
How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut - taylorbuley
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/
======
diydsp
>Not long after obtaining his doctorate, he received an inheritance from his
grandfather

>“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,

>Thiel had cofounded PayPal and sold it to eBay in October 2002 for $1.5
billion.

>Enter Karp, whose Krameresque brown curls, European wealth connections and
Ph.D. masked his business inexperience.

And thus we enter the Establishment's presentation of hippie-cum-suit stories,
presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars [1]. Sound familiar? It's the
same story that worked on the baby boomer generation. "First I was a hippie,
then I was a stock broker, now I am a hippie again."

[1] Let's see them give the token opposing community activist on page 4 the
same photography treatment instead of photographing him on the margins of the
frame so he looks even more obese and distended.

~~~
badman_ting
"presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars"

Yes, this really bothers me as well. We should believe in the power this tool
has, and that should cause us to be afraid. Biz-mag dorks are always going to
eat up such things, but who cares about that. The adulation by people who seem
like they should know better is what rankles.

~~~
saraid216
Be afraid, be very afraid!

------
steveklabnik
I've always found Palantir terrifying. The name itself is just so brazen. This
article's presentation of 'but even if you're sketched out by the defense
angle, it's now being used for good!!!' doesn't help.

Also, let's not forget that Palantir helps the FBI infiltrate and attempt to
destroy domestic political groups like Occupy.

~~~
knowaveragejoe
To be fair, Occupy largely fell apart on its own.

~~~
sp332
Occupy protesters were forcibly removed, repeatedly.
[http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/22/opinion/crabapple-occupy-
wall-...](http://www.cnn.com/2012/09/22/opinion/crabapple-occupy-wall-street)
[http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-
occupy/all...](http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/12/a-eulogy-for-occupy/all/)

------
jivatmanx
I wonder what logic Karp has used to convince Peter Thiel that he's still a
libertarian? I mean, talk about cognitive dissonance.

“If we as a democratic society believe that license plates in public trigger
Fourth Amendment protections, our product can make sure you can’t cross that
line”

The majoritarian argument - That's a popular one amongst libertarians /s.

On the other hand, Jimmy Wales considers himself an Objectivist... I guess,
forget the mumbo-jumbo and judge people by their works?

~~~
smacktoward
People can always find ways to convince themselves that whatever they're doing
fits their personal ideological beliefs:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_%28making_excus...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalization_%28making_excuses%29)

It's not hard. Self-interest and/or the desire to avoid trouble are powerful
motivators. Ideology is much less so. If the two conflict, we find ways to
bend the ideology to fit, even if to an outside observer it looks like we've
turned it completely inside out.

It gets even easier when the outside forces that are compelling us to go along
give us pre-written rationalizations for doing so. "You're serving your
country." "You're stopping terrorists from hurting innocent people." All we
have to do then is just decide to not think about the rationalization we've
chosen too hard.

~~~
jivatmanx
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one
to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."

-Benjamin Franklin

------
denzil_correa
Palantir's organizational framework will make an excellent case study for
whistle blowing, secrecy and privacy. I found the bat phone pretty
interesting. In particular, I liked the fact that after a security related
incident Palantir retained the employee and strengthened their system; rather
than the textbook "we fire you" without any acknowledgment of the issue with
the system.

    
    
        Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team created an 
        ethics hotline for engineers called the Batphone: Any 
        engineer can use it to anonymously report to Palantir’s 
        directors work on behalf of a customer they consider 
        unethical. As the result of one Batphone communication,   
        for instance, the company backed out of a job that involved 
        analyzing information on public Facebook pages. Karp has 
        also stated that Palantir turned down a chance to work with 
        a tobacco firm, and overall the company walks away from as 
        much as 20% of its possible revenue for ethical reasons.

------
arh68
As much as the article conveys doubts to Karp's moral fortitude, at least one
(former) engineer there is willing to speak his mind

> _He goes on to argue that even Palantir’s founders don’t quite understand
> the Palantiri seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien’s orbs, he
> points out, didn’t actually give their holders honest insights. "The
> Palantiri distort the truth," he says. And those who look into them, he
> adds, "only see what they want to see."_

~~~
CatMtKing
With or without the palantiri, people see what they want to see. But it is a
pretty good name for a data mining company.

------
badman_ting
Something about Palantir has creeped me the hell out ever since I lived in DC
and used to see their ads in areas close to the Pentagon. I am sure its
founder is every bit as brilliant as people In this article say.

~~~
purplelobster
Extremely creepy: [http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-
wikileaks-2011-2#-1](http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-
wikileaks-2011-2#-1) Their recruitment also reeks of creepiness, sending
"confidential" letters to my work place (don't have that address listed
anywhere, company has many buildings in the same city).

~~~
tmarthal
That document is from 2010. ArsTechnica and other places wrote about what came
about when the shit hit the fan in 2011: [http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-pl...](http://arstechnica.com/tech-
policy/2011/02/the-ridiculous-plan-to-attack-wikileaks/)

From the article: "I have directed the company to sever any and all contacts
with HB Gary," said the CEO of Palantir.

~~~
purplelobster
After getting caught. The fact is that the business they're in and the
technology they're developing will continue to push them to do questionable
things. They rely on large contracts with government and big corporations.
They will have to judge (secretly) whether the use of their technology is
moral or not. Do you think they will turn down hundreds of millions because
their technology is being used for questionable moral purposes?

~~~
freyr
But they have a "batphone", that let's their employees make anonymous to
report ethical abuses. Haha, batphone, isn't that quirky and cool and
something we can get onboard with?

------
rubikscube
I wonder how it is legal for a bank to view data obtained by monitoring the
Internet on the scale that only the NSA would be able:

    
    
      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.

~~~
nemothekid
This is overblown. You don't need to track the entire internet to realize that
a fraudster is using proxy.

~~~
rubikscube
They are not merely seeing the proxy address. They claim to see the address
behind the proxy.

------
paulbaumgart
Given our (somewhat irrational) risk-aversion towards things like terrorism,
the success of this sort of tech seems pretty much inevitable.

The stable state we'll probably reach is a more extreme version of what Karp
mentions: next to zero privacy, but also high levels of transparency into the
operations of our authorities, and, as a result of both, much more cultural
acceptance of "deviancy".

Their civil liberties controls seem like a fairly sane attempt to smooth out
the transition to that sort of society (but admittedly of unclear
effectiveness). They're trying to avoid a detour into a totalitarian police
state while our laws and cultural norms catch up with the reality of our
growing data collection and data mining capabilities.

Edit: To clarify the logic of my first sentence above: if we keep voting out
elected officials who fail to stop terrorist attacks (which are almost always
disproportionately sensational compared to their actual death tolls), we're
basically evolving our set of politicians into people who will stop at nothing
to prevent them.

~~~
Zigurd
That's a dreadful vision. I expect a lot of people got into technology because
it's "clean." There little chance of harming people or the environment with
what you do. It will be interesting to see if people become disgusted by
technology, in general.

~~~
smacktoward
Or at least, we've managed to push the unclean parts of it into places far
away where we don't have to personally see it -- assembly lines in China,
coltan
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coltan))
mines in the Congo, etc. It's not like the old days of, say, the garment
business, where the abuse was happening right in New York City for everyone to
see (cf.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fir...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fire)).
It's been shuffled off to places where customers and cameras can't go.

This makes it easier to pretend to ourselves that what we do is not tied up
with the human costs in those places. It's easy to not think about something
you never see.

------
rdl
I'm terrified of what powerful tools like Palantir can do in the wrong hands,
with really any hands without a lot of oversight, but somewhat comforted by
this article (and by the Palantir employees I know personally) being generally
"techie-libertarian" types -- they at least are more willing to consider the
downsides of universal surveillance than a lot of their "customers" are.

It would be amazing if Palantir was a 5-10x better tool for CIA, but came with
non-overridable limits which actually protected individual liberty (of US
citizens and non-citizens).

There are certain things Palantir can be used for which are essentially purely
good -- identifying disease outbreaks, other potential environmental danger,
etc. -- which they will hopefully emphasize.

------
ck2
Not quite up there with building the atomic bomb but with about the same
amoral structure.

Sorry but I cannot admire that.

------
logn
As someone who's worked in text analysis, I'm comforted to see this story
told. It's what we should be talking about. Please take the time to read this
full article, then go out and do something useful for our world, we're going
to need it.

~~~
shiven
Like catching 'potential' terrorists, you mean?

Sorry for the snark, but I call BS on glorification of a technology company
that so far has not done anything but strip away _almost_ everyone's privacy.

Fat comfort in that.

~~~
jivatmanx
You should have also put terrorists in quotes. We already know that the NSA is
going after drug crimes.

~~~
Vivtek
To be fair, the DEA is going after drug crimes using secret information
supplied by the NSA, and lying about it.

------
asgard1024
In a way, this is a sad story. It reminds me of
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Haber)

But some people will never learn. Fortunately, he decided not to have kids.

~~~
darkarmani
> who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his development for
> synthesizing ammonia, important for fertilizers and explosives. The food
> production for half the world's current population depends on this method
> for producing fertilizer.

Or are you talking about his development of chemical weapons? Surely, they
weren't as devastating as nuclear weapons which were developed by an
astonishing array of celebrated scientists.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Surely, they weren't as devastating as nuclear weapons which were developed
by an astonishing array of celebrated scientists._

Who were all working under the fear that Nazi scientists would develop it
first and give it to Adolf Hitler. It's hard to fault them morally for
thinking that it would be best for someone else to get to it first.

~~~
jacquesm
In this same thread:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6212695](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6212695)

~~~
smacktoward
Except that Hitler _actually managed to conquer half the world_ instead of
being a powerless figure used as a convenient bugaboo to scare people into
rationalizing immoral acts. You know?

If you're a scientist in, say, 1942, when all of Europe from Spain to Moscow
is under Hitler's control, and then someone comes to you and tells you he's
working on an atomic bomb, should that prospect not scare you?

Almost all of the scientists who made the A-bomb (with a few notable
exceptions like Edward Teller, who never met a bomb he didn't like) agonized
over the morality of it. Many organized after the Nazi threat had receded to
try and put the genie back in the bottle. It's a smear to categorize them as
"good Germans" who were just using Hitler as an easy way to rationalize away
unjustifiable behavior.

------
bsenftner
Why to all Forbes articles read like flaming propaganda bullshit?

~~~
gergles
Because these aren't actual Forbes articles. Anything on forbes.com/sites/XYZ
is somebody's blog, not content that is actually vetted by Forbes.

~~~
me2i81
"This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes."

~~~
gergles
Bleh, the /sites/ URL used to be a giveaway that it was UGC. Now I see they're
even moving their own content under there, to prevent you from discarding the
(worthless) UGC. Sorry for the misinformation.

------
wslh
I am curious, what different data mining techniques uses Palantir? or is it
just that they have access to difficult to find information?

~~~
ethanbond
Here's one way to explain it:

Current data mining techniques take in massive amounts of similar data and
output a parsed signal. Palantir takes in massive amounts of data, preserves
all of it, allows their FDEs and clients to hand-draw ontological connections
between dissimilar pieces of data, and outputs a gigantic raw data object.
Palantir is one of the few entities with the technical know-how and
infrastructure to make this gigantic object manipulatable on any old computer
or phone.

Where other miners might bring you a gold ring (which may or may not be the
right fit for your finger at the time!), Palantir brings you a cart full of
raw gold and a map back to the mine shaft. From there you can do whatever you
want.

------
webwanderings
This is one of the most fascinating article that has come out in recent times.

