

Palantir: The War on Terror's Secret Weapon - gatsby
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/palantir-the-vanguard-of-cyberterror-security-11222011.html

======
bane
This would be a great advertisement if it were marked "special advertising
section".

I've always wondered what it would take, money-wise, to get Businessweek to
write a non-researched fluff piece like this. Palantir has a _hell_ of a
sales/marketing department.

There's not _any_ mention at all of any of the recent, and quite public,
controversies surrounding this firm, HBGary, Industrial espionage against a
competitor, Glenn Greenwald and others.

I'd almost flag this if it were just a blog, but this is really pathetic
reporting and worth seeing for the crap article it is.

~~~
tansey
I have to admit, this article is really awful. I initially upvoted this too
quickly, after only reading the first page and seeing that there were five
more to go. After reading most of the article, you're right-- it's pure fluff.

I suppose it's tough to actually discuss how this technology works since there
are so many security issues involved, but I feel like I learned almost nothing
about Palantir's system. All I learned was that they have a bunch of fun
anecdotes about their founders and CEO, and that it apparently has been used
to somehow solve cases.

Pretty weak. I wish I could take back my upvote.

~~~
brown9-2
Their main products are oriented towards integrating structured and
unstructured data from lots of different data sources:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#Palantir_Government)

Other articles on the company make it more clear that the reason why they need
so many "forward-deployed engineers" are because they heavily customize the
installed software for each customer, i.e. you have to do a lot of custom work
pulling data out of Proprietary Customer Database X to feed it into the system
(and back out). See "Why Palantir Makes My Head Hurt"
[http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-
hu...](http://kellblog.com/2011/06/27/why-palantir-makes-my-head-hurt/)

------
brown9-2
_As he does every day, he walked to work. “I never learned to drive because I
was busy reading, doing things, and talking to people,” he says. “And I’m
coordinated enough to bike, but the problem is that I will start dreaming
about the business and run into a tree.”_

I love CEO anecdotes like this: too busy to learn to drive, but not too busy
to learn to ride a bike?

 _Palantir also has a permission system to make sure that workers in agencies
using its software can access only the data that their clearance levels allow.
“In the pre-Palantir days, analysts could go into file cabinets and read
whatever they want,” says former NCTC director Leiter. “Nobody had any idea
what they had seen.”_

It's amazing how the former NCTC director, who is now a lobbyist for this
company, seems to be unaware of the simple method of placing locks on file
cabinets and/or secretaries that log who has checked out which files - methods
I am sure intelligence agencies in the US have had since their founding.

------
psychotik
What sort of influence does the government have on the actual algorithms/data
mining done by Palantir? Basically, it feels like a way for the government to
spend a bunch of taxpayer money to provide a false sense of security, while
making folks at Palantir rich. Feels a lot like a digital version of those
airport scanners we love so much.

~~~
MattLaroche
Disclaimer: I used to work at Palantir. However, I never used the Government
product, and never as much as saw a demo of the Government product. I'll talk
mostly about the Government product, but much of this goes for the Finance
product too.

Seems like there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what Palantir does. Palantir
Government does not do data mining natively. The best explanation of this is
from Palantir themselves: <http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-
do/>. There's impressive algorithms under the hood of Palantir Government, but
the insight and analysis is provided by government analysts.

Palantir provides software, services, and support. The services are mostly
data integration, training, and some custom software built on top of the
Palantir Government product. Palantir isn't providing analysis for money,
they're providing a product that enables analysts to analyze.

------
ggwicz
Palantir: One Step Closer to 1984

 _Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither.

\- Benjamin Franklin _

------
twelvechairs
> None of Fikri’s individual actions would raise suspicions. [snip] Taken
> together, though, they suggested that Fikri was up to something.

What an objectionable statement. Taken together, they don't suggest that Fikri
was up to anything more than the sum of their parts (which pretty much seems
to rely on the one piece 'hanging around alone in the plazas of disneyland').
If this is the best example they can come up with, I hate to think what the
marginal ones might be...

