How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/

by taylorbuley • 13 years ago

119 79 13 years ago

forbes.com

diydsp• 13 years 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.

VladRussian25• 13 years 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.

ethanbond8• 13 years ago

They are cool, though. Why the snarkiness?

applecore• 13 years ago

I laughed at the notion of a Ph.D. (in social theory, no less) masking one's business inexperience.

_delirium• 13 years ago

Well it did say "European wealth connections and Ph.D.", which is a bit different than just the one...

badman_ting2• 13 years 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.

saraid2162• 13 years ago

Be afraid, be very afraid!

dylangs1030• 13 years ago

To 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_ting2• 13 years ago

Something 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.

VladRussian25• 13 years 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.

purplelobster2• 13 years ago

Extremely creepy: 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• 13 years ago

That 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-pl...

From the article: "I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HB Gary," said the CEO of Palantir.

bsenftner• 13 years ago

Why to all Forbes articles read like flaming propaganda bullshit?

gergles2• 13 years ago

Because these aren't actual Forbes articles. Anything on forbes.com/sites/XYZ is somebody's blog, not content that is actually vetted by Forbes.

me2i81• 13 years ago

"This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes."

pvdm• 13 years ago

Because it is run by people disconnected from the real world. Walled-garden of rich people who like to read about people liked themselves.

logn2• 13 years ago

As 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.

shiven2• 13 years ago

Like 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• 13 years ago

Like 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?

jivatmanx3• 13 years ago

You should have also put terrorists in quotes. We already know that the NSA is going after drug crimes.

logn2• 13 years ago

I think you mis-interpreted what I meant. I don't think the article glorified this technology and that toward the last half it offered a balanced viewpoint. Regardless, I don't think we quite have to hit the panic button yet, but if we don't start actually improving our world by inventing technology to protect our human rights, they'll be gone before we even have a chance to really panic.

ethanbond8• 13 years ago

Do you really not like reading, or is it just easier to maintain your bad mood that way?

I'm not saying they're a saving grace, nor that there aren't potential/real problems with what they're doing, but your comment is just patently false.

http://www.missingkids.com/partners/Palantir

asgard10242• 13 years ago

In a way, this is a sad story. It reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber

But some people will never learn. Fortunately, he decided not to have kids.

darkarmani• 13 years 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.

smacktoward4• 13 years 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.

asgard10242• 13 years ago

Well, yes, about his development of chemical weapons. Also believed he did something good. And in the end, his family was exterminated with similar chemicals that he invented.

In the similar vein, Mr. Karp ponders loss of privacy at the end. By the very tools he helped to develop.

jivatmanx3• 13 years ago

I 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?

saraid2162• 13 years ago

I'm pretty sure most libertarians think that a lot of people who call themselves libertarians aren't actually libertarians.

sbirchall• 13 years ago

Now THAT is cognitive dissonance. Bravo, sir (although I'm pretty sure you did that by accident).

knowaveragejoe2• 13 years ago

Of 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.

smacktoward4• 13 years ago

People can always find ways to convince themselves that whatever they're doing fits their personal ideological beliefs:

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.

jivatmanx3• 13 years ago

"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

-Benjamin Franklin

cheeseprocedure• 13 years ago

I've spoken to Palantir folks about the libertarian angle, and their story went like this: by maximizing the utilization of available intelligence data, they could minimize the erosion of civil liberties that occurs in the pursuit of more data.

I'm not sure that story survives outside a vacuum, but there you have it.

paulbaumgart4• 13 years ago

Given 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• 13 years ago

That'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.

smacktoward4• 13 years ago

Or 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) 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_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.

paulbaumgart4• 13 years ago

There would be some benefits. For example, if it became trivial to detect that a person was a user of illegal drugs, we'd very quickly change our drug laws to something more congruent with reality. Instead, we are in a situation where our drug laws are only tolerated because they're completely financially unrealistic to enforce the way they're written. That leads to selective enforcement, which gives authorities way too much discretionary power.

joering2• 13 years ago

but also high levels of transparency into the operations of our authorities

You are kidding yourself. How about zero privacy for citizens and no transparency and not accountability for government?? I could fall under why they don't share it with me and you, civilians, but they don't even share it with congressmen, judges and anyone else in-between.

http://www.mediaite.com/tv/asked-if-justice-department-is-sp...

(bit old) http://www.fas.org/sgp/congress/2008/rohr022608.html

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-31727_162-57423389-10391695/gove...

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=eric+holder+refu...

paulbaumgart4• 13 years ago

Yeah, that's part of the bumpy transition. But, just like other totalitarian power schemes, it's inherently unstable.

Sven72• 13 years ago

"cultural acceptance of deviancy"

Really?

So at the height of the next privacy/NSA/Snowden debates, I guess, I should expect society to be vigorously defending the privacy rights of the next Anthony Wiener.

Yup I am sure that day will come.

Sounds like parent doesn't get much human contact.

paulbaumgart4• 13 years ago

What I mean is that we'll come to accept the fact that things like sexting are really common, and we just won't treat it like a big deal anymore.

(Not a fan of the sarcasm and ad hominem, by the way.)

denzil_correa• 13 years ago

Palantir'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• 13 years ago

As 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• 13 years ago

With or without the palantiri, people see what they want to see. But it is a pretty good name for a data mining company.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

I'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.

knowaveragejoe2• 13 years ago

To be fair, Occupy largely fell apart on its own.

guelo• 13 years ago

Though it was helped along by infiltrators and provocateurs.

steveklabnik2• 13 years ago

Only 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• 13 years ago

Occupy protesters were forcibly removed, repeatedly. http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/22/opinion/crabapple-occupy-wall-... http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/all...

chimeracoder• 13 years 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• 13 years ago

I am curious, what different data mining techniques uses Palantir? or is it just that they have access to difficult to find information?

ethanbond8• 13 years ago

Here'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• 13 years ago

Not quite up there with building the atomic bomb but with about the same amoral structure.

Sorry but I cannot admire that.

webwanderings• 13 years ago

This is one of the most fascinating article that has come out in recent times.

rubikscube2• 13 years ago

I 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• 13 years ago

This is overblown. You don't need to track the entire internet to realize that a fraudster is using proxy.

rubikscube2• 13 years ago

They are not merely seeing the proxy address. They claim to see the address behind the proxy.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I'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.

How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

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