
Palantir: the 'special ops' tech giant that ... - mikhailfranco
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/30/palantir-peter-thiel-cia-data-crime-police
======
Hasknewbie
I considered submitting that article this morning, but decided against it as
it's too low quality and tech-illiterate.

As evidence, this wonderful phrase:

>> Palantir, the CIA-backed startup, is Minority Report come true.

Immediately followed by this facepalm inducing statement:

>> It is all-powerful, yet no one knows it even exists.

The whole article follow this idiotic "Palantir is Eye of Mordor Minority
Report black magic!" trope. Apparently the author has never heard of number
crunching, or that mysterious form of sorcery known as "statistics".

The only real-life example given is re-allocating police patrols to identified
hot-spots, a common sense M.O. that the police have been doing (at least in
the UK) for years, the only difference being that they probably crunched those
numbers in a more manual way. Yay black magic.

It's quite ironic that this is coming out now, when the more recent
news/rumors about Palantir have been that some of their customers are not at
all that impressed by the results they got.

