13y agoAs much as the article conveys doubts to Karp's moral fortitude, at least one (former) engineer there is willing to speak his mind > He goes on to argue that even Palantir’s founders don’t quite understand the Palantiri seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien’s orbs, he points out, didn’t actually give their holders honest insights. "The Palantiri distort the truth," he says. And those who look into them, he adds, "only see what they want to see."
- CatMtKing 13y agoWith or without the palantiri, people see what they want to see. But it is a pretty good name for a data mining company.
- steveklabnik 13y agoI've always found Palantir terrifying. The name itself is just so brazen. This article's presentation of 'but even if you're sketched out by the defense angle, it's now being used for good!!!' doesn't help. Also, let's not forget that Palantir helps the FBI infiltrate and attempt to destroy domestic political groups like Occupy.
- knowaveragejoe 13y agoTo be fair, Occupy largely fell apart on its own.
- guelo 13y agoThough it was helped along by infiltrators and provocateurs.
- steveklabnik 13y agoOnly when looked at a certain way. Strike Debt and Occupy Sandy are going strong. It's hard to say that any decentralized organization 'failed,' exactly. Changing the national conversation isn't exactly failure. But it wasn't outright insurrection either. And regardless of failure die to internal issue, the executive branch paying money for intel on how to disrupt political groups isn't cool.
- sp332 13y agoOccupy protesters were forcibly removed, repeatedly. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/22/opinion/crabapple-occupy-wall-street http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/22/opinion/crabapple-occupy-wall-... http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/all/ http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/all...
- chimeracoder 13y ago> I've always found Palantir terrifying. The name itself is just so brazen. For those who missed the reference, it refers to the all-seeing stone used by the (spoiler!) evil wizard Sarumon. Depending on your political persuasion, you may find that to be a very fitting name. But I'm surprised that the founders would have chosen it.
- wslh 13y agoI am curious, what different data mining techniques uses Palantir? or is it just that they have access to difficult to find information?
- ethanbond 13y agoHere's one way to explain it: Current data mining techniques take in massive amounts of similar data and output a parsed signal. Palantir takes in massive amounts of data, preserves all of it, allows their FDEs and clients to hand-draw ontological connections between dissimilar pieces of data, and outputs a gigantic raw data object. Palantir is one of the few entities with the technical know-how and infrastructure to make this gigantic object manipulatable on any old computer or phone. Where other miners might bring you a gold ring (which may or may not be the right fit for your finger at the time!), Palantir brings you a cart full of raw gold and a map back to the mine shaft. From there you can do whatever you want.
- ck2 13y agoNot quite up there with building the atomic bomb but with about the same amoral structure. Sorry but I cannot admire that.
- webwanderings 13y agoThis is one of the most fascinating article that has come out in recent times.
- rubikscube 13y agoI wonder how it is legal for a bank to view data obtained by monitoring the Internet on the scale that only the NSA would be able: A Palantir user at a bank can, in seconds, see connections between a Nigerian Internet protocol address, a proxy server somewhere within the U.S. and payments flowing out from a hijacked home equity line of credit, just as military customers piece together fingerprints on artillery shell fragments, location data, anonymous tips and social media to track down Afghani bombmakers.
- nemothekid 13y agoThis is overblown. You don't need to track the entire internet to realize that a fraudster is using proxy.
- rubikscube 13y agoThey are not merely seeing the proxy address. They claim to see the address behind the proxy.
- rdl 13y agoI'm terrified of what powerful tools like Palantir can do in the wrong hands, with really any hands without a lot of oversight, but somewhat comforted by this article (and by the Palantir employees I know personally) being generally "techie-libertarian" types -- they at least are more willing to consider the downsides of universal surveillance than a lot of their "customers" are. It would be amazing if Palantir was a 5-10x better tool for CIA, but came with non-overridable limits which actually protected individual liberty (of US citizens and non-citizens). There are certain things Palantir can be used for which are essentially purely good -- identifying disease outbreaks, other potential environmental danger, etc. -- which they will hopefully emphasize.