How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

Forbes ^ | September 2, 2013 | Andy Greenberg and Ryan Mac

[nickcarraway]

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

[Zeneta]

In the future.

A hypothetical scenario may go like this.

Cop pulls you over for speeding, taillight, whatever...

Cop instructs you to get out of your car and place this “Cap” on your head.

He informs you that this is for your safety, as it will allow him to determine if you have violent intentions. If you don’t have violent intentions than all is good.

Your brain waves are then feed wirelessly and analyzed in real-time and the results are displayed on the Cops “Google Glass”.

In addition to virtually everywhere you have been, everybody you talk to, every group you are a member of, if you own a gun, if you have written statements about the threat of Government and on and on....

This “threat matrix” will then be matched to your “Current State of mind”.

If your current “State” is sanguine, you take your ticket and go.

If on the other hand you’re agitated, paranoid and even calculating, you are a threat.

“Future Crime” suspect that needs further evaluation for the good of society.

[null and void]

Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping!

To get onto The Nut-job Conspiracy Theory Ping List you must threaten to report me to the Mods if I don’t add you to the list...

[1010RD]

He’s an idiot. He should have picked something totally innocent and safe sounding like Hobbit.

[CodeToad]

Alternate caption for that picture: “Man, this NSA crap has gone just too far now.”

[ballplayer]

Well just Google Curt Weldon and Data Mining and you will see that 9_11 could have been avoided. Data Mining was getting to close to the Clinton shenanigans and I believe Condolezzaa Rice was not who she was made out to be also.
Really interesting stuff,Curt Weldon paid the price for making this public years ago,the commie democrats got rid of him

[Pan_Yan]

Schizophrenics have stalked Karp outside his office for days at a stretch.

Have these people been identified, treated by a doctor and clinically diagnosed or is the author just misusing a medical term to smear someone he dislikes? More shades of the USSR.

[Old Sarge]

...even Palantir’s founders don’t quite understand the Palantiri seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings .

No kidding!!

Here's the verbatim quote from Tolkien in "Return of the King":

"The Stones of Seeing do not lie, and not even the Lord of Barad-Dur can make them do so. He can, maybe, by his will choose what things shall be seen by weaker minds, or cause them to mistake the meaning of what they see."

Palantir, as I understand it, does not gather information. It collates information from other sources, and generates intelligence products tailored to the customer's demands. Palantir can, like Sauron, manipulate what you see, and you will accept what you see as fact.