Slashdot Mirror
How a Team of Geeks Cracked the Spy Trade
drunken_boxer777 sends us to The Wall Street Journal for a lengthy article on a small tech company, Palantir Technologies, that is making the CIA, Pentagon, and FBI take notice. The submitter adds, "And yes, their company name is a reference to what you think it is." "One of the latest entrants into the government spy-services marketplace, Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks. The software's main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do. That means an analyst who is following a tip about a planned terror attack, for example, can more quickly and easily unearth connections among suspects, money transfers, phone calls and previous attacks around the globe. ... With Palantir's software 'you can actually point to examples where it was pretty clear that lives were saved.'"
But what is the reference?
Sweet name for a company.
> ..a small tech company, Palentir Technologies..
> ..Palantir Technologies has..
> The submitter adds, "And yes, their company name is a reference to what you think it is."
A spellcheck company?
I'm guessing the reference is the beloved ex governor, but is it that really so obvious on first reading? Unless I missed it entirely...
It's not like as though the company was named "Rusty Trombones Inc." or something
It was the seeing stone that Sauron used in Lord of the Rings.
That is the tool the evil guy used to control the world. Sounds appropriate.
With a name like Palentir, it sounds like trojan spy program, not a Google like search tool.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
Palantir Technologies has designed what many intelligence analysts say is the most effective tool to date to investigate terrorist networks
What? a crystal ball to fight the terrorist:
A palantír (sometimes translated as Seeing Stone but actually meaning "Farsighted" or "One that Sees from Afar") is a stone that functions somewhat like a crystal ball.
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
The actual product seems MUCH more interesting than the silly summary. It compartamentalizes secret info, so if you are classified for level 5, you can still search and find info that is level 6, even if the file also has level 4 information. It can also tag information so that if your level 5 clearance is not enough to tell you how person A is connected to person B, you can still know that the connection exists.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
What happens when you aim the same tool at ordinary people like Slashdotters? You will discover sexual orientation, adultery, etc.
In other words, the same tool saving us from the terrorists can also defeat the last barriers protecting our privacy. If an intelligence officer in the government hated a particular SlashDotter (due to her articles in this forum), that officer could easily identify her address, her friends, her bank accounts, her adulterous lover, etc. Can you say, "blackmail"?
Hayden Panettiere ?
Ok, well thats the first thing that came to my mind...
Yes, and we know who gets to keep the chief Palantir don't we? It always depresses me how engineers can be so smart and so morally bankrupt at the same time.
'What did you do a work today, honey?' 'Oh, I made a neat tool that makes invading privacy and abusing human rights even more trivial!'
"Hi, I'm Alex Karp," Mr. Karp said, offering his hand. No response. "I didn't know you really don't ask their names," he says now.
Real spies have fake names and ids. There's no reason not to give the guy a name, as long as everyone in the room isn't named "Bob".
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
There has been this notion that somehow if you can shove a bunch of data through algorithms that somehow you can catch terrorist networks.
More likely you're just wasting time and here's why: terrorists don't act or usually exhibit predictable and trackable behavior like normal people. Typically they deal with disposable cell phones, cash and other "untrackables".
These guys have managed to come up with Yet Another Terrorist Tracking Tool®
... we hatesss it, Preciousss, yesss we doesss.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
After all, all the Seeing Stones are not yet accounted for. Who knows who might be watching?
Cool, so they just invented Splunk! Cool. Is it any cheaper than splunk, because if it is, I'll use it.
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
.... treating the disease rather than preventing it....
STOP SCREWING WITH OTHER SOVEREIGN NATIONS.
There, saved the taxpayer a lot of money.
In case you forgot the term engineer originally applied to constructors of military engines. Engineers have a long and healthy tradition of being clever and morally bankrupt.
mmmm...forbidden donut
It sounded like a bunch of hype. The search engine is no different than what we can do with our search engine appliances - you can't see results to which you are not authorized. The only thing they bring further seemed to be tracking if you access data as part of a search and then mark it as not related. The idea was that it would keep feds out of your if they already decided you weren't involved.
> The software's main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do
OMG! Did someone finally discover the hidden "UNION" conjunction in SQL?
This sounds similar to Starlight, which the NSA uses for all kinds of "connect the dots" type intelligence activities.
With the first link, the chain is forged.
CIA and FBI computer systems are infamously way, way behind. They only got wikis in 2006. Now they can finally google something.
Good guys used it too. To defeat Sauron AND to "keep the world safe".
In fact... Good guys made all 7 Palantir mentioned in LotR.
Sauron got his hands on one of those and used it to corrupt Saruman and Denethor.
So... No. It is not "the tool the evil guy used to control the world."
The message would be that "power corrupts". In this case - power in the form of knowledge or information.
What Palantir really lacked was a decent firewall. No protection whatsoever.
Very intuitive user interface though. And they were practically indestructible.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Lunch was too much...
The only person right now who can make anything out of anything Ozzy is muttering is Sharon. Technology that can translate Ozzybabble would be a huge leap forward.
Palantir is a startup with Clarion (a hedge fund) VC backing. Clarion is now using their connections to showcase their holding via the WSJ. Sounds like Clarion is trying to dump their investment and cash out.
Thankfully, engineering was split into military and civilian engineering a loooong time ago. Software engineering is simply a recent offshoot from civilian engineering which has been split to the vast number of engineering disciplines we know today. As for being clever and morally bankrupt, engineers are clever. As for morally bankrupt, perhaps is not the tool that is morally bankrupt, but rather the uses it is put to. You cannot claim that the design of a passenger aircraft is morally bankrupt, and yet without that design, a lot of bad things would not have happened in they way they happened.
It is acceptable to say that some technological advances have no purpose or meaningful reason to exist other than morally bankrupt ones, but thankfully, they are few and far between.
If only we could fall into a woman's arms without falling into her hands
This would be the first time that the US would be acting in the interests of a democratic movement in Latin America rather than in direct opposition. I'm highly skeptical of any action taken by the State Department, but it seems that the Organization of American States support reinstatement of Zelaya with conditions before the elections, as well as the citizens of Honduras itself.
That's why there's no good press. Supporting democracy is protecting the monarchy in Saudi Arabia, and overthrowing governments across the world which have any self-interest that is in opposition to American power. Supporting democracy is declaring war in the outdoor prison in Gaza when they don't vote the way you want them to. Supporting democracy is when you send in guerrilla forces to Latin American countries, where nuns are gang raped for 24 hours while CIA interrogators coach their students on how to get more information, where priests who oppose American sponsored violence are gunned down while they give Mass on Sunday mornings, and where decades of warfare, destruction, and misery are considered progress.
American businesses don't get to make any money when they don't control puppet governments or subsidize weapons to the "freedom fighters" with our tax dollars. So, I remain skeptical on why the State Department wants this guy back in office, but the fact the Fox News is against it gives me some hope.
Fact B can be Top Secret and
Fact C can be confidential
Sometimes taking C and then correlating to something with A+B (with the B removed) will then result in TS (same as B). So, I'd think it's a touchy area. In the 90s a similar "classification by association," was commonly referred to as Elements of Essential Friendly Information (EEFIs), such as a recall roster and leave schedules. If the enemy has the recall roster and suddenly one particular part of a unit gets a 3-ring recall to report for duty, you've got a tip off and good information on what's likely to happen. For example, I knew when the 2nd Gulf War was going to start (within a small window) when I saw something I'd never seen before: A large number of stealth bombers out of their hangars, and taking off in Missouri. You'll notice we now keep some deployed overseas so there's not as easy of a single telling point. With intel, it's the same.
However, getting back to the article, I'm 100% supporting them. I'm a Defense Contractor and I'm tired of incompetent retired mid-/senior officers who get a paycheck for their former rank and do nothing to really make an acquisition program work. On the same note, you've got officers in Program Offices as a PM who will never be held accountable or benefit from his decisions. I could go on with examples, but I think this company has a hard battle ahead but likely brings a great, fresh, greatly needed new perspective. Our government is hurting badly in many areas, and this is a small step to help make a small part of it better. If we can just get more of these going...
Dear Fellow Spies:
Here is a list returned by Google Scholar for "galois lattice" and terrorism.
I hope this helps the prosecution of Cheney et al.
Yours In Novosibirsk,
Kilgore Trout
i'm guessing you thing Twilight and Harry Potter are works of genius?
i'm surprised more people haven't taken your flamebait.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
So is this a civilian version of ECHELON? Or a tool to sort through all the data that ECHELON collects?
They've plastered the Pentagon with banners practically claiming they single-handedly brought down GhostNet when they were at best on the periphery of the rather large collection of organizations responsible for it.
"Thankfully, engineering was split into military and civilian engineering a loooong time ago."
You are high, right? Smoking something really strange? There is as much separation between military and civilian engineering as there is between military and civilian written languages. That is to say, there is precious little that can't be interchanged.
Trick question: In a group of people including a waitress, a secretary, a construction worker, a doctor, and a professional wrestler, who is likely to know the simplest, fastest, and easiest way to kill a human being?
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
There are several tools in this market, and Palantir is a visualization tool.
Lynxeon, for example, has similar visualizations but also includes improved querying tools that can make finding the needle in the haystack much more manageable.
Oh yes. In the books, I recall the Palantir being used as a wonderful tool of disinformation by the bad guys.
What kinds of "terrorists" kill people through computer networks? Has this ever even been a problem, or are we just using "terrorism" as a substitute for "boogie man" now?
Speaking as someone that has intimate knowledge of the system.
Grow up. Seriously. It isn't just a "spy tool". It can be used to track gang activity, drunk driver tendencies, sexual assaults, accidents in high traffic areas. It is a system that helps manage massive quantities of data that exists anyway. Rather than paying a team of people to sit at a computer and crunch data all day we have a computer do it.
ooohhh...scary.
I was afraid they were Sarah Palin Volunteers!
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Actually their software works like this:
1: Announce software that will bust terrorist networks.
2: Only terrorists buy software to test out their own network security.
3: Software phones home.
4: PROFIT!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Just be careful not to have your name mentioned in the same document with a bad guy's name in it. This technology really is that simple and that dangerous.
Kriston
There is a particularly entertaining game mentioned in the video called "Turbo Hearts", which rules.
I found this good explanation of how to play:
http://ericanderson.us/2009/09/04/how-to-play-turbo-hearts/
The books are pretty clear; Sauron did not use magical powers to infect Saruman and Denethor's minds. What he did (after trying to deliver the mental/magical bitch-slap and failing) was filter their information, only allowing them to see what he wanted them to see. This is what drove them mad, not the palantir itself.
Presumably this "team of geeks" knows that tracing information that is placed by your enemies carries risks, and thus the name is appropriate.
If you ignore all the "catch terrorists" mambo jumbo, this is probably the most advanced and outright awesome data mining tool I've ever seen.
Take a look at the videos on their blogs - the "Palentir Financial" videos are particularly worth it.
Hummm, "The software's main advance is a user-friendly search tool that can scan multiple data sources at once, something previous search tools couldn't do."
Wasn't searching multiple sources at once already done? With a little tool called webferret?
www.webferret.com "Get comprehensive results from multiple search engines and search the Web faster"
Sound like an infringement fight brewing to me! LOL
And no, I did not read the article.
Hah, a friend of mine built the red light and bubble machine. Neat to see it on the WSJ.
http://www.bobdylan.com/#/songs/masters-war
http://www.masturbateforpeace.com/
Construction worker.
Drop a bridge on 'em.
It's called Limeware, or Frostwire FTE
"Along with the safe house location, the LimeWire networks also disclosed presidential motorcade routes, as well as sensitive but unclassified document that listed details on every nuclear facility in the country." - http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/29/205207
Sorry, but I stopped taking people seriously who mention them.
Everyone who can't remember that in the same freaking week that 9/11 happened, tenthousands of Indians died in a landslide: Don't *dare* to ever mention "terrorist attacks" again!
Or how about the banking scam attack that threw the whole global economy in a recession? Or do you still think that was no deliberate attack?
Etc, etc, etc.
I think we have bigger things to fix, than to use "terrorist attacks" as an excuse to create attacks on our nations values, so big that those terrorist attacks look like freaking jokes in comparison!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
I was going to say that I'm really getting tired of the 'geek' and 'nerd' terms. But after reading several of these posts, never mind. :) Anyway, I don't understand why we still put up with those labels. The Palantir team is making a contribution. More than I can say for the WSJ geeks. Hell, they can't even make money off of advertising.