...Palantir is at the heart of the US government, but with its other arm, Palantir Metropolis, it provides the analytical tools for hedge funds, banks and financial services firms to outsmart each other....
From The Guardian, July 30:
Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’
techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being
sold to police departments. Will they inflame already tense relations
between the public and the police?
In Minority Report,
the 2002 movie adaptation of the Philip K Dick novel, Tom Cruise plays a
police officer in the LAPD “pre-crime” unit. Using the premonitions of
sentient mutants called “pre-cogs”, the police are able to predict when
someone is going to commit a crime before it happens, swooping down from
helicopters and arresting them on the street before they can do
anything. Their “crime” is that they merely thought about it.
Palantir,
the CIA-backed startup, is Minority Report come true. It is
all-powerful, yet no one knows it even exists. Palantir does not have an
office, it has a “SCIF” on a back street in Palo Alto, California. SCIF
stands for “sensitive compartmentalised information facility”. Palantir
says its building “must be built to be resistant to attempts to access
the information within. The network must be ‘airgapped’ from the public
internet to prevent information leakage.”
Palantir’s defence systems include advanced biometrics and walls
impenetrable to radio waves, phone signal or internet. Its data storage
is blockchained: it cannot be accessed by merely sophisticated hacking,
it requires digital pass codes held by dozens of independent parties,
whose identities are themselves protected by blockchain.
What is Palantir protecting? A palantir is a “seeing stone” in JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings;
a dark orb used by Saruman to be able to see in darkness or blinding
light. “Palantir” means “one that sees from afar”, a mythical instrument
of omnipotence.
In 2004, Peter Thiel
– the billionaire PayPal co-founder, Facebook investor and and
latter-day Trump ally – created Palantir alongside Nathan Gettings, Joe
Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen and Alex Karp. Their intention was to create a
company that took Big Data somewhere no one else dared to go. In 2013,
Karp, Palantir’s CEO, announced that the company would not be pursuing
an IPO, as going public would make “running a company like ours very difficult”. This is why.
Palantir watches everything you do and predicts what you will do next in order to stop it. As of 2013, its client list included
the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Centre for Disease Control, the Marine
Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the
IRS. Up to 50% of its business is with the public sector. In-Q-Tel, the
CIA’s venture arm, was an early investor.
Palantir tracks everyone from potential terrorist suspects to corporate fraudsters (Bernie Madoff was imprisoned with the help of Palantir), child traffickers and what they refer to as “subversives”. But it is all done using prediction....
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