: Palantir Knows Everything,About You

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Suzanne Johnson <fuhn () pobox com>
> Subject: Palantir Knows Everything,About You
> Date: April 19, 2018 at 11:28:26 AM EDT
> To: "DAVID J. FARBER" <farber () gmail com>
>
> High above the Hudson River in downtown Jersey City, a former U.S. Secret Service agent named Peter Cavicchia III ran 
> special ops for JPMorgan Chase & Co. His insider threat group—most large financial institutions have one—used 
> computer algorithms to monitor the bank’s employees, ostensibly to protect against perfidious traders and other 
> miscreants.
>
> Aided by as many as 120 “forward-deployed engineers” from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc., which 
> JPMorgan engaged in 2009, Cavicchia’s group vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from 
> company-issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations. 
> Palantir’s software aggregated, searched, sorted, and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of 
> behavior that Cavicchia’s team had flagged for potential abuse of corporate assets. Palantir’s algorithm, for 
> example, alerted the insider threat team when an employee started badging into work later than usual, a sign of 
> potential disgruntlement. That would trigger further scrutiny and possibly physical surveillance after hours by bank 
> security personnel.
> Over time, however, Cavicchia himself went rogue. Former JPMorgan colleagues describe the environment as Wall Street 
> meets Apocalypse Now, with Cavicchia as Colonel Kurtz, ensconced upriver in his office suite eight floors above the 
> rest of the bank’s security team. People in the department were shocked that no one from the bank or Palantir set any 
> real limits. They darkly joked that Cavicchia was listening to their calls, reading their emails, watching them come 
> and go. Some planted fake information in their communications to see if Cavicchia would mention it at meetings, which 
> he did.
> It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a 
> promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal. The misadventure, which 
> has never been reported, also marked an ominous turn for Palantir, one of the most richly valued startups in Silicon 
> Valley. An intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror was weaponized against ordinary Americans at 
> home.
>
> ....clip
> https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/ 
> <https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/>




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