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.'"

Comments

Re:Call me dense...

[TypoNAM]

This: Palentir

Reference to LotR

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Reference to LotR

[hooeezit]

That's the FUD propaganda. The more balanced perspective is it's the seeing stone anyone could use to see their future. But it was put to evil purposes instead by Sauron.
Technology by itself is not good or evil. It's how one uses it that makes it so. Remember that the Internet came out of a doom-and-gloom project to create a nuclear-war resistant communication network.

Re:Reference to LotR

[jollyreaper]

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.

The Palantir themselves were not evil, it was simply put to an evil purpose. The last surviving one was so corrupted by Sauron's influence it could never be used peacefully again but you can no more blame the Palantir for that than you could blame a wrench for becoming radioactive when left sitting next to a leaky reactor. Really, the only bit of truly evil magic in the entire book was the Ring itself and, seeing as it bore a measure of Sauron's own power, I think of it less as an object than as a character with a will and mind of its own.

There is no evil in science, technology, or magic; evil lies not in the tool but the hand that wields it.

Bad summary

[gurps_npc]

The summary seems to be a description of a meta-search engine, which is rather common. (Dogpile).

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.

Re:Palin?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

No, it's a Tolkien reference. IOW, they really are geeks.

Re:The Palantir Tool is a Double-Edged Sword

[Anonymous Coward]

Its funny you mention that, I had the asFasBasI (remove the as) come to my house over a slashdot post I made. They were not happy about my criticism of their organization .

Re:Gee it's almost impressive.....

[brainboyz]

Except, despite all of this, they still exist in a trackable world. They live and have stuff delivered to addresses, they access information that leaves a data trail, and use identifiers which do the same. If they share anything, or a field observer notices a meeting then it gets tagged as a meeting and connection; then any activity at all is tracked back to a single node (bank account, address, person, phone number, etc) then you can link ALL connected nodes to that activity. Cash, disposables, and other "untrackables" still have temporary information: GPS on phone calls, messages intercepted with keywords or names, or phone numbers used for a material order. The info might not be permanently valid, but the connections it makes between nodes are.

I need to fucking shit

[Anonymous Coward]

Lunch was too much...

Re:Call me dense...

[nacturation]

Let me help you with that:

http://www.google.com/search?q=palentir

Re:All we need

[tibman]

I thought it went down differently than that. Zelaya was trying to rewrite the constitution to allow him more than two terms as president, a step in the direction of dictatorship.

A judge issued a warrant for his arrest because he had no right to call a vote to rewrite the constitution. The military followed the Judge's order but expelled him from the country instead of arresting him. They later said they did this to prevent his followers from getting access to Zelaya.

The military was never in charge of the government.. with the order for removal of the President, the Vice President was promoted to full president. The current president of Honduras did not claim power, it was thrust upon him by the line of succession.

The same thing could happen in the United States.. the Military swears an oath to the Constitution FIRST, then the president. The process to remove the president from power would be different though. He would have to be impeached.. which again comes from the judicial side of the house. The Chief Justice would preside over it and congress would do the voting.