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Palantir Video Demo

Looks more like a executive dashboard Windows app than Minority Report, but that's journalism for you. It doesn't make what it enables any less frightening though, and it does seem like a pretty sophisticated product (created on the backs of admittedly low-paid programmers). The whole idea of "let's give the government some tools so they don't REALLY frack us over" is such flawed logical thinking based on the history of the powers given to the US government, and I would dare to say incredibly disingenuous. These guys want to make money, and Palantir is the means to that end.

It should be noted that they are also using the tech to expand into other markets, such as finance and biotech. It is, in an abstract sense, a way to deal with information overload, and as we are in the Information Age, this is a smart product to create. But these guys have gone off the ethical deep-end, and whether they are morally bankrupt or just terribly misguided, they are in effect "collaborators" with the groups within the US government who are destroying the last strands of American ideals.

Which is rather ironic, considering Palantir has "full wiki markup capabilities", according to their video demo:

Palantir Video Demo

Those of you who are making the connection with Sauron would do well to remember that the Seeing Stones had many good and important uses before one fell into Sauron's hands. The Stones themselves were not evil. For the real-life analog, see http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/haiti

Anyway, not a fan of increased government surveillance, but calling "Big Brother" because the government is working to share data more effectively strikes me as equivalent to assuming that every person using Bittorrent is a pirate, or every person who refuses the full-body scan at the airport is a terrorist.

This. I was thinking exactly the same thing, but with a caveat: the company, not the government, is behind this.

On the one hand, the intelligence community thrives on producing disinformation. Putting on a show of omniscience is in their interest: it hypes their efficiency and productivity when budget considerations come around, and it scares the opposition, very likely in that order of importance.

On the other hand, the article reads more as a press release for Palantir Technologies (which may or may not be a front company or intel-community spin-off). The panegyric of Thiel and Karp in the article add to that suspicion: there's a great deal of effort spent on making these guys Hollywood-style geniuses; all that's missing is for one of them to be a race car driver or test pilot in his spare time. I'm surprised they didn't hire Derek Flint, too. Regardless, the company did the dev work and GUI, not the government: point (4) is invalid.

For those wanting screenshots of the GUI, see http://blog.palantirtech.com/category/palantir/page/2/

Not the stuff of "Mission Impossible" dreams by a damned sight. More like "Bloomberg meets elementary-school mind-mapping software." The real work, though, seems to have been put into integrating information from banks and other forms of payment (one of the guys used to work for PayPal) to track cash flows through networks of opponents.

Speaking of PayPal and Palantir's connections to other online businesses, did anyone notice that they're operating out of Facebook's old offices?

My favorite quote from the article:

Thiel, who sits on the board and is an avowed libertarian, says civil liberties advocates should welcome Palantir. “We cannot afford to have another 9/11 event in the U.S. or anything bigger than that,” he says. “That day opened the doors to all sorts of crazy abuses and draconian policies.” In his view, the best way to avoid such scenarios in the future would be to provide the government the most cutting-edge technology possible and build in policing systems to make sure investigators use it lawfully.

Disclaimer: I'm not in any way affiliated with Palantir.

Palantir Mobile

My bet? It's to use more of this. Seriously seeing Palantir Mobile in action is bloody freakin awesome.

Looks like this may be a way to make a play for competition in homeland security and business support, like Palantir has done plus medical data tracking, and other possible extrapolations

I'm fairly sure it's not going to be used for just generating websites.

http://www.palantirtech.com/government/videos/mortgage-fraud

I don't use their product but http://palantirtech.com/ makes a data visualization tool and has a good blog about it, with some interesting Java dev tips thrown in. It might be overkill for the data discussed in the article summary, but sounds pretty badass.

One really interesting blog article http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/12/12/vizweek-2008-report/ talks about something called the "VAST Interactive Challenge", which as near as I can tell is a competition for data visualization tools to go head-to-head against each other. (Side note - wouldn't it be cool if more software frameworks/applications had shootouts like this?)

The blog article talks about how they had 30 minutes to train an analyst that had never used Palantir, and then 2 hours for the analyst to explore the data. It's an interesting read, and makes you realize how useful a really good tool like this could be for finding trends in raw data.

I don't use their product but http://palantirtech.com/ makes a data visualization tool and has a good blog about it, with some interesting Java dev tips thrown in. It might be overkill for the data discussed in the article summary, but sounds pretty badass.

One really interesting blog article http://blog.palantirtech.com/2008/12/12/vizweek-2008-report/ talks about something called the "VAST Interactive Challenge", which as near as I can tell is a competition for data visualization tools to go head-to-head against each other. (Side note - wouldn't it be cool if more software frameworks/applications had shootouts like this?)

The blog article talks about how they had 30 minutes to train an analyst that had never used Palantir, and then 2 hours for the analyst to explore the data. It's an interesting read, and makes you realize how useful a really good tool like this could be for finding trends in raw data.