FOR THOSE INTERESTED...
PALANTIR TECHNOLOGIES IS FVEY...
AND YES IT's OLD NEWS... SO WHAT?
DID YOU GIVE PALANTIR PERMISSION TO STORE DATA ABOUT YOU?
WHERE IS YOUR COMPENSATION FOR IT?
"Karp's 24/7 security detail is meant to protect him from extremists who have sent him death threats and conspiracy theorists who have called Palantir to rant about the Illuminati" ~ Forbes, 2013
Palantir Technologies Hires British Security Official | by Shane Harris | June 29, 2012 | Washingtonian Media
Palantir Technologies, a Silicon Valley startup that has become an influential player in Washington’s spy world, is beefing up its senior ranks. The company has hired Gavin Hood, a British lawyer and national security expert, to be the chief of staff to Palantir CEO Alex Karp.
Hood has served as a liaison between British and US national security and intelligence agencies, and he is well known in counterterrorism circles. He was recently the legal adviser to the British embassy in Washington, where he dealt with national security issues. And his connections to American policymakers include a stint as the United Kingdom’s legal adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, which ran the country following the 2003 invasion by US and allied forces.
At Palantir, Hood will join other former high-level intelligence officials who advise on business and strategy for the company, which makes sophisticated data-analysis software. It’s used by military forces and the intelligence agencies to share classified information. And it has been especially helpful tracking terrorist suspects and identifying terrorist networks, according to government officials who use the product.
Last year, Palantir hired Michael Leiter, the former director of the US National Counterterrorism Center, as a senior counsel. The company’s advisers also include a former CIA intelligence officer and aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, as well as top officials from the so-called “Five Eyes,” an international partnership comprised of intelligence and security services from the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.
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How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut | By Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac | Aug 14, 2013 | Forbes Media
Since rumors began to spread that a startup called Palantir helped to kill Osama bin Laden, Alex Karp hasn't had much time to himself.
On one sun-baked July morning in Silicon Valley Palantir's lean 45-year-old chief executive, with a top-heavy mop of frazzled hair, hikes the grassy hills around Stanford University's massive satellite antennae known as the Dish, a favorite meditative pastime. But his solitude is disturbed somewhat by "Mike," an ex-Marine--silent, 6 foot 1, 270 pounds of mostly pectoral muscle--who trails him everywhere he goes. Even on the suburban streets of Palo Alto, steps from Palantir's headquarters, the bodyguard lingers a few feet behind.
"It puts a massive cramp on your life," Karp complains, his expression hidden behind large black sunglasses. "There's nothing worse for reducing your ability to flirt with someone."
Karp's 24/7 security detail is meant to protect him from extremists who have sent him death threats and conspiracy theorists who have called Palantir to rant about the Illuminati. Schizophrenics have stalked Karp outside his office for days at a stretch. "It's easy to be the focal point of fantasies," he says, "if your company is involved in realities like ours."
Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA--an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund--along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In the last five years Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, with a slick software interface and coders who parachute into clients' headquarters to customize its programs. Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called "forward-deployed engineers" a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer's data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.
Palantir's advisors include Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet, who says in an interview that "I wish we had a tool of its power" before 9/11. General David Petraeus, the most recent former CIA chief, describes Palantir to FORBES as "a better mousetrap when a better mousetrap was needed" and calls Karp "sheer brilliant."
Among those using Palantir to connect the dots are the Marines, who have deployed its tools in Afghanistan for forensic analysis of roadside bombs and predicting insurgent attacks. The software helped locate Mexican drug cartel members who murdered an American customs agent and tracked down hackers who installed spyware on the computer of the Dalai Lama. In the book The Finish, detailing the killing of Osama bin Laden, author Mark Bowden writes that Palantir's software "actually deserves the popular designation Killer App."
And now Palantir is emerging from the shadow world of spies and special ops to take corporate America by storm. The same tools that can predict ambushes in Iraq are helping pharmaceutical firms analyze drug data. According to a former JPMorgan Chase staffer, they've saved the firm hundreds of millions of dollars by addressing issues from cyberfraud to distressed mortgages. 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.
Those tools have allowed Palantir's T-shirted twentysomethings to woo customers away from the suits and ties of IBM, Booz Allen and Lockheed Martin with a product that deploys faster, offers cleaner results and often costs less than $1 million per installation--a fraction of the price its rivals can offer. Its commercial clients--whose identities it guards even more closely than those of its government customers--include Bank of America and News Corp. Private-sector deals now account for close to 60% of the company's revenue, which FORBES estimates will hit $450 million this year, up from less than $300 million last year. Karp projects Palantir will sign a billion dollars in new, long-term contracts in 2014, a year that may also bring the company its first profits.
The bottom line: A CIA-funded firm run by an eccentric philosopher has become one of the most valuable private companies in tech, priced at between $5 billion and $8 billion in a round of funding the company is currently pursuing. Karp owns roughly a tenth of the firm--just less than its largest stakeholder, Peter Thiel, the PayPal and Facebook billionaire. (Other billionaire investors include Ken Langone and hedge fund titan Stanley Druckenmiller.) That puts Karp on course to become Silicon Valley's latest billionaire--and Thiel could double his fortune--if the company goes public, a possibility Karp says Palantir is reluctantly considering.
The biggest problem for Palantir's business may be just how well its software works: It helps its customers see too much. In the wake of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's revelations of the agency's mass surveillance, Palantir's tools have come to represent privacy advocates' greatest fears of data-mining technology -- Google-level engineering applied directly to government spying. That combination of Big Brother and Big Data has come into focus just as Palantir is emerging as one of the fastest-growing startups in the Valley, threatening to contaminate its first public impressions and render the firm toxic in the eyes of customers and investors just when it needs them most.
"They're in a scary business," says Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Lee Tien. ACLU analyst Jay Stanley has written that Palantir's software could enable a "true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale."
Karp, a social theory Ph.D., doesn't dodge those concerns. He sees Palantir as the company that can rewrite the rules of the zero-sum game of privacy and security. "I didn't sign up for the government to know when I smoke a joint or have an affair," he acknowledges. In a company address he stated, "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."
Palantir boasts of technical safeguards for privacy that go well beyond the legal requirements for most of its customers, as well as a team of "privacy and civil liberties engineers." But it's Karp himself who ultimately decides the company's path. "He's our conscience," says senior engineer Ari Gesher.
The question looms, however, of whether business realities and competition will corrupt those warm and fuzzy ideals. When it comes to talking about industry rivals, Karp often sounds less like Palantir's conscience than its id. He expressed his primary motivation in his July company address: to "kill or maim" competitors like IBM and Booz Allen. "I think of it like survival," he said. "We beat the lame competition before they kill us."
KARP SEEMS TO enjoy listing reasons he isn't qualified for his job. "He doesn't have a technical degree, he doesn't have any cultural affiliation with the government or commercial areas, his parents are hippies," he says, manically pacing around his office as he describes himself in the third person. "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, starting at Stanford Law School. The two both lived in the no-frills Crothers dorm and shared most of their classes during their first year, but held starkly opposite political views. Karp had grown up in Philadelphia, the son of an artist and a pediatrician who spent many of their weekends taking him to protests for labor rights and against "anything Reagan did," he recalls. Thiel had already founded the staunchly libertarian Stanford Review during his time at the university as an undergrad.
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REF LINKS
Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac. "How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut". Forbes Media. Aug 14, 2013. https://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/
Shane Harris. "Palantir Technologies Hires British Security Official". Washingtonian Media. June 29, 2012. https://www.washingtonian.com/2012/06/29/palantir-technologies-hires-british-security-official/
