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How Peter Thiel's Palantir helped the NSA spy on the whole world


From: "David Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2017 09:25:15 -0500



Begin forwarded message:

From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Peter Thiel's Palantir helped the NSA spy on the whole world
Date: February 22, 2017 at 9:00:53 AM EST
To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com

How Peter Thiel’s Palantir helped the NSA spy on the whole world
By Sam Biddle
Feb 22 2017
<https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/>

Donald Trump has inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield 
and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the 
outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship 
with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought 
to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind. Thiel represents a perfect nexus of 
government clout with the kind of corporate swagger Trump loves. The Intercept can now reveal that Palantir has worked 
for years to boost the global dragnet of the NSA and its international partners, and was in fact co-created with 
American spies. 

Peter Thiel became one of the American political mainstream’s most notorious figures in 2016 (when it emerged he was 
bankrolling a lawsuit against Gawker Media, my former employer) even before he won a direct line to the White House. 
Now he brings to his role as presidential adviser decades of experience as kingly investor and token nonliberal on 
Facebook’s board of directors, a Rolodex of software luminaries, and a decidedly Trumpian devotion to controversy and 
contrarianism. But perhaps the most appealing asset Thiel can offer our bewildered new president will be Palantir 
Technologies, which Thiel founded with Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale in 2004. 

Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA 
itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses 
to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 
2009, according to an August 2016 report in Politico. The company was last valued at $20 billion and is expected to 
pursue an IPO in the near future. In a 2012 interview with TechCrunch, while boasting of ties to the intelligence 
community, Karp said nondisclosure contracts prevent him from speaking about Palantir’s government work.

“Palantir” is generally used interchangeably to refer to both Thiel and Karp’s company and the software that company 
creates. Its two main products are Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis, more geeky winks from a company whose 
Tolkien namesake is a type of magical sphere used by the evil lord Sauron to surveil, trick, and threaten his enemies 
across Middle Earth. While Palantir Metropolis is pegged to quantitative analysis for Wall Street banks and hedge 
funds, Gotham (formerly Palantir Government) is designed for the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland 
security customers. Gotham works by importing large reams of “structured” data (like spreadsheets) and “unstructured” 
data (like images) into one centralized database, where all of the information can be visualized and analyzed in one 
workspace. For example, a 2010 demo showed how Palantir Government could be used to chart the flow of weapons 
throughout the Middle East by importing disparate data sources like equipment lot numbers, manufacturer data, and the 
locations of Hezbollah training camps. Palantir’s chief appeal is that it’s not designed to do any single thing in 
particular, but is flexible and powerful enough to accommodate the requirements of any organization that needs to 
process large amounts of both personal and abstract data.

Despite all the grandstanding about lucrative, shadowy government contracts, co-founder Karp does not shy away from 
taking a stand in the debate over government surveillance. In a Forbes profile in 2013, he played privacy lamb, saying, 
“I didn’t sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair. … We have to find places that we 
protect away from government so that we can all be the unique and interesting and, in my case, somewhat deviant people 
we’d like to be.” In that same article, Thiel lays out Palantir’s mission with privacy in mind: to “reduce terrorism 
while preserving civil liberties.” After the first wave of revelations spurred by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, 
Palantir was quick to deny that it had any connection to the NSA spy program known as PRISM, which shared an 
unfortunate code name with one of its own software products. The current iteration of Palantir’s website includes an 
entire section dedicated to “Privacy & Civil Liberties,” proclaiming the company’s support of both:

Palantir Technologies is a mission-driven company, and a core component of that mission is protecting our fundamental 
rights to privacy and civil liberties. …

Some argue that society must “balance” freedom and safety, and that in order to better protect ourselves from those who 
would do us harm, we have to give up some of our liberties. We believe that this is a false choice in many areas. 
Particularly in the world of data analysis, liberty does not have to be sacrificed to enhance security. Palantir is 
constantly looking for ways to protect privacy and individual liberty through its technology while enabling the 
powerful analysis necessary to generate the actionable intelligence that our law enforcement and intelligence agencies 
need to fulfill their missions.

[snip]

Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>






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