
Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions and Key Clients - bhaumik
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals-uses-specific-functions-and-key-clients/
======
lawl
Copy paste of Joe_Doe's comment. Which seems dead but sais "[noobtor]" instead
of [dead]. Never seen that before?! However should he have registered via tor
to leak a bit of insider info I don't want to let this die because of tor
flagging.

\----------

Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I
honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The
'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors
into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any
FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting
company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product
company.

Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire
spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil
company, that should stay unamed). However, with oil trading at 50s, they are
scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract
cancellation.

To be continued...

~~~
capkutay
"Every new contract requires dozen extra people."

I've heard this as well. They essentially hire customer-facing engineers to go
out and scope specific contracts and literally implement custom solutions with
small generic software frameworks they developed in house.

~~~
fishcakes
On one hand, it is true they deploy people to implement the software.

On the other hand, the customer has results after 6-8 weeks. How much software
can really be built in that sort of time frame? Not much...

In my opinion Palantir is a product company, but the product is deeply
integrated in to an enterprise. And doing that takes time and people.

~~~
capkutay
I would debate that...if your 'product' takes a team of stanford engineers to
actually deploy at an enterprise, then it's probably closer to a dev
framework.

~~~
jonstewart
No, it's a bog-standard on-premise "Enterprise" product, like Oracle, SAP,
etc. This is how that business model works. The customer pays _both_ for the
software _and_ for the on-site engineers, usually through the nose.

------
Joe_Doe
Palantir is trying to raise another ~400mm to finance their operations. And I
honestly think this just another PR stunt to attract investors. The
'secretive' attitude is just a game of deception. They are deceiving investors
into believing that the company has a real product. However if you talk to any
FDE or Embedded Analyst, you'll immediately realize that this is a consulting
company. Which should be valued at far lower multiple than a real product
company.

Every new contract requires dozen extra people...That's why they are on a hire
spree right now, (because of a large 'consulting' contract with a an oil
company, that should stay unamed). However, with oil trading at 50s, they are
scared and they trying to get some cash to cushion a possible contract
cancellation.

To be continued...

------
jpatokal
This sounds more like a leaked Palantir press release; but then again, that's
pretty much what a prospectus is.

> "It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of."

> The Pentagon used the software to track patterns in roadside bomb deployment
> and was able to conclude that garage-door openers were being used as remote
> detonators.

> With Palantir, the Marines are now able to upload DNA samples from remote
> locations and tap into information gathered from years of collecting
> fingerprints and DNA evidence

> The leaked document cites a 2012 study where 96% of the surveyed war
> fighters in Afghanistan recommended Palantir.

~~~
gaius
There were similarly glowing reviews of
[http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510156/physicists-
prove...](http://www.technologyreview.com/view/510156/physicists-prove-
dowsing-bomb-detectors-useless-in-double-blind-trial/)

------
insidious
Check out their SEC filings: [http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-
edgar?action=getcompany&CI...](http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-
edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001321655)

Insiders are selling shares to private wealth management firms / asset
management firms. It's amazing how much hype can do in the private finance
world when you have the perception of momentum and herd mentality. Look at
Clinkle raising $30mm ... this is the same thing happening at a bigger scale.
Look at Groupon... same thing.

Here's one to S F Sentry Securities, Inc.
[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/0001321655140...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165514000004/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml)

Morgan Stanley took over $25mm in fees to arrange these sales... the reason
for that is because they know that there is no way Palantir is going to have
an IPO in the near future -- or else they would be salivating to do this kind
of transaction for free to gain favor with management.

The fundamental problem with Palantir is that they are a government contractor
masquerading as a product company. $200mm in government contracts comes with
enough overhead that there is not a ton of margin. You can see tons of defense
contractors in the midwest doing hundreds of millions in revenue.

Take a look at their revenue numbers for federal government (which is likely a
major portion of their ~$420mm in revenue):
[http://goo.gl/v7JzT5](http://goo.gl/v7JzT5)
[http://goo.gl/AzZeuR](http://goo.gl/AzZeuR)

~~~
boomzilla
According to this form, Morgan Stanley charges 25M to arrange a sale of 50M.
Is there something behind this, or is this normal?

[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/0001321655140...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1321655/000132165514000005/xslFormDX01/primary_doc.xml)

~~~
insidious
There are a few other sales where there are 0 fees. So likely they "don't
charge" for those and put all of the fees in a single filing.

~~~
JMCQ87
Unbelievable that this can be legal.

~~~
zo1
Could you explain to me why it's a problem or should be illegal? I don't know
enough about the topic to understand your surprise that it's legal.

~~~
fnordfnordfnord
>Its primary purpose is to increase the efficiency and fairness of the
securities market for the benefit of investors, corporations, and the economy
by accelerating the receipt, acceptance, dissemination, and analysis of time-
sensitive corporate information filed with the agency. source:
[http://www.sec.gov/edgar/aboutedgar.htm](http://www.sec.gov/edgar/aboutedgar.htm)

"Delaying" the filing of required disclosures makes it more difficult for
investors and potential investors to make informed decisions, and possibly
defeats the purpose of requiring its disclosure in the first place.

------
icpmacdo
Nothing too interesting revealed in the document. Here is a video of the LAPD
talking about more specific uses of Palantir,

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ-u7yDwC6g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ-u7yDwC6g)

Here is an interesting video from them talking about data analysis of Iranian
arms deals used to show off some of their tools used by the intelligence
community

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX0gwNU3WBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX0gwNU3WBI)

~~~
newaccountfool
It may be intrusive and it may end up being used for the wrong reasons, but as
a technology community we've got to give it to them. It's very impresive.

~~~
jsprogrammer
It's impressive, but without meaningful and effective restraints on its use
it's potentially dangerous. There is a large focus on secrecy seemingly within
the organization itself (Palantir) and the organizations it works with (NSA,
CIA, FBI, etc.). One important question is, why is Palantir arming secretive
organizations with very powerful technology?

If the analysis capabilities are so great (and they appear to at least be
good), then there is likely tremendously more good that can be achieved by
opening up the code to the software so that anyone can use it to tackle local
and global problems around the planet. Instead, the company is using it to arm
secret police organizations and financial organizations.

~~~
jpttsn
> why is Palantir arming secretive organizations with very powerful
> technology?

They get paid handsomely.

> more good that can be achieved by opening up the code to the software so
> that anyone can use it to tackle local and global problems around the planet

This attitude bothers me. Palantir is not a charity. Why are you holding them
to these standards?

~~~
jsprogrammer
>> more good that can be achieved by opening up the code to the software so
that anyone can use it to tackle local and global problems around the planet

>This attitude bothers me. Palantir is not a charity. Why are you holding them
to these standards?

I fail to see how that statement is an 'attitude'. I'm also not holding them
to any standard in that statement. As far as I can tell, it's only a statement
of fact. Or at least, perceived fact.

Do you think the statement is not accurate?

~~~
zo1
You're implying that they should give up their competitive edge over the
market so that they can help the world "tackle local and global problems
around the planet". That sounds like you're saying they should give to charity
and/or forfeit profit for some noble good.

And yes, it's an attitude/opinion though it sounds like you're just nitpicking
words. I'm not the OP you responded to, but it's clear your attitude/opinion
towards this topic is that this software should be given away for free, with
the sole reason for that being that it would "[do] more good".

They invented it, they didn't steal it (presumably), and they're choosing to
use that product of their intellect in a way that makes them profit. Heck, you
could argue that they're already doing good by making it available to law-
enforcers while still profiting. In which case your entire point is that
they're not doing _enough_ good according to _your opinion_.

~~~
totalrobe
It's extremely naive to think that governments and coroprations worldwide
would intrinsically "do good" if this type of product was open source.

------
devonkim
I consider them closer to SAP than the usual DC area style contracting
company. What does distinguish them from most of the companies in the area
though is that their product tends to work and scale somewhat which I can't
say for the vast majority of government contractor produced software for the
government at their (very, very schizophrenic and oftentimes misleading)
direction. Actually hiring engineers that can codifies instead of asking for a
clearance first makes a monumental difference in how you structure your
company and lines of business. It lets you at least create a working project
first because you can actually reject most of your candidates instead of being
pressured to due to being jerked around by the terms of the contract requiring
certain levels of clearance first. The government isn't run by completely
retarded people and they're seeing now how it's probably easier to have actual
software companies produce software and then go through the integration and
compliance paperwork later - it's how GovCloud fundamentally became an option
in Intelligence Community projects. You thought the Terremark cloud was one
nobody used that's terribly overpriced? Wait until you see the "clouds" the
big defense contractors came up with at orders of magnitude more dollars (most
of it probably going to compensate those poor people filing documents and
paperwork meant to protect the government but now entrapping it to work
primarily with parasitic companies).

Look online for people with DCGS on their profiles, you'll be able to trace it
all back to trying to reproduce Palantir down to the web GUI. Some decent
journalist should be able to piece a lot together if they just trolled
LinkedIn. A lot of it is unclassified but technically FOUO so not quite
cleared for public consumption. The reason I figure it hasn't been researched
thoroughly is because it's extremely boring DC area "tech" news that is more
about topics that are of little interest to the tech community and is boring
even by DC tech standards. Almost every company here is some Big Data bullshit
company that's writing something about 8 - 14 years behind private industry
timelines from an engineering standpoint and held back by politics, funding,
and sheer disorganization endemic to enterprises but especially bad in the
bloated Pentagon budget.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
being lax with vetting has cost TLA's a lot but then police forces are second
tier players.

And the actual codfiying isnt hard it undersatning the domain problem and how
to apply the verious tools.

Having engineers that will want to work in this area and can pass the
citizenship requirements is harder back in the day in the UK noprmaly all 4
gradparents had to be citizens from birth for DV (TS)

~~~
devonkim
Dismissing coding from being "difficult" makes sense to most of us on HN that
are somewhat competent. However, most of us haven't experienced truly terrible
programmers that are very commonplace in big corporate and government shops
(this is changing as we finally start adopting platforms at least semi-
interested programmers pick instead of "I need a job" programmer types). At a
point, if your engineers are so slow and unproductive even without the typical
hoops of enterprise dysfunction, it is a bigger problem than if you don't have
someone that knows the business well. Good engineers can be misled by just bad
business requirements for a while and pivot back around quickly because their
code is far, far easier to refactor, re-architect, and reframe. Most
enterprises treat programmers (due to their cultural DNA of massive, over-
managed projects like in big construction projects) like assembly line workers
where output and skills mostly only differ by age and individual skill is not
a significant factor (it's part of how we keep seeing houses constructed by
low-skill labor despite many higher skilled, probably more efficient skilled
laborers present yet constantly unemployed or underemployed). Better
programmers also translates to less ugly hacks and better long-term solutions
and designs as well (I said better, not more clever). And lastly, they can
just plain code away some terrible hacks for the sake of a demo to keep
everyone paid if the situation calls for it. Business domain rules and systems
being very people-driven typically (by virtue of the people that wrote them
typically being centered around people-first, not process-first) and with very
imprecise human language by default are really, really slow to enact typically
too. Besides the cost issues, a good engineer's work is far, far easier to
sell anyway to where a mediocre, barely competent sales person should be able
to get similar results with the usual sales guy pitching <random $1M suite of
ERP software with $150M professional services over 6 years>.

So in short, good engineers with ineffective domain knowledge might make a
great solution... that sadly doesn't solve what the person with the check
wants up-front but you can put the most capable domain experts and managers to
lead a team of bad engineers and the software will be both expensive to
maintain (raising prices for the unfortunate customers) and perhaps just plain
not work very often, causing more band-aid "solutions" that riddle cash-
strapped bureaucracies and pass the dysfunction onto us as customers. I'm
confident that tech is not the solution for most dysfunctional organizations
and that IT projects just bring out the worst in them.

~~~
spacecowboy_lon
Unfortunetly I have :-( I used to work in house as a consultant for a big
publisher and unfortuntly most of the devlopers wher in the lower two
quartiles and required a rediculous amount of handholding.

BTW I was "banned" from writing any code that would go into production as a
condition of my director being allowed to employ me.-

------
ChuckMcM
Reads like the intro to "Person of Interest". This capability has been on the
'want list' for ARPA forever, and I first heard about it as the "total
information awareness" program. Mining deep sources of periodic data can be
very very enlightening with respect to people's activity. Too bad these guys
aren't subject to federal oversight with respect to personal privacy rights.

------
harry8
These guys?
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palanti...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/02/11/palantir-
apologizes-for-wikileaks-attack-proposal-cuts-ties-with-hbgary/)

Well they apologised, I guess. No resignations, no charges, no referring
evidence to police. But yeah, they did apologise for it, so they got that
going for them.

~~~
JMCQ87
Didn't know they had connections to HBGary at some point. Quite telling, if
you dealt with these "bottom of the barrel-guys".

I pitched in front of some people from ManTech once and knowing that they
acquired HBGary made me somewhat uncomfortable - and made some negative things
I heard about ManTech all the more believable.

------
Bahamut
I'm kind of surprised that TechCrunch acts like Palantir's role was never out
in the open - if anyone ever browsed a job opening there for engineering, they
have you check out a tool that steps through using the product to uncover the
9/11 attackers in a mock but plausible scenario. It is very obvious what their
role is for intelligence analysis.

~~~
cabinpark
I've attended Palantir tech talks before and they try to "hide it". Everyone
in the room knew and the person giving the talk kept talking about the other
uses of Palantir beyond government things. However all the examples they use
were based on war scenarios in Iraq.

------
kendallpark
I have a friend that works here. Apparently the job interview process is
tough. Very technical. Tons of questions involving algorithms. I'm tempted to
apply just for the challenge.

The perks are nice. They have an onsite chef so you can have a catered meal
for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Apparently a masseuse comes in every
month(?) or so for free massages. Seems like a nice gig for the programmers.

~~~
username223
> They have an onsite chef so you can have a catered meal for breakfast,
> lunch, and dinner. Apparently a masseuse comes in every month(?) or so for
> free massages.

That's a bad deal. Ask for enough money to hire your own chef and masseuse
instead.

~~~
kendallpark
I think the convenience is worth it. For me, my most valuable commodity is my
time, not money. Not to mention they probably get a better deal on the
catering and masseuse than you would individually.

If I could go into work and not have to worry about preparing a good, healthy
meal for myself (or drive somewhere to get one), that would be great.

~~~
mahyarm
Catering and masseuse is pretty standard with many bay area companies, it
doesn't make palantir special. The chef part is more a function of how large
the company than anything else.

You'll actually start to curse the catered food part if you want to actually
conform to some sort of diet, weight loss or otherwise. The food can create a
culture of longer working hours, so leaving earlier so you can go make your
own dinner will create career challenges later on. SV is a large suburban
place, not catering lunch just wastes a shit ton of time for the company
itself and creates a lot of traffic.

And the masseuse service isn't that expensive for the company to hire once a
week.

~~~
kendallpark
No one's arguing that the perks are THE BEST PERKS EVER. Just that they are
"nice."

They have a chef available if you want your meal prepared there--no one's
forcing anyone to eat at work. Also, from what my friend tells me it's not
like one thing is being served each day. You have many options and they cook
what you order. Seeing that he's seriously slimmed down while eating most of
his meals there, I don't think his diet is suffering at Palantir due to the
catering.

I don't really get what your point is other than to split hairs over how
"nice" the perks are.

EDIT: Perhaps this quote from the website will explain the catering: "At
Palantir, you will never be hungry. Chefs craft weekly menus consisting of
organic and local foods, and we serve three meals a day. Family, friends, and
guests are always welcome, and to-go boxes are always available."

[https://www.palantir.com/life-at-palantir/](https://www.palantir.com/life-at-
palantir/)

------
higherpurpose
TechCrunch: "Look, guys, we just totally randomly found this document that
says how _awesome_ Palantir is. The document about the negatives was lost due
to water damage".

------
Bartweiss
Honestly, I don't understand the excitement over this. For all the conspiracy
theories, Palantir is pretty open about their basic work. Their website is
pretty vacuous, but that's not shocking for what is essentially enterprise
software. They had (have?) a fairly comprehensive "try it out" tool on their
site, and give example-based demos at a host of college campuses.

All of this indicates that there's no big mystery here - they built a
relationship-analysis tool that doesn't suck horribly. When you're selling to
banks and the government, "actually works as promised" is rare enough to make
you a billion dollar company.

Palantir is more hush-hush about some of their work, though this seems to be
more 'competitive advantage' and less 'military secrets'. New initiatives and
project restructuring are kept fairly quiet, and their customer lists are
obviously secret, but none of this is shocking.

TechCrunch seems to have discovered what looks like a 'secret' press release
about how great Palantir is, and it's being spun as dark secrets instead of
info that any Palantir employee or tech talk is happy to divulge.

------
BinaryIdiot
They're looking for a round of funding so of course it was "leaked".

~~~
FallFastForFun
Peter Thiel is a genius businessman. He's got quite a natural instinct for
using social media to rally his motives.

I personally don't agree with much of what he says, but still gotta give him
props for his business savviness.

In some ways he's better than Musk. But the projects Musk has choose are far
more interesting and engaging.

------
mkx
TechCrunch needs better editors.

~~~
JMCQ87
Better journalists, or just critical thinkers, too.

This person drank a bit too much of the valley kool-aid already, it seems.

------
RandomAttack
All of these comments couldn't be more correct.

The only question I have is how could investors be this dumb?

I have heard that some investors in the prior round (all of what, 12-18 months
ago?) are trying to get some/all their money out after seeing the curtain
pulled back. It has to be somewhat of a stampede for the door gaining
momentum.

Still, while it is a cushy place to work (smart people, nice perks, okay money
and stock that is supposedly valuable on paper until everyone rushes for the
door), I also don't understand why smart people work there - unless they
don't.

Maybe the smart employees are the ones who left 2-3 years ago.

------
mythrowaway888
Ah, the Paypal mafia at it again. Well atleast they're bringing the money to
the valley. Funny how a lot of Libertarian Thiel's companies are funded by
govt. contracts. Same goes for Elon.

~~~
JMCQ87
Yeah, and this person supposedly believing in "merit" wants you to buy into
his vision based on fluff and hype.

~~~
wyager
Libertarians aren't allowed to use marketing?

------
onewaystreet
Never trust investors with private info.

------
spikels
So Palantir is Big Brother Inc.

~~~
Chronic30
No way

------
technologia
Working across silos? Palantir does that by creating yet another silo.

~~~
mralvar
Why make just a bridge when you can put a toll on it too!

------
mikhailfranco
A more interesting journalistic question would be: why does an 10-year-old
software company with existing products, paying customers and an international
presence need yet another $400m?

------
tomaskafka
It lets people without analytics know-how type a query in human language and
target killer drones on result set? Do they at least have Palantir False
Positives Victim fund?

------
snowwrestler
The article reads to me as very credulous; I can't imagine a piece like this
running in TechCrunch in the good ol' days with Arrington at the helm.

------
pXMzR2A
Uhm, so... thanks for the advertisement?..

------
zobzu
Leak or ad? ;)

------
RandomAttack
Hm.

------
stevenspins
Peter Thiel is backing Palantir, and is the biggest investor in the marijuana
trade. It's bit more ironic thing he's doing it

~~~
mralvar
It's silly to think capitalists care where money comes from.

------
stefantalpalaru
All watched over by machines of loving grace. Just like here on HN where
algorithms take care of people using Tor or links that get too many votes too
fast.

------
curiously
I just lost all my respect for Peter Thiel.

------
brooklyndude
It is a bit ironic that Peter Thiel is backing Palantir, and is the biggest
investor in the marijuana trade. They seem like opposite ends of the spectrum.

~~~
orbifold
I find that not entirely contradictory, both are tools of societal control.
From a perspective of power, whether you legalize marijuana or not is not a
question of personal liberty but what is of greater utility to your immediate
political goals. I think it is an open secret that the 1960-70s
criminalisation of drugs was not really because of concern for the health of
the users, but because it was an effective way to suppress and ultimately
eliminate the threat of the emerging counter culture.

Maybe in light of growing inequality and youth unemployment marijuana is seen
as one of the diversion tools to prevent the poor from taking political
action. Especially because it has roughly the intended effects, when used
regularly. Note that it is not entirely out of the question that people in
power think that way, for example the 60-70's were perceived as a "Crisis of
Democracy" in parts of the establishment.

~~~
tomaskafka
This. Almost all work of the three lettered agencies could be classified as
"revolution prevention" = mechanisms for supressing backslash from society at
the controlling elites.

------
AdeptusAquinas
First screenshot shows a system running Windows XP. Not a good sign that a
product serving such confidential information is running on an operating
system no longer supported with security patches.

~~~
jzwinck
If you click the attribution link for that photo (at the bottom of the
article, unfortunately), you will see it was taken in 2007:
[https://www.flickr.com/photos/aki51/1675246969/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/aki51/1675246969/)

That's just nine months after the initial release of Vista. So hardly
surprising to see XP on a desktop.

~~~
AdeptusAquinas
Ah fair enough then - sorry I missed that.

Current day job is performing service IT for a security-paranoid bank that
nevertheless runs XP exclusively internally, so I guess I'm just
hypersensitive :D

