Palantir, the War On Terror's Secret Weapon

hessian tips a story in BusinessWeek about Palantir, a system designed to aggregate disparate data points gathered by intelligence agencies and weave them into a more useful narrative. The article summarizes it thus: "Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir’s technology is either creepy or heroic." "The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA's Palantir system. An analyst types Fikri's name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government's disposal. There's fingerprint and DNA evidence for Fikri gathered by a CIA operative in Cairo; video of him going to an ATM in Miami; shots of his rental truck's license plate at a tollbooth; phone records; and a map pinpointing his movements across the globe. All this information is then displayed on a clearly designed graphical interface that looks like something Tom Cruise would use in a Mission: Impossible movie."

Comments

Hello

[Titan1080]

Big Brother.

Re:Hello

[russotto]

He prefers to be called "Lord Sauron" now.

Re:Hello

[Dexter Herbivore]

Creepy, definitely creepy.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Brother.

1984... is freaking real

Re:Hello

[Opyros]

Nay! He does not use his right name, nor permit it to be spelt or spoken.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

WARN: THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Federal Reserve Corp???

Re:Hello

[migla]

Mister Mxyzptlk, is that you?

Re:Hello

[SpzToid]

And like every other I.T. project it is behind schedule. Probably way over budget too, but who knows?

At least Mark Zuckerberg is helping out in the free sector, showing everyone how well it can be done. If nothing else his company sets the bar for us all to see.

Re:Hello

[u38cg]

This quote, from the very end, is interesting:

Thiel...says civil liberties advocates should welcome Palantir. âoeWe cannot afford to have another 9/11 event in the U.S. or anything bigger than that,â he says. âoeThat day opened the doors to all sorts of crazy abuses and draconian policies.â

There is something in that, I think. You can argue all you like about rights and what makes just law, but the fact is such events tend to drive the national mood squarely towards security over civil liberty.

Re:Hello

[tmosley]

Does that make Osama bin Laden Bilbo Baggins?

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but that relies on the assumption that these systems will meaningfully prevent future events, when the reality is likely that they do little more than add noise to the system. Also, it doesn't make all that much sense, because it is a draconian policy that will certainly be crazily abused.

Re:Hello

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

You can argue all you like about rights and what makes just law, but the fact is such events tend to drive the national mood squarely towards security over civil liberty.

While true, I don't think appeasement is the right way to handle the problem. For one thing, no matter the sales hype, there is no way that this system can guarantee there won't be any more major attacks (hell, their own promotional example relies on the bad guy being stupid enough to get a speeding ticket, as if a dedicated terrorist won't be doing everything he can be appear to be law abiding).

So, we install Big Brother, a major attack still eventually gets through and now the baseline for new crazy draconian abuses is just that much higher to start with. But in the mean-time before that all goes down, our entire society suffers the knock-on effects of living in a surveillance state.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Nay! He does not use his right name, nor permit it to be spelt or spoken.

Hussein?

Re:Hello

[flyingsquid]

Big Brother.

1984... is freaking real

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you read the article, it starts out with the story of a suspicious character by the name of Mike Fikri. Fikri has bought a one-way ticket from Egypt to Florida, he's making bank withdrawals from Russia, talking to suspicious people in Syria, scoping out crowded places at Disneyworld. The scenario lays out something a lot like the lead up to 9/11: lots of individual actions that alone mean nothing, but together make a huge red flag and make this guy a Person of Interest. And Palantir can allow the government to spot this guy before he executes his plot. And you start thinking, wow, if this technology really spotted this guy, maybe it's worth thinking seriously about it. And then the article's punchline: "Fikri isn’t real—he’s the John Doe example Palantir uses in product demonstrations that lay out such hypothetical examples."

Here's the problem with all these liberty-vs-security debates. Before we get into the argument about just how much personal liberty we're willing to give up for security, let's first establish that the proposed measures would actually make us safer. Does any of this security theatre actually work? If torture isn't an effective interrogation technique- and all of the available evidence strongly suggests that it is not- we don't need to have a debate about whether it's moral to torture someone to save lives. If torture doesn't work, then the left, right, and centre should all be able to agree that we shouldn't torture. Similarly, has all of this government eavesdropping actually produced useful leads in the War on Terror? If so, then we can have a debate about the merits of something like Palantir. But if after ten years the government still can't point to a single credible case of where massive, indiscriminate domestic surveillance has spotted a credible threat from a terrorist, well, there's no need to even debate the civil rights aspect of it. It's just a waste of resources regardless of whether it's justifiable or not.

Basically, the War on Terror proponents want to engage you in a debate that goes like this: "Aren't you willing to give up just a little liberty for a lot of security?" It's a reasonable proposition for anyone but a hardcore libertarian, so that's a debate they can win with many people. So if you engage them in that discussion, you're basically ceding the argument. They're going to win over the majority of the people every time. But the debate we need to be having first is, "Are all of these invasive, expensive measures you're proposing actually going to make us safer at all?"

Or look at it this way. A guy comes up to you with a handful of beans and says, "These are Magic Antiterrorism Beans. They cost a billion dollars but they'll keep you safe from terrorists forever. Isn't that a small price to pay for security?" Before you start haggling over the price, wouldn't you want to be sure that the beans actually worked?

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Also note a system like Palantir has obvious, enormous potential for civil rights abuses...and Thiel's a libertarian.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it. Maybe I need to set my browser to right-to-left character order.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Now if only they could manipulate the information to incriminate any dissidents, they could automatically influence any decision-making. The next step would be to influence education and media, to help us love Big Brother. I think, that what we will see is actually "Big Sister" since a female model seems like it is more likely to appeal to both genders.

Re:Hello

[gl4ss]

palantir drives people mad and doesn't tell exactly what's going to happen anyhow!

Re:Hello

[hedwards]

That was my thought, regardless of where you are on the spectrum it's creepy. Where you are on the spectrum dictates whether or not you realize it to be so.

There's absolutely no way that aggregating huge amounts of information about people without warrants and then trolling through it is anything other than creepy.

Re:Hello

[mauri]

Spot on!
I would like to add that one of the major driving forces behind all this shit is simple: tortures want to torture and programmers want to create palantirs.
I am 100% sure that these 3 poor bastards tortured to death in Gitmo base did not give out anything. The same goes for Abu Ghraib.

Re:Hello

[EdIII]

What's creepy and deeply ironic is the name.

The Palantir were created by good to accomplish communication and ostensibly protection similar to satellite photography. However, they were appropriated by evil and used to lie, distort the truth, and fill the world with oppression.

Privacy advocates (such as myself) are rightly worried about such technology for exactly the reason their name implies.

That's creepy.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

The key factor for this whole question is, will they ever release information saying that such a system has been successful or not? Right now, the TSA is sitting on what I have been told is plenty of evidence that they have stopped a significant number of incidents. . Having heard this from a couple of very, very credible sources, I have to wonder - why would they keep it a secret? Mostly, what I hear is that they do not want to disclose anything that might give someone a leg up on the whole process, but it creates debates like this and leaves a lot of people wondering.

If the TSA isn't talking about successes, why do you think CIA would? That makes any public discussion about this pointless because outside of a privileged few, nobody knows the facts. Is the TSA working or not? Would this system work or not? I don't think we are ever likely to find out the real story.

Re:Hello

[causality]

I wouldn't be so sure about that. If you read the article, it starts out with the story of a suspicious character by the name of Mike Fikri. Fikri has bought a one-way ticket from Egypt to Florida, he's making bank withdrawals from Russia, talking to suspicious people in Syria, scoping out crowded places at Disneyworld. The scenario lays out something a lot like the lead up to 9/11: lots of individual actions that alone mean nothing, but together make a huge red flag and make this guy a Person of Interest. And Palantir can allow the government to spot this guy before he executes his plot. And you start thinking, wow, if this technology really spotted this guy, maybe it's worth thinking seriously about it.

All of that is really easier than deciding not to use economic warfare to push other nations around? It's easier than not using our intelligence agencies to overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators who play ball with us?

Or did you think they hate us for our great freedoms? In that case they should like us by now and admire the path we're on.

Basically, the War on Terror proponents want to engage you in a debate that goes like this: "Aren't you willing to give up just a little liberty for a lot of security?" It's a reasonable proposition for anyone but a hardcore libertarian

So not being a coward makes one a hardcore libertarian? Or being observant enough to recognize the problems with the government's brand of "security" and the way it's always sold in terms of fear requires a particular political philosophy?

See this is the problem with politics. Everyone wants to be a member of some team and then it's a "go team go!" mentality instead of starting with the facts, a good understanding of history, and proceeding from there. I'm happy to dismantle every program like this and then take my chances of dying in a terrorist attack. I'm more likely to get struck by lightning but I'll chance that too, even without a portable Faraday cage.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Like, totally groaty.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Nevermind a dedicated terrorist wouldn't be caught in the other acts either, especially knowing the level of big brother watching.

Speeding ticket: Certainly not going to happen like you said.
Visiting ATM in Miami: How even can that be in any sense discriminating if the amount is not huge? If the amount of withdrawals is huge, multiple moles, multiple accounts would be utilized, and a lot of it would not go via the banking system as any terrorist would know that all is rather easily traceable by authorities.
As in the example, from russian bank account, now who would be stupid enough not to realize that will raise red flags.

Phone records: Burners anyone? To be extra paranoid, use mules to acquire them across the country. Also utilize heavily VOIP, ie. skype, through VPNs, fake accounts etc.

Disney world: Would be mostly based on available photos, maps etc. online to discreetly scope the place out. To scope it out IRL, a normal unsuspicious visitation there, say if he would be driving past it, make a stop there to scour the area, and other tourist hot spots. Tourism works here because he's new in USA.
You definitely would not be stupid enough not to act like any other visitor, you would do your surveillance as part of a normal visitation there.

Flagging the flight: Just stupid. Since when is it cause of suspicion just to travel to USA?

Everything in that example is just false, or they would be the world's most stupid terrorist.
In real world, the devil would be in the details. For example, spending time on different internet cafes every day of the week, despite having smartphone with net access and a laptop, but then also using a burner for some calls, but not most, changing the burner 3 to 8 times a month, minutes left or not. New in the country, spending months and "not enjoying the place", ie. spending a lot of his time in his condo, or internet cafes, not looking for work, not going to see places etc. Shops for unusual gear which are usually kept for a really long time, esp. if from hardware stores: If you are visiting a country for a few months now would you be buying up tools and building materials?
But most of that information would require active surveillance, CCTVs cannot spot if you change a burner often, or CC transactions for shopping at HW store etc. for a intelligent terrorist.

I say the whole security theatre is all about oppressing people, gaining more power and control over the general population. These big brother things cannot catch other than the most stupid terrorist.

Re:Hello

[stewbacca]

Big Brother.

Except for the small detail that Palantir is a privately owned corporation and not the government.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the propaganda has gotten to you. Total surveillance. Total control society are completely safe, if by safe you mean safe from harm of another, non-government sponsored being. But living all alone in a cage sucks too, even if the cage is of our own choice.

You should really read up on things like "Solaria". Or "Deepness in the Sky" (part of it at least). Do you want a society like that?

There is a price to pay for freedom. And that price is lack of control, lack of 100% security. You are either free or safe, and you can pick 1 or neither.

If you want to reduce death rates from unnatural causes, maybe the primary goal should be to address those deaths. You know, pollution, drunk and stoned drivers, wars, etc. How many people died in the world last year because of terrorism? How many died because a drunk driver has killed them? How many died because of drug related violence or random gun violence?? And how many died because of terrorists??

Fix the real problems not freak out about insignificant, hypothetical dangers.

Re:Hello

[pugugly]

I don't find it so much creepy as, well, useless.

We keep trying to add more raw data to the system - what's needed is to remove irrelevant data from the system.

This is just going to be a boondoggle full of data that can eventually prove Captain America Killed Kennedy in the Library with the Lead Pipe.

We only have so many smart people that can investigate so many leads - sending them off to investigate a speeding ticket because his girlfriend dated bin Laden's father's brother's former roommate is no use whatsoever.

Idiots.

Pug

Re:Hello

[pugugly]

You said it better - thanks.

Re:Hello

[PopeRatzo]

Creepy, definitely creepy.

a system designed to aggregate disparate data points gathered by intelligence agencies and weave them into a more useful narrative

A "more useful narrative".

The use of that term of art sends shivers up my spine. I'm not comfortable with our intelligence agencies "weaving" "narratives".

Looking back at the second half of the past century, I see a hell of a lot of human suffering that came from intelligence agencies "weaving narratives".

Re:Hello

[Hognoxious]

There's absolutely no way that aggregating huge amounts of information about people without warrants and then trolling through it is anything other than creepy.

-1, trawl.

Re:Hello

[Hognoxious]

You've basically pointed out the other axis, which is more or less orthogonal to the one mentioned in the title.

It runs from "computer says you're a tayrst, so get yer to gitmo" to "this is completely useless" via "this may occasionally flag things that warrant further investigation, but that would require some mental and possibly physical effort from some fat asstard who might be wearing a badge and carrying a gun but mentally he's still an 11 year old schoolyard bully".

Re:Hello

[fozzydabear]

This quote, from the very end, is interesting:

Thiel...says civil liberties advocates should welcome Palantir. âoeWe cannot afford to have another 9/11 event in the U.S. or anything bigger than that,â he says. âoeThat day opened the doors to all sorts of crazy abuses and draconian policies.â

There is something in that, I think. You can argue all you like about rights and what makes just law, but the fact is such events tend to drive the national mood squarely towards security over civil liberty.

Thiel calls himself a civil libertarian? A civil libertarian would accept that every once in a while a group of criminals may figure out how to crash planes into buildings, but would prefer that over further government encroachment over people's lives. And that history has shown the rife of abuses government has committed against its own people when given too much power over them. These systems are far more likely to allow abuses than to prevent attacks. His argument is doublethink.

Re:Hello

[ultranova]

palantir drives people mad and doesn't tell exactly what's going to happen anyhow!

It's not the Palantir that drives them mad, it's Sauron using it to feed them misinformation that makes them do really stupid things, drawing the Good Guy's forces away from dealing with the actual attack. Which, I might add, shows a potential problem with such systems: all you have to do is have your underlings act suspiciously, so the system starts throwing alarms, and then have them pass by the same town. You don't even need to actually do anything, just act suspiciously and let paranoia do the rest.

Re:Hello

[Anthony Mouse]

tortures want to torture and programmers want to create palantirs.

That's just ridiculous. For one thing, half of these decisions get made by people other than those who implement them. More than that, most of these people actually believe what they're doing will help. (They may be wrong, of course.)

I suspect part of the problem is the sort of "forbidden fruit" aspect of it all. If certain interrogation tactics are banned, they must be really effective, right? Otherwise why ban them?

People don't seem to get that some things are prohibited because the costs objectively outweigh the benefits, not because some tool in an ivory tower decided that the costs are too high in a vacuum.

Re:Hello

[Anthony Mouse]

Right now, the TSA is sitting on what I have been told is plenty of evidence that they have stopped a significant number of incidents.

Even if true, that doesn't actually tell you anything. The question is whether the data mining efforts were required to stop them or if they would have been caught using more traditional methods.

As for the "our detection methods are secret so the bad guys can't counter them" argument, that isn't consistent with a democracy. The public has to be informed before they can make a decision. The people making these claims have perverse incentives: They might genuinely be doing something good, they might just be exaggerating in order to keep their jobs or get more funding. The only way you can tell is if you actually evaluate what they're doing.

If you want to argue that preventing terrorism is more important than having democracy and therefore we should in effect give these people unaccountable autonomy to protect us, I feel like most reasonable people are not going to agree to that. Or if they do we're in trouble. There are some things more important than catching bad guys.

Re:Hello

[rust627]

problem is, we are talking governments here.
if 10 years of government eavesdropping and data matching does not produce any credible result in an anti terror area, any other department that can will have its fingers in the data somewhere.
and of course Government departments are not justified by results, Government departments are justified by budgets, so if it is spending all of its budget, then it is working . If at that point it is not achieving results this is only because either it does not have a big enough budget or it is not gathering enough data...
Once a government department or division is started it is incredibly hard to stop, too many people get caught up in work and they will fight to maintain their jobs irrelevant of how immoral or useless their positions are.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

If the purpose is to provide useful leads while investigating actual terrorists, then it is completely useless. However, such a tool would be very helpful, for proving anyone guilty of anything. Don't like what someone has to say about the government's policies? It turns out his sister's cell phone called another cell phone, which at the time, was near somebody who might know a guy who knows a guy. Such an accusation would not stand in any reasonable court, but if you send in a paramilitary unit to break in at night...

Re:Hello

[ultranova]

Privacy advocates (such as myself) are rightly worried about such technology for exactly the reason their name implies.

Brits do one better and use outright Liddless Eye symbology.

It's kinda depressing to realize our leaders consider Sauron their ideal.

Re:Hello

[dudpixel]

Its only creepy if you distrust the party using it.

So if you dont trust the current law enforcers, what is it you really want?

Do you want NO law enforcement? hardly a solution.
Do you want the law enforcement not to have good tools? criminals will probably always have at least as powerful tools at their disposal...why would you want to cripple the law enforcers?
So given that we need SOMEONE to do the job of police, and we need to be kept safe...just what DO you want?

To put it another way, if you distrust the people using this system, why? and how would they do their job effectively without it?

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office

10 years late buddy.

Re:Hello

[Mr. Slippery]

Except for the small detail that Palantir is a privately owned corporation and not the government.

It's a government contractor, in which the CIA has invested. If Big Brother's telescreen's use parts sourced from private companies, so what?

Re:Hello

[gmhowell]

Nay! He does not use his right name, nor permit it to be spelt or spoken.

Chaim Levine?

Re:Hello

[Tjp($)pjT]

Recall that even Sauron did not have the power to make the palantiri show false images, but rather could force selective showing of truthful images to lead to deceit. The best lies are based in truth.

Re:Hello

[stewbacca]

So if the government buys screws from my ACME corp, I'm Big Brother all of a sudden?

I think you'd be surprised to see what qualifies as a government contractor these days. Plus, Palantir sells stuff off-the-shelf as well, and to the financial sector, so they aren't exclusively a government contractor.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Brother.

What's that have to do with intelligence analysis?

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not an opinion, it's an objective statement of face.

You OTOH are -1 troll. Adding nothing to disprove the idea and nothing else of value either.

Re:Hello

[Jeremi]

We keep trying to add more raw data to the system - what's needed is to remove irrelevant data from the system.

According to TFA that is essentially what this software does. It doesn't collect data; rather it is alleged to be super-duper data mining software that figures out which parts of your existing gigantic databases are relevant and filters out the rest.

Re:Hello

[hedwards]

I'd probably support it if there were any hope of them ceasing the collection of data that's not relevant.

Re:Hello

[rtb61]

Creepy is not the word for it 'Bullshit' is the word for it. The problem with the fantasy is the quality of the information in the database and the assumptions made in creating the links. It doesn't take long for the most innocent person to be linked with the most destructive activity, based upon how far those assumptions are stretched to create connection between records in the database.

Then of course there are gross errors in the database things like false revenge based accusations, for profit accusations, reduced sentence accusations, now add in simple clerical errors, typos, misspellings and then tie faulty recognition, poor human memory and then of course just stupid stuff like people with the same name or foreign intelligence agencies poisoning data on purpose.

Nett result, another billion dollar boondoggle on a dead end craptastic database. All works well with simulated data but in the real world, a world full of lies, trickery, deceit and of course laziness, it all just collapses. Of course a world full of 'Anonymous' types would just love to have fun poisoning that database with false data and ludicrous connections to accelerate the collapse.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, why use som oriental name as Fikri it can and will as easily be Simmons, Washington and Kowalski....

Re:Hello

[datavirtue]

I do not consider myself a "hardcore" libertarian but the phrase "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." keeps ringing through my mind, so I must default to liberty. Sorry. Debate over.

Re:Hello

[datavirtue]

Working in government I have learned that NOTHING ever gets done right for various reasons. For all the "good" decisions that are made they are contained within an overall context that is always foobarred to hell. We are talking about entities that do not have to produce to receive their funding and for people to keep their jobs. It is enough to create illusions of success or push propaganda from the top that whatever project or effort was a success--make a stink rock the boat and you go nowhere. The money keeps coming, period. Eventually you end up with piles of crap, tons of inefficiencies that go on forever, inefficiencies that those in charge PREFER! We are seeing the fruit of this system; we are seeing it reach its end. I'm getting out of government work, but the problem and modus operandi has spread to the private sector as well. We are heading for some change.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, but it would appear stupid if you take it at face value. If all of this were actually to go after bad guys and terrorists, they wouldn't need all of that "irrelevant data". I do believe it'll become more and more evident that all of this actually has virtually nothing to do with going after terrorists. It has everything to do with shutting down political opposition. Just imagine how corrupt individuals could use such information on their political rivals for blackmail. They WANT all of that information, even if it actually THWARTS any real efforts to go after real bad guys. Just in case your 5 year old neighbor might enter politics or become and activist 30 years from now, they'll have ALL the dirt on them from childhood to adulthood in an easy to read package. We have to think of the long term programs at work, here, not just the present.

In the end, everyone will be databased and profiled, and our protection from all out Nazi Germany will lie in just how far they can legislatively take us down that road.

I don't mean to come across as a "Tin-foil hat" or real downer, but I think that the people screaming about all of this way back in the Bush years are going to be vindicated at some point down the road. We can see the headlights of the freight train coming in the distance, but we've secured ourselves firmly on the tracks.

Re:Hello

[SuricouRaven]

"If torture doesn't work, then the left, right, and centre should all be able to agree that we shouldn't torture."

If the left say we shouldn't torture, the right will demand we heat up the hot poker and eye-gougers just to be different. Do not underestimate the sheer power of hate that is the political divide in US politics.

Re:Hello

[Hognoxious]

As in the example, from russian bank account, now who would be stupid enough not to realize that will raise red flags.

I see what you did there, comrade.

Re:Hello

[Hognoxious]

A statement of face? Did you read that on factbook, you illiterate, ignorant cunt?

P.S. Whooooosh!

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

All data is relevant to some end, so all will be kept.

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, abstractions don't have moods. F the "national mood". I doubt it speaks for the mood of civil libertarians anyway.

If Thiel really believes this self-serving rationalization, if he really wants to reassure everyone he is not evil and has only the best intentions, then open-source the system, and let everyone use it. Transparency. Democracy. Freedom.

Perish the thought, huh? Yeah, hard to get those juicy contracts from govts and bankers, then, for sure. Yeah, we know what you're really about, Mr. Thiel. Sorry, but this is one good guy badge you don't get to keep.

Yeah go ahead and run my IP through your system, and, oh yes, up yours.

"An anonymous friend of Eddie Coyle"

Re:Hello

[Grumbleduke]

Brits do one better and use outright Liddless Eye symbology.

I know I'm being pedantic/trolling, but I can't let this one slide. See those lines around the Underground-symbol-eye things, those would be eyelids.

Re:Hello

[RockDoctor]

With the beard and the time inside the mountains, he'd be more of a Dwarf Lord.

Re:Hello

[milimetric]

How very shallow. I'm coming at this from a radical left perspective, but I happen to think it's good to think things through before pulling your hair out and running around like a crazy person screaming bloody murder.

This story has no mention of any *new* civil liberties violations. Palantir *aggregates* existing data. If anything, this could help *limit* civil liberty violations. Palantir or a similar system means the government can actually use the data they are already collecting, which implies they can optimize it and get rid of spying tactics that never help deter crime. A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening, it's in society's best interest to use it. The point of civil liberties isn't to protect criminals, it's to protect ourselves from the government's mistakes. I think Palantir will allow the government to make less mistakes and be more efficient.

Re:Hello

[mrchaotica]

It is the duty of every patriot to distrust his leaders!

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of an old joke:
A: Why do elephants paint their legs red?
B: ???
A: They do it to hide themselves in cherry trees.
B: Well, I've never seen elephants in cherry trees.
A: That just proves that it works.

Re:Hello

[dudpixel]

Not sure why I got modded flamebait above...

but the point is, we need A leader. and it seems that it doesn't matter who it is, people will find fault in them one way or another.

I'm just voicing my opinion that there is no perfect solution, and that this solution seems perfectly fine so long as you trust your leaders to protect you.

If this is not the case then you have a much bigger problem than this "big brother" system...

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Big Brother.

Hello Big Brother, how about a game of chess?

Re:Hello

[axlr8or]

I thought you were about to mention this system was redundant, because Zuckerberg had in fact already created it. And it is FACEBOOK!

Re:Hello

[axlr8or]

All of that is really easier than deciding not to use economic warfare to push other nations around? It's easier than not using our intelligence agencies to overthrow elected governments and replace them with dictators who play ball with us?

Which they will continue to do, whether the DB actually worked or not. They would never give up the capacity that they have now.

So not being a coward makes one a hardcore libertarian? Or being observant enough to recognize the problems with the government's brand of "security" and the way it's always sold in terms of fear requires a particular political philosophy? See this is the problem with politics. Everyone wants to be a member of some team and then it's a "go team go!" mentality instead of starting with the facts, a good understanding of history, and proceeding from there. I'm happy to dismantle every program like this and then take my chances of dying in a terrorist attack. I'm more likely to get struck by lightning but I'll chance that too, even without a portable Faraday cage.

Hear, Here. -- pun intended

Re:Hello

[tomtomtom777]

Well spoken. It's "Tuttle", not "Buttle".

Re:Hello

[tehcyder]

As for the "our detection methods are secret so the bad guys can't counter them" argument, that isn't consistent with a democracy. The public has to be informed before they can make a decision.

OK, then you agree that the US government should have released in advance details of its assassination (sorry "bungled arrest") of Osama Bin Laden, including how it gathered its intelligence, which Pakistani military officials they bribed and so on? Nice idea, but about as likely as having live X-Factor style public voting on military or police tactics.

Re:Hello

[v1z]

Here's the problem with all these liberty-vs-security debates. Before we get into the argument about just how much personal liberty we're willing to give up for security, let's first establish that the proposed measures would actually make us safer. Does any of this security theatre actually work? If torture isn't an effective interrogation technique- and all of the available evidence strongly suggests that it is not- we don't need to have a debate about whether it's moral to torture someone to save lives. If torture doesn't work, then the left, right, and centre should all be able to agree that we shouldn't torture.

It's about counter insurgency, not counter intelligence.

Breaking hearts and shattering minds.

We take your dad/husband/friend/son away in the middle of the night, ship him half across the world, torture him for 4 years for no reason then drop him right back, and pretend it didn' t happen. Why? So you know we're really fucking scary people and you shouldn't try do topple our puppet regime in the name of "democracy" or some other counter-consumerist nonsense.

It's a really old doctrine, formed mostly by the British in India/Afghanistan in the good old days, refined by the SAS and CIA for Latin-America: http://www.soaw.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=98

If you want reliable intelligence, torture doesn't work. Isolation and sleep deprivation and repetitive questioning does.

Re:Hello

[tehcyder]

There is a price to pay for freedom. And that price is lack of control, lack of 100% security. You are either free or safe, and you can pick 1 or neither.

Ah yes, everything is black or white in slashdot world. In reality, no one is either 100% free or 100% safe. Personally, I prefer living in a society with customs, laws, standards of behaviour and so on which reduce absolute freedom, but enable something like civilization to occur. I don't think you should be 100% free to murder me, but maybe I'm just old fashioned.

Re:Hello

[tehcyder]

For one thing, no matter the sales hype, there is no way that this system can guarantee there won't be any more major attacks

Having heavy physical security around nuclear weapons can't guarantee one won't be stolen and used, should we just not bother even locking them away at night?

Re:Hello

[__aancvu2993]

You were modded flamebait and might as well have been 'sheeple'. Trust your leadr, you say? Sheesh, when will you grow up.

There is at least another option: that law enforcement is transparent. It works very well in northern Europe.

And I don't want to hear your feeble excuse for staying sheepish while repeating to yourself that it's for your own good: national security. Ah, that could be invoked once in a year realistically but every week? You might want to connect up your brain if you still can do that.

Your options reek of 'just don't bother me with philosophy as long as the cops catch the bad guys'. A mature society is more complicated than what you want to think to feel good but it's the only way out of the deadlock of stupidity and irresponsibility. And then there are still problems. How does that make you feel?

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

Well he DID live in a cave....

Re:Hello

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Having heavy physical security around nuclear weapons can't guarantee one won't be stolen and used, should we just not bother even locking them away at night?

Context, dude, context. Start with asking yourself - what is the price to society at large of having heavy physical security at nuke sites?

Re:Hello

[Anthony Mouse]

You're conflating two different issues. Whether they use bribery at all is a matter of public policy. Who they bribe, if they're allowed to bribe anyone, is a military secret.

You don't have to compromise operational security just by publishing the ground rules. "US forces can never use torture" is not really telling the bad guys anything useful: "Don't tell them anything" is not a significantly different strategy than "don't tell them anything, even if they torture you."

Likewise, knowing that they can't record your telephone conversations or your internet traffic without a warrant doesn't give the bad guys any margin of safety, because they don't actually know whether you've got a warrant or not. They can't change their plans. "Use encryption, because they're watching" is not significantly different than "use encryption, because they could have a warrant." If anything it's a good thing because it gives the bad guys a false sense of security, so when you do get a warrant they're less likely to be taking countermeasures.

The only argument you can really make is that taking tactics off the table reduces effectiveness in general. But that's the heart of the policy question -- that's the decision the people need to make, not the military. If the people want more freedom and less temporary safety then it's their call.

Re:Hello

[P-niiice]

""The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket - shots of his rental truck's license plate at a tollbooth"

One does not simply walk into mordor. One taketh I-75 and pay thy toll saving a long trip around yon turnpike

Re:Hello

[Anonymous Coward]

A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening,

By that logic, every single person in the USA should be jailed. There's networking nowadays, so everyone can do their day jobs from their cage. Every single living person can live their entire lives in a cage and work/live from there. *BAM*, zero crime.

And if you don't believe that Palantir's data will be compromised by outsiders, "adjusted" to fit what the authorities want it to fit, misinterpreted, or otherwise abused, you're an idiot. It WILL be taken over and run by corrupt individuals. There is no getting around that. That's how the world works. Power corrupts. This is extraordinarily powerful. The corrupt want power. This isn't exactly a far stretch of the imagination here.

Re:Hello

[P-niiice]

When the police start policing themselves, they will get more trust. Right now, I don't trust them, and they continue to taze, pepper spray, and no-knock themselves into more funding and power.

Re:Hello

[thoromyr]

This situation is a typical lead in to war or revolution. You say "I fell like most reasonable people are not going to agree to that" but when phrased as flyingsquid did, they will -- at least for a while. This is exactly how authoritarian governments exert their power. "Those who don't understand history are doomed to repeat it" -- well, as society never "understands" we continually repeat these things.

Saddam Hussein would have loved to have this sort of capability to oppress the Iraqi population. He was more brutal to a greater fraction of the population than is currently the case in the US but people tolerated it or left the country. I've met and talked with some of these folks: it wasn't a happy place to live politically and you didn't want to look like you were accumulating power. But they had a really good education system. They had good infrastructure. It wasn't necessarily a *bad* place to live (it is easy to think of worse).

This is the thing: an oppressive government that provides no benefit to the population either collapses from within (revolution or coup) or it must aggress against neighbors (which for some countries is anywhere in the world) to distract from the internal problems. The second option only works so long and ultimately results in either a war they cannot win (and thus are overthrown) or it collapses from within. The old government may be replaced by another oppressive government, or things may improve to an extent -- but eventually oppression sets in as the wealthy and powerful attempt to consolidate all resources and control to themselves.

What I'm saying is that perfectly reasonable people go along with the proposition that they don't need privacy in exchange for a false sense of security: it isn't a matter of what they are agreeing to but how it is couched. But eventually, when the oppression can no longer be ignored, they don't agree and that's when domestic turmoil really sets in.

Is it possible to avert this progression, at least for a while, in the US? Maybe, but I am doubtful. We are so far down the road to corporatacracy that I don't think there is any turning back, just occasional slow downs when the government is forced to apply some regulation after particularly egregious corporate behavior (SOX, et al).

Re:Hello

[Anthony Mouse]

We are so far down the road to corporatacracy that I don't think there is any turning back, just occasional slow downs when the government is forced to apply some regulation after particularly egregious corporate behavior (SOX, et al).

I don't think it's as bad as all that. Corporate power is like a pendulum, but it doesn't move at the same rate in both directions. It grows slowly over many years until it reaches a tipping point and public outrage reaches a boil, then all at once it swings back (like the trust busting a century ago). And we're due for one of those events.

SOX is nothing. It's the status quo masquerading as change. People want real change. You can lie to them and spout nonsense about "hope and change" or pretend to be a bunch of 18th century revolutionaries for a while, but people will only believe the lie for so long before it just makes them even more angry. At some point you have to give the people what they want.

Re:Hello

[dudpixel]

I wasn't saying you need to trust the people who are currently there.

I was saying that we need SOMEONE to do law enforcement, and whoever it is needs to be trusted.

twist what I said all you like, but it seems people cannot separate reality from an open discussion around "well how would YOU do it better?"

I was merely trying to say that trust is a necessary part of safety. If you never trust anyone, you will never feel safe.

The Intersect

[Anonymous Coward]

Soon: The contents of Palantir are sent in a coded email to a wage-slave computer tech at a large big box electronics store. Hijinks ensue.

Sounds like Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

...to me. Collate their combined services and presence on the web, and you'll know "everything about anyone".

Re:Sounds like Google...

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

...to me. Collate their combined services and presence on the web, and you'll know "everything about anyone".

Google is not empowered to use force against the populace, nor to maintain order, nor to enact law. The Government is. There is a subtle difference.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[migla]

Google is not empowered to use force against the populace, nor to maintain order, nor to enact law. The Government is. There is a subtle difference.

So, they depend of the monopoly of force that the state holds for their force- and order-needs. They need to take the time consuming detour of lobbying for the laws they need.

Subtle difference indeed. Depending on the issue, one or the other of these overlords is the worse evil.

Goverments can at least sometimes, in some places, do things that are actually the right thing to do for the people.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[migla]

ng...

Maybe I wasn't being clear just then..(?)

What I meant was that if a corporation does good by the people, it's because that is good for their bottom line, but, at least in principle, an elected government can dish out the will of the people, for the sake of dishing out the will of the people.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[nurb432]

More like "Google on steroids", with access to non public data as well as public.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[HiThere]

FWIW, I suspect that Google has lots of non-public data.

But they have a better track record for being helpful to people in general than the government has of recent decades. And they aren't allowed to directly use force. Both leave me feeling less suspicious of Google.

This is a bit unfair to the government. The job that they should be doing does require that they occasionally act in unpleasant manners using force as an argument. I just don't feel that they have been attending to their proper job, and that they have instead been using their force and rule making capability to advantage one proportion of their constituency over another. This, in a government, is malfeasance. They are also guilty of misfeasance, i.e., not properly performing their jobs. (Failure to resolve the budget problem is an example of misfeasance rather than malfeasance.)

I should be clear that when I describe the actions of the government in terms of criminal acts, the criminal acts are not necessarily something that the judicial system would recognize as criminal. They are things that *I*, personally, consider criminal. And though I use the term government, I actually mean the people holding office in the government. E.g., at the recent civil disobedience in Davis, CA I feel that the officer that sprayed the demonstrators with pepper spray should be charged with assault, and that the other police who just stood around should be arraigned as accessories before the fact. The judicial system does not appear to be of the same opinion. (You will note that I do not call it the justice system.)

Re:Sounds like Google...

[jvonk]

What I meant was that if a corporation does good by the people, it's because that is good for their bottom line, but, at least in principle, an elected government can dish out the will of the people, for the sake of dishing out the will of the people.

As rare as it is for governments to actually do that, I propose your apples-to-apples comparison would be to a nonprofit corporation. Alternatively, a nonprofit foundation funded by a for-profit corporation might be an appropriate comparison to your hypothetical benevolent government.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[stewbacca]

Google is not empowered to use force against the populace, nor to maintain order, nor to enact law. The Government is. There is a subtle difference.

Good thing Palantir is not the Government.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

With the Patriot act, can't the government just request Google to do the searching for them, in secret? Google becomes part of the government, for surveillance purposes anyway.

Re:Sounds like Google...

[Hognoxious]

Not yet, but I'm sure they're worki%@&
* .
no carrier

Re:Sounds like Google...

[Hognoxious]

More like "Google on steroids", with access to non public data as well as public.

It's Rupert Murdoch?

This springs to mind

[Dexter Herbivore]

The Onion has a lot to answer for; http://www.theonion.com/video/cias-facebook-program-dramatically-cut-agencys-cos,19753/

Re:This springs to mind

[Anonymous Coward]

All seeing eye?

http://www.theonion.com/video/obama-axes-pentagon-plan-to-build-billion-dollar-t,14351/

Re:This springs to mind

[Anonymous Coward]

All seeing eye?

http://www.theonion.com/video/obama-axes-pentagon-plan-to-build-billion-dollar-t,14351/

The all smelling nose?

Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[Gideon Wells]

Well, I hope jokes.

For years we have been joking that 1984 is not a guide. Now it seems either someone being paid to develop this has a sense of humor or has decided to up their game. No longer will 1984 be the guide, they are out to outdo the Dark Lord Sauron himself. Though, Tolkien was trying to recreate the lost myths of Britain, and by that reasoning LotR would be our past... Has anyone noticed any recent appointees or elected officials seemingly always wearing a plain gold ring?

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[SerpentMage]

it will not work worth a damm! because yet again americans think this is a technology problem. what do i offer as proof? read the recent right wing case in germany. these criminals lived ten years off the grid and murdered 8 people in cold blood without so much as a clue. they did it because they borrowed one id after another. but hey why let facts get in the way of an awesome computer program that is as useful as a paperweight.

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[notmyusualnickname]

Has anyone noticed any recent appointees or elected officials seemingly always wearing a plain gold ring?

No. It's a ring of invisibility, after all...

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[Chris Mattern]

Most people call it a "wedding band". Coincidental resemblance? You decide.

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Has anyone noticed any recent appointees or elected officials seemingly always wearing a plain gold ring?

Well, you wouldn't notice them when they had the ring on, would you?

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[artor3]

Oh come on. It's a system designed by geeky engineers. They gave it a cute name. That doesn't mean that the government is equivalent to a fallen angel bent on dominating the world.

All they're doing here is collating the info they already have. You can object to them gathering info, but how is it remotely sane to complain about them efficiently using the info they've collected? Are you really claiming that our liberties should be protected by a mess of paperwork?

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[Anonymous Coward]

Information wants to be free.

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[Svartormr]

Has anyone noticed any recent appointees or elected officials seemingly always wearing a plain gold ring?

Well, you wouldn't notice them when they had the ring on, would you?

Only those who cannot wield the full power become invisible.

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[ISoldat53]

I looked for him but couldn't see him.

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[ShakaUVM]

>>For years we have been joking that 1984 is not a guide

A better guide is "Dark Rivers of the Heart" by Dean Koontz, which basically this is. A data aggregation system run by the feds that taps into a variety of databases (credit, phone records, etc.) and can pull up data on you in a flash. It also gets some digs in on Asset Forfeiture (which is one of the biggest unconstitutional trends going in America today) as well as how powerless people can feel against an omniscient government.

It's actually a pretty enjoyable book, too.

Re:Who is the one pulling the jokes here?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's easy to solve. Make living off the grid illegal. Anyone who pays with cash, does not have a facebook account and so on gets put in prison.

Also, just in case, everything you do (including paying for a cab) must be signed using a DNA-sample.

Very coo that...

[dotancohen]

...the submitter linked to the one-page printer version. The full version of TFA spreads out over six page. I went through those six pages looking for a screenshot of the software, but there were none. So if you are going to read it (I must be new here) then stick to the printer version as submitted.

Thanks, hessian!

Deeply creepy

[Jawnn]

...and the cries of an outraged populace are stunning in their absence. Sad days, for sure.

Re:Deeply creepy

[Anonymous Coward]

Outrage?

I once would have been outraged. But now I know the system better. I understand its idiosyncracies. I understand the ways it's corrupt. I know how to defeat the tracking and I know how to abuse it.

And as my leaders have stopped caring about the rule of law I've stopped caring about it as well.

I'm no longer outraged, I feel mildly enthusiastic every time I read another story like this. It represents more empty confidence in this countries leaders and more holes for me to slip into and hide.

I, once an honest man, am now presented with a chance at true freedom.

Freedom to steal what I want. Freedom to do as I please. Frankly I'm quite pleased.

Re:Deeply creepy

[artor3]

Why should I be outraged over this? There's plenty of bad stuff going on in this country to be upset over. Having the government develop a system to efficiently collate the data they already have doesn't seem like a bad thing at all.

And everything falls into place when you remember

[unity100]

What 'Palantir' is in lord of the rings -> a vehicle for sauron to pry out and seek for the ringbearer and its allies.

Getting the data is the hard part

[Hentes]

Searching through already obtained information is a solved problem, getting the data is the hard part. So how exactly are they planning to get a warrant on all of this again?

Re:Getting the data is the hard part

[rev0lt]

If it was a solved problem, you wouldn't see so much companies investing in data search and tagging. Search through normalized data may be a solved problem, but even then not when you have the data spread across hundreds of different systems. Harvesting data ususally isn't the bottleneck, extracting the useful bits of data in a timely fashion is.

You're reading a Slashvertisement

[Rogerborg]

Crib notes: this is a description of what a Palantir system could do in TLA Wet Dream Land, not what it does do. Palantir is a product, not a system: the article might as well say "SQL".

Re:You're reading a Slashvertisement

[stewbacca]

Palantir is a company, not just a product.

Re:You're reading a Slashvertisement

[Rogerborg]

Urgh. Pedantry fail. Oracle is also company, not just a product, but in any case neither Palantir nor Oracle nor A-N-Other company/system doesn't describe an extant boogeyman TLA panopticon. Never mind, the Slashduh Collective have already decided that if it scares and angers us, it must be true.

Anything...

[Anonymous Coward]

An other technical solution for a faulty foreign policy problem.

Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait until this War on Terror is over and there is no more terrorism. Remember when the USA had a drug problem and it declared War on Drugs and now you can't buy drugs anymore? It's going to be just like that, right?

(apologies to Get Your War On)

Love the use of the name....

[Shivetya]

can't wait to see the all seeing eye, can only be around the corner.

Who would have thought that the US Government was Sauron? The same monster which consumes over four trillion dollars of our work certainly is a monster of epic proportion. No wonder that they now even feel the need to take mythic names for what they do.

Who needs Skynet when we have all sorts of fantasy names to assign the latest abuse of our rights by our government. The US defeated (or outlasted) communism of the Soviet Union for what, a Soviet Union style government masquerading as a Republic. From control exerted over industry to health care its nearly complete, we even get the same choice in our elections, which is to say none. Vote for whomever the government has approved from these two sides of the same coin.

Oh, ignore the guy behind the curtain; in your bedroom.

Occupy Wall Street was too many miles North of where it should been, and targeting the wrong foe. Just as the Tea Party figured out and OWS was only hinting at, the real problem in the US isn't the rich and corporations but the politicians who use their position to empower the rich and corporations all the while securing themselves their position

Re:Love the use of the name....

[Gothmolly]

Who would have thought that the US Government was Sauron?

Pretty much every productive member of US society.

Re:Love the use of the name....

[HiThere]

It's a feedback system, set up around the time of the civil war. The companies pay the politicians, and the politicians pay the companies. They just use different kinds of coin. (Before then "lobbying" was illegal.)

Expect that where-ever, whenever, you have centralized control by humans, you will have corruption. Expect it, and design your systems to account for it. One reason that elections are a bad means of selecting representatives is that they encourage corruption. A simple lottery would be better. (Simple. It is to laugh. You still need means to prevent corruption, even if almost everyone selected would start out not-yet corrupted. This means enforced penalties. Not only on those who are the corrupters, but also on those who become corrupt. And it means denying rewards in the future, not just while they hold office.)

But in a feedback system, you can't say one link is more important than the other. They are all important. If any one breaks, the mode of operation of the system changes.

What I propose is that if someone is selected to state or regional office, they be given a salary of 3/2 the median income in the country, an ample pension, and forbidden from accepting any gifts or favors from anyone. Expenses of office would need to be covered (which can get a bit tricky...but being a bit lavish here isn't *too* damaging to the country).

And I also propose that they be selected at random (lottery) from among all adult citizens in an area. It would probably be best to increase the number of Senators, as we don't want a state to be represented by a delegation that's half looney. But 1/3 would be ok.

If you don't like this, Condorcet voting or Instant Runoff is far better than the current system, as it makes it much more difficult for all contenders to be purchased before the election. But you also need to do something to eliminate the advantage that the well-funded have over the poorly funded, or even so the improvement is likely to be minimal.

OTOH, don't expect the Supreme Court to allow anything to be done that will impede the ability of the well-funded to rule things. They have recently and historically shown a distressing tendency to side with the wealthy, and let justice and equity go hang.

If the Constitution was actually honored, I'd be much less likely to propose such an alteration, which is clearly unconstitutional (unless amended). However, since the constitution is ignored except when it's convenient by the powerful and wealthy, I have no qualms in such a proposal. (Besides, I know it won't be adopted, so I'll never be proven foolish.)

Re:Love the use of the name....

[An Ominous Coward]

If the U.S. is creating the Palantir, then the U.S. is Feanor. Prideful, arrogant, greedily in love with his own work. But a strong, charismatic genius none-the-less. His arrogance leads him to commit evil acts, but he does lead the fight against the greater evil, and the world would have been poorer without his actions.

Sounds like an even better analogy.

Re:Love the use of the name....

[mauri]

As a citizen of former CCCP or Soviet Union as you like to call that, I can only agree.
CCCP had much less spookery in everyday life than we have now. Even in those "independent" states that now mostly are US clients...

Re:Love the use of the name....

[ShakaUVM]

>>A simple lottery would be better.

And look how well that worked out for the Athenians...

Re:Love the use of the name....

[dkleinsc]

Occupy Wall Street was too many miles North of where it should been, and targeting the wrong foe. Just as the Tea Party figured out and OWS was only hinting at, the real problem in the US isn't the rich and corporations but the politicians who use their position to empower the rich and corporations all the while securing themselves their position

First off, there is an Occupy D.C.

Second, there's at least a reasonable question of who's the puppet master and who's the puppet. I for one tend to think politicians work for business, and thus the financial center is exactly the right target. In other words, the US government may be Sauron, but Goldman Sachs et al are Melkor.

Re:Love the use of the name....

[Anonymous Coward]

The All Seeing Eye was an excellent tool for finding and destroying quake servers.

BTW....Wasn't Palantir one of the little hick companies that was hit by Anonymous along with that Gary fag?

Re:Love the use of the name....

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no it started at least 30 years before. It was in full swing by the time DeWitt Clinton funded his canal and lined his banker friends' pockets with the sweat and savings of poor Irish immigrants. Couldn't have happened without the state legislature underwriting the loan. The Erie Canal in turn of course set a large part of the economic stage for the war Lincoln prepared for by lawyering for the railroads getting state and federal grants and subsidies.

Shit, I better go turn on PBS and watch a Ken Burns documentary. I'm losing my grip on unreality. Of course it was about freeing the slaves. That's why the US has an income tax and a Federal Reserve, notwithstanding the 13th amendment, for which 600,000 died, supposedly to get enacted.

"an anonymous embarrassment to his sister the Fed"

Re:Love the use of the name....

[HiThere]

Thank you for your more precise resolution. For my grip of history "30 years before" counts as about the same time as. (Unless, of course, it's something since WWII. And it gets worse the farther back you go, and gets more precise as you get closer to now, but at about 1865 30 years +|- counts as "about the same time" unless I'm discussing something that's anchored to something I know more precisely.)

So you're probably right. But I didn't disagree with you, I just have larger error bars.

Re:Love the use of the name....

[HiThere]

No matter how you select a dictator, it isn't a good long term answer, and I wasn't proposing any such method. I'm more relying on statistics. If you select 535 people at random, you have a pretty good chance that when they vote they won't make crazy choices that don't accomplish what they want. (Not accomplishing what they want is quite likely if they don't want something reasonable.) This was about the size of an Athenian jury, and those worked out pretty well, though not perfectly. And the jury wasn't selected at random, so even that's not a fair comparison, but it's reasonably close.

So instead of electing members of the House of Representatives, choose them at random from within their district. Declining not allowed. You've got 6 months to put your affairs in order, after that you are financially independent of all private organizations (meaning that you can't accept bribes either now or in the future). You have a secure retirement and a better than average salary. And your expenses while on the job are paid (but anything you acquire is owned by the office, not by you...like the crown jewels, except that it's not a job for life, but only for two years).

Analogously for the Senate, but I think the number of senators is too small for reasonable statistical certainty, so it's 3 senators per state rather than two. And the term is, as now, 6 years.

Note that the only way to get chosen a second time is to be chosen by the lottery twice. This would be *very* rare.

This way one ends up paying for lots of retired legislators, but much smaller selection costs. And you don't get candidates that have been "pre-corrupted". You may get many stupid ones, but they'll need to go pretty far to be worse than some of the ones we get right now. You may get some malicious ones, but they'll need to go pretty far to be worse than some of the ones we get right now. You may get some...

Unfortunately, this approach wouldn't work for selecting a president. But I think the presidential powers need to be scaled way back anyway. Perhaps the president's office should be divided in half, with one office doing nothing be either vetoing bills or not, and the other being totally separate from legislation. Centralizations of power need to be broken up. Centralized power becomes largely immune to the consequences of it's actions.

P.S.: It's not power that corrupts, it's immunity to consequences. But power is used to acquire immunity to consequences. (Even those who aren't yet corrupt don't want to suffer the consequences of making a mistake. That desire, however, is one of the first steps toward corruption. And EVERYONE has it.)

Re:Love the use of the name....

[ShakaUVM]

>>If you select 535 people at random, you have a pretty good chance that when they vote they won't make crazy choices

You have a lot more faith in random chance than I do. Most Americans have never heard of SOPA, PROTECT-IP, etc., and have absolutely no knowedge of how to write laws.

So they'd have to rely heavily on "expert" testimony (MPAA, RIAA) to advise and write the laws for them. It'd be even worse because if one congress wasn't amenable, they could just wait two years and then push through their law, or constitutional amendment banning gays or internet access, or whatever.

>>Declining not allowed. You've got 6 months to put your affairs in order, after that you are financially independent of all private organizations

Awesome. So by the time I get back, my corporation has failed, I've got no investments, and have no source of income.

>>P.S.: It's not power that corrupts, it's immunity to consequences

What could be more immune to consequences than a legislature that is not unelected and held unaccountable to anyone?

Re:Love the use of the name....

[HiThere]

It would be literally *impossible* for them to rely more heavily on industry sources of information than the current house. It really is that bad. And if you think the bills you mention are how laws should be written, we have a major point of disagreement.

To my way of thinking nobody should be expected to obey a law that they can't understand. I'll grant that since some people can't understand much, this means that they shouldn't be expected to obey many laws. So the more important a law is, the simpler it's expression needs to be.

I understand that my belief has certain technical problems. E.g., people tend to lie when it's to their advantage, so they can be expected to claim to not understand laws. This means that most laws that impose requirements must also grant benefits. As it is more traditionally put, with liberty comes responsibility. But this needs to be built into the structure of the legal system rather than being a pious pronouncement with vague but obviously meaningful weight. If you can't measure it, it's not something that can, or should, be regulated. If you think it should be regulated, find a way to measure it.

Currently we not only have too many laws, but the laws we have are too complex. This is the result of having a legislature that sees it's job as passing laws, and of companies that benefit from having specific laws passed. Often they will literally write the laws, and the congressional sponsors will never read them. (Well, perhaps not often, but much too often.)

I have a belief that most people put in job will try to do the job as well as they can (plus a bunch of sluffing off). And I have a belief that if they weren't corrupted, they would try to do the right thing. (We might well disagree about what's right. But I often disagree about that.)

If you don't think that that's enough, require that each bill pass by a 2/3 vote. Or allow representatives to filibuster. But I think that's putting too many road-blocks in the way when some legislation does need to be passed.

Additional options:
1) Every bill automatically expires after 20 years. If it's important enough, it should be worth passing again every 20 years.
2) There is a special house of congress created whose only job is do remove legislation that's already been enacted.
3) No bill can be more than 5000 words long, and each bill must be understood to mean the same thing by 3 randomly chosen classes of high school seniors.
4) There is a limit on the number of bills that can be passed. Say 5000. ( Consider using this in conjunction with 3, above. If you don't like the numbers chosen [they're pretty arbitrary] what numbers would be appropriate?)

The main point is that the legal information needs to be intelligible. When four different intelligent people come to four different opinions about what the legal implications are of some one particular action, then the system is broken. There should never be more than three reasonable opinions which I can characterize as 1) it's covered by these particular law; 2) it's not covered by any law; 3) I need more information. If different intelligent and well-informed people disagree about whether it's covered, or which laws cover it, then the law is bad.

Sorry, I've gotten well off the point, so I'll close now.

Re:Love the use of the name....

[ShakaUVM]

>>It would be literally *impossible* for them to rely more heavily on industry sources of information than the current house.

I disagree. I think putting a bunch of random people in congress would create an unelected "elite" class in Washington of lobbyists and policy wonks that would dictate policy to the new congressmen - and that would be impossible to get rid of. On the positive side, I guess, congress would quickly respond to whatever is happening in the news with knee-jerk legislation (let's outlaw student molestation in colleges!) without having a good understanding of what it takes to write a law with precision or think through the longer consequences of the laws. The Law of Unintended Consequences has bit the US so many times in the past, I guess I just don't have much faith in random people doing any better.

In part I guess it's because I lecture around the country, and know that most people are woefully uninformed about what is going on in America, and when they do, only repeat talking points from their political party of choice.

>>And if you think the bills you mention are how laws should be written, we have a major point of disagreement.

No. I do think we'd even see more of the same.

Do you know how to write a law? No? Then your best friend, Mr. Smith here, from the RIAA, will assist you in drafting it up...

Re:Love the use of the name....

[HiThere]

The elite class you fear already exists, and writes many of the laws. My proposal would make the legislators less beholden to them, so that they didn't feel compelled (for one reason or another or bribery in fact if not in law) to do them favors.

Re:Love the use of the name....

[ShakaUVM]

>>The elite class you fear already exists, and writes many of the laws.

Right, I understand that. You and I both agree that it's problematic.

My point is, putting people with no knowledge of the subject areas in power would lead to subject area "specialists" (i.e. lobbyists) taking even MORE power than now.

I've studied Medicare and SSN for quite a while, and I still wouldn't want to write legislation about it without consulting some subject area specialist on the subject.

Hmmm

[PCM2]

1. Integrates multiple, disparate global databases and extracts information from them like magic.
2. Combines text, numeric data, and multimedia as if they were ingredients in a cake recipe.
3. Has a UI that looks just like something from a Hollywood movie.
4. Designed and implemented by the government.

Add that its name is derived from a fantasy novel, and why, yes, I do believe that this story is absolutely true.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[PCM2]

Regardless, the company did the dev work and GUI, not the government: point (4) is invalid.

OK fine, some random company whose sole customer is the government. What's the difference? The story reads like an episode of the Twilight Zone. "I have invented a computer that can solve all the world's problems." I was actually expecting a zinger at the end -- "the board of directors voted the computer to be the new CEO."

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

I love how you added the conspiracy theories about Facebook by mentioning their old offices. Who cares that Facebook leases out buildings with broken HVAC systems--I don't think Facebook has anything to do with this.

Still, there's a market for companies like Palantir...the government loves to buy that sort of software, though I'm surprised if they are able to acomplish anything useful even with the best software.

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

The system exists. If you search the web you'll find a lot of demo movies about it. The GUI is not as flashy as the article makes it out to be - the author is clearly exaggerating there. The technology behind the tool exists and the core idea comes from a rather small research area called "visual analytics" where the idea is to combine data visualization with dynamic data filtering applied by the user. The typical model is that the user formulates theories in terms of filters on the data set, inspects the data that passes through and iterates until the data is narrowed down enough to be viewed in its entirety. The usual scenario does not leave the user with much information to start with; this is why iterative filtering in a trial-and-error-approach is required. The tools that come out of that research can sometimes be almost as scary as Palantir.

Practical use

[gmuslera]

Could this tools be used to see what do politicians, the top 1%, judges and the people in high ranks in the government agencies? you know, the "we the people" could give a good use of it to make sure that the ones they elect do right their job.

Re:Practical use

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, yes. There's a free-to-use Palantir instance set up that lets you do just that.

https://www.analyzethe.us/

Re:Practical use

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Of course it could.

It may be designed not to. We have special controls in some of our electronic systems to stop government workers from looking up info on them--e.g. in State, the passport data system has a system that flags high-profile requests. (There was a story about it last year.)

Also, NSA may be conflicted about the idea of tracking some of those people. Tracking the intelligence committee, for example, would prevent intelligence leaks but also raises a big risk of (1) temptation for blackmail and (2) having their programs shut down.

Re:Practical use

[Larryish]

Sorry, but "anal sis" in a website name totally sets off my filtering software.

LOL

[0123456]

The problem with the 'all-seeing eye' is that it sees everything and is overloaded with irrelevant details. After the next major terrorist attack the government will be asking why the 'intelligence' agencies yet again failed to detect them and the answer will be that they were wasting their time chasing up thousands of useless 'leads' spewed out by their surveillance systems.

Re:LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been doing some study at the URL above. It's nothing like an all-seeing eye. It's an obfuscating lens, a controlled presentation tool, transparently redacting information on a need (or privilege)-to-know basis.

Very interesting, but it doesn't exactly shake up and level the intel playing field. Under the guise of privacy protection etc. it instead entrenches proprietary interests.
Probably a big selling point to those paying for it. Give me the raw data though. And don't charge me. I've already fucking paid for it. Ask Clyde R. Smith.

"The Central Anonymizer"

Won't work if you put aside important inputs

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds nice - but won't work, of course.

Remember 9/11? Remember the fact that the German intelligence agency sent the full name, phone number, and last known whereabouts of one of the plane hijackers to the USA agencies, including his contacts, and the fact that his recent behaviour was highly suspicious?

The warning was put aside... Rumours tell that the reason was a distrust of any information that didn't come directly from USA personnel.

Re:Won't work if you put aside important inputs

[HiThere]

This is but one of several pre-event trasmission of informations that was ignored. There wasn't just one, there were many, including one from an FBI supervisor.

You can believe that they were all ignored because of information overload, and that's possible. But I don't consider it the most likely reason. Especially given the immediate submission of legislation to congress that was passed in a hurry for abridging civil liberties. And the constant cries that we should be more paranoid being raised for most of the next 3 years.

I guess I did become more paranoid, but not about external assailants. And there are reasonable grounds for believing that if the government didn't do the assault on twin-towers, it at least had advance knowledge, and decided to let it go through. (I'm not really convinced that it *didn't* perform the act through agents that were working for it. But I don't believe that the evidence is sufficient to prove that that was the case. It does indicate it, however, and it's well to remember that a government is not an entity. It is a collection of agents that each have their own idea about what is going on. So at the department head level it might well have only had advance knowledge, while at the operative level it could be acting to make the event more spectacular. But again, this is not proven. Merely plausible. Even the "advance knowledge" is only most plausible, and was probably kept from the public faces, so that they would react more realisticly. The "cell system" isn't only used by the underground, an informal version of it is living in every large bureaucracy.)

While the spooks are watching this ...

[petes_PoV]

... the real Fikri (who?) is getting on with his/her/its nefarious activities on the other side of the country, while the decoy is just wondering when they'll twig. Aren't Mission Impossible style latex masks wonderful when the whole security system is designed around farcial recognition.

By purchasing it.

[khasim]

A lot of the data can be purchased from the private companies (non-governmental agencies) collecting it.

Phone records with location data.
Rental records.
And so forth.

I wonder how long it will be before private citizens can form businesses whose sole purpose will be license plate recording near their homes/offices. And maybe facial recognition. And then selling that information to the government.

HBGary

[Anonymous Coward]

Didn't Palantir feature prominently during the HBGary e-mail hack fall-out?

Hmm, sounds familiar...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Wasn't Palantir Technologies one of the slimy corprospook outfits(along with the notorious H.B. Gary Federal and Berico technologies) commissioned to do a little proposal for some dirty-tricks work against Wikileaks after Bank of America decided to lawyer up(with a little advice from the DOJ... How's that for a public defender?)

Oh yes, yes they were...

Fuck these guys and the horse they rode in on. Compared to a few pitiful fanatics who want to bomb everybody back to the 12th century, where they can feel at home, fine outfits like this are a much more serious threat to the aspects of our society worth saving.

Re:Hmm, sounds familiar...

[Anonymous Coward]

+5 to that pls

Re:Hmm, sounds familiar...

[Atmchicago]

Not only that, but the captivating example of Mr. Fikri is made up. I bet their system will never work as intended, but rather drain billions of dollars from taxpayers (which is arguably what was really intended). In the end, the system will be used to catch petty criminals and to further erode our rights, while the risks of terrorism remain less than of car accidents.

Re:Hmm, sounds familiar...

[petsounds]

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

Palantir Video Demo

Who wants to work there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Read TFA all the way through, and they devote a lot of time to explaining that it's about "non-monetary motivation". Their salaries are capped at $127k/yr and they founder is ambivalent about IPO because it will dilute this "non monetary motivation".

Well, that works out very well for the founder doesn't it? I bet he won't be getting just $127k/yr out of all this. I bet there is one helluva golden parachute, or off-market share trading for those guys.

Oh, and having sleepovers and building forts in the office? Fuck. You.

Re:Who wants to work there?

[nurb432]

Sometimes its the hidden perks ( bonuses ) and contacts you make that are the real payoff in businesses like this. They are used as stepping stones.

It's real hard to make inroads into some of those 3 lettered agencies, but with this you get your face seen and you name 'out there' for when its time to crossover.

Re:Who wants to work there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the Palantir system WILL make us safer from unreasonable searches, because 1) the millions of false leads generated will cause users to quit using it, and 2) the billions of dollars sucked out of the intelligence community to pay for it will prevent them from buying a system without the false leads.

UNfortunately, it leaves us LESS secure because of all the false leads, and it leaves us broke because of the cost of implementation (and cost overruns due to floods in Thailand, etc).

Been going that way for a while.

[khasim]

I think the summary is wrong in one aspect.

The article summarizes it thus: "Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantirâ(TM)s technology is either creepy or heroic."

Fuck "homeland security lockdown". Think more about who has access to that information and whether you trust THEM with this kind of information about your daughter.

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[artor3]

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

Yes. Yes, I do. The whole "pervert around every corner just waiting to rape YOUR DAUGHTER!" argument is every bit as exploitative and dishonest as terrorism scare-mongering.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt very many creeps would have easy access to this; however, I don't doubt that something like this will be used far far far more often in silencing dissent in our corrupt economy than it will in defending us from the occasional sociopath

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

Yes. Yes, I do. The whole "pervert around every corner just waiting to rape YOUR DAUGHTER!" argument is every bit as exploitative and dishonest as terrorism scare-mongering.

Sounds like you've never been around Catholic priests then.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[migla]

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

Yes. Yes, I do. The whole "pervert around every corner just waiting to rape YOUR DAUGHTER!" argument is every bit as exploitative and dishonest as terrorism scare-mongering.

I understood the point differently:
The potential of misuse by idiot government thugs/bureaucrats and thereby trouble for people is greater than the terrorist threat.

Maybe if this is just a CIA thing, where they all are real smart professionals, it wouldn't be a widespread problem (unless ones views differ from those of the CIA).

But in general, a huge problem about this new big brother society of ours is that the people at the monitors are security guards and police officers. Have you seen those? I wouldn't let those be in charge of filming everybody all the time. There's too many stupid jerks there who'd circulate stuff they find amusing.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the summary is wrong in one aspect.

The article summarizes it thus: "Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantirâ(TM)s technology is either creepy or heroic."

Fuck "homeland security lockdown". Think more about who has access to that information and whether you trust THEM with this kind of information about your daughter.

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

Yes.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[artor3]

See, you're doing the same thing with the underhanded FUD, most likely without even realizing it. You suggest that if "ones views differ from those of the CIA" they're gonna come and getcha! Hey, your views differ from theirs, I'm sure. Have they come to disappear you yet?

It's all fear-mongering by people who watch too many dystopian movies and on some level want their lives to be that interesting. The fact is that the real problem with all this new security is that it's expensive and doesn't work. All a would-be terrorist needs to do is buy a gun, walk in some place, and start shooting. It happened at Ft Hood, it happened to Dr. Tiller, it happened at Gifford's rally (though that was more a crazy person than a terrorist, but the methods and effects are the same), and so on. Short of strict gun control laws, which will never get passed, there's no way to stop this.

These fears that the government is out to get you are foolish and a distraction. The government does just fine controlling a slim majority of people through fear of others and ignoring the rest who fight back (e.g. the people in Wisconsin, the Occupy movement, and anti-Iraq War protests). The cops can beat or harass you with impunity, because they know enough of the populace is controlled that you'll never find a 12 person jury to convict.

1984 was nonsense. A good book, but totally unrealistic. The rich and powerful have found much better ways to control the public, and they are far more effective than mind-reading TV screens.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but you're simply incorrect. According to the DoJ and FBI, there were 88,100 forcible rapes in the US in 2009 alone. I've never seen numbers like that for acts of terrorism.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0306.pdf

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[causality]

Maybe if this is just a CIA thing, where they all are real smart professionals

"Smart" and "professional" are a really bad combination when the people in question are also fuckin' evil.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[element-o.p.]

I agree with your main point: scaremongering for any reason is exploitative and dishonest. Personally, I'm sick to death of everyone from pharmaceutical companies, to insurance agents to the TLAs all trying to scare me into acquiescence. However, I have to disagree with some of your particulars. First, I'd argue that there is a far, far greater chance of being raped or sexually assaulted than of being a victim of a terrorist. Second, considering the odds of each type of offense, we seem to be spending a disproportionate amount of money on the terrorist bogeyman (I tried to find a stat on how much money the Federal Government spends investigating sexual assault cases so that I could make a valid comparison, but a quick Google search came up empty -- the FBI's "FAQ" page vaguely claimed that there is no set budget for any particular investigation).

IMHO, for however much or however little that's worth, "terrorist" is just the 21st century word that is equivalent to the 1950's term "communist" or the 1600's term "witch".

foreach label in bogeymen
{
warn("There's no expenditure too great and no liberty too dear to sacrifice in order to be free of the threat of %s, right comrade?", %(label))
}

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[pugugly]

I don't know - the Bush administration was dumb incompetent and evil - do you really think smart professional evil could do more damage?

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[dbIII]

Maybe if this is just a CIA thing, where they all are real smart professionals

Now that is just fantasy.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[dbIII]

I hate to do a Godwin, but in WWII there were a few people that were of the opinion that if Germany was not run by crazy Nazis doing stupid things (eg. stopping at Stalingrad instead of going around it) the war would have lasted a lot longer. Dumb incompetent evil also meant they executed some of their best people. The same held in Iraq with Saddams nuclear program - it didn't get anywhere because he killed all the people that could have completed it.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to resort to potential pedophile bogeyman threats against a surveillance system like this. Go look up Echelon, in particular how many times it's come up as a source of industrial espionage, despite supposedly being restricted to military and anti-terrorist use. If the information is collected, it *will* be misused, just as it has been in the past.
I suppose they'll tell us that this time it's different, just like all the other times it was different.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Next on Fox News...The Terrorist Plot to Rape your Daughter

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[darthdavid]

Unjust lies and slander, tarnishing the good name of Catholic Priests everywhere. They wouldn't be after your daughter.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[ultranova]

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

And just what would a pervert do with that access, apart from leaving behind lots of logs that he's been looking up Jane Victims movements just before she was attacked? As opposed to laying in wait in the bushes somewhere for a random victim - and remember, Joe Pervert would need to do that physical part anyway to do anything to Jane - who has no tracable connection to him.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Stormthirst]

Do you believe that there are more terrorists in the USofA than there are perverts who would have access to that system?

Yes. Yes, I do. The whole "pervert around every corner just waiting to rape YOUR DAUGHTER!" argument is every bit as exploitative and dishonest as terrorism scare-mongering.

Sounds like you've never been around Catholic priests then.

Apparently nor have you, since Catholic Priests are only interested in YOUR SONS!

Allegedly.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[migla]

That is,of course, suboptimal. But they won't be coming after most of us. Incompetent buffoons manning most of the cameras might easily affect anyone.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whole gist of this scopophilic intrusion is a form of rape. Ever read about the the "Male Gaze" issue current in the art world some 20 yrs ago? THis is a license to do upskirt on everyone, blackmail, manipulate, rape everyone. We have all been systematically raped by the spooks and they want to do it better, deeper, more penetratingly. Get the picture?

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[makomk]

Meh. Mostly, the Catholic priests were raping boys - they probably had better access to them.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[migla]

Yes, that was a silly remark and didn't fit in with my actual point of the real problem being CCTV everywhere, manned by incompetent assholes.

Re:Been going that way for a while.

[tehcyder]

But in general, a huge problem about this new big brother society of ours is that the people at the monitors are security guards and police officers. Have you seen those? I wouldn't let those be in charge of filming everybody all the time. There's too many stupid jerks there who'd circulate stuff they find amusing.

I thought we were all OK with distributing information on the internet for the lulz?

Palantir is *VERY* appropriate

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Actually, now that I think about it, it is very appropriate. IIRC, the system was created for aggregating information on people who are not American Citizens, and coded to ignore and discard all data it received on American Citizens, but management removed that functionality because there was no oversight over them. Although created to be used by Good as of old a Palantir might have been used by the Lords of Gondor to track the affairs of neighboring lands, the system was taken and used for evil--indeed, one could even say that the prospect of visions within it corrupted the minds of those who watched, as with Denathor.

Re:Palantir is *VERY* appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and that's not even counting the second-order and higher effects.

"An anonymous friend of Admiral Poindexter"

Re:Palantir is *VERY* appropriate

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yes. It's not evil if you do it to others. It's only evil when you might do it to Americans....

TIA

[Sean]

Remember that "Total Information Awareness" program that was supposedly cut?

Re:And everything falls into place when you rememb

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

Yet also a method for Aragorn to challenge Sauron, to draw his attention from the ringbearer at a critical time.

Re:And everything falls into place when you rememb

[Anonymous Coward]

No. The seven seeing stones were originally used by the rulers of Arnor and Gondor for communication and intelligence gathering (save for one that was not in accord with the other six and looked back West over the sea).

Sauron captured the Ithil stone when Minas Ithil fell, and thereafter the remaining stones (those not lost over the years) were not used for fear of what they might reveal to Sauron.

Until the end of the Third Age, that is, when Saruman came to occupy Isengard and began using the Orthanc stone which he found there, and thus coming to Sauron's direct attention and direction (until Saruman's treason against both the Sauron and the White Council). And also during the stewardship of Denethor II in Gondor, wherein his striving with Sauron's will contributed to Denethor's rapid aging and mental deterioration.

451

[Cornwallis]

When I first read Fahrenheit 451 decades ago what struck me most was when the authorities zeroed in on some hapless fall-guy who took the hit for Guy Montague. All that mattered to the public watching the video was that *someone* took the fall.

It did not matter if a crime took place. It did not matter if the real perp got caught. The public need for resolution was achieved at the expense of some/anyone. In my current work with databases I see errors that get accepted as fact even if I explain why the error occurs. Similar to my dear departed grandmother telling me "I saw it on TV so it must be true". Good grief, why is everyone so willing to hand-off their self-actualization/responsibility to some government flunkies?

Right about the same time my parents gave me 1984 to read and I've been watching us ride that slippery slope. So sad and so unnecessary except it DOES keep the powers-that-be in power!

Re:451

[mikael]

UK had situations like that in the past - whenever there was some serious crime like a bombing, the pressure was on the government to catch those invididuals. They passed that pressure onto the police, who promptly attempted to fit up the first suspects they could find.

So is it tied into the "five eyes" of Echelon?

[wisebabo]

Is Echelon, which was operated by the "five eyes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AUSCANNZUKUS) still in operation? Is Palantir tied into it? Presumably that would give it a lot more data to work with.

Anyway, I'd be much more concerned with making sure the data matched with the right person. For example, remember how many spellings there were for Colonel Qaddafi, and he presumably wasn't trying to mask his identity! (At the U.N.: "I'm sorry Mr. Qaddafi but we don't have you down as speaking to the general assembly now, we have someone by the name of Khaddafi".)

I wonder if the recently announced initiative to collect the biometrics data for EVERY living Afghani (which will then be given to the U.S.) was "encouraged" by the U.S. for this reason. I doubt that the Indian effort to do the same for 1.2 BILLION(!) Indians had anything to do with the U.S. (but you never know, both countries ARE U.S. allies). I guess we'll know if other U.S. "allies" in the middle east (Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq?) follow suit. THEN these systems could begin to really track down terrorists (who by and large come from that part of the world).

Re:So is it tied into the "five eyes" of Echelon?

[sirdude]

While Indian-US relationships have certainly thawed substantially in the last few years, calling them allies is a bit of a stretch (as is your theory :P) Pakistan is considered the American ally (although that has taken a hit today) in the region and are also the source of a lot of international (and national) terrorists.

Re:So is it tied into the "five eyes" of Echelon?

[thoromyr]

THEN these systems could begin to really track down terrorists (who by and large come from that part of the world).

Why does everyone forget our home grown terrorists? Timothy McVeigh? the Unabomber? Or aggressive government actions to eliminate potential home grown terrorists? Waco, TX? Ruby Ridge?

There was a group ("Sword and hammer of the Lord" in Arkansas/Tennessee IIRC) taken down in the 1980s. That one, unlike the first four I mentioned, never really got any press. Its hard to tell how common these groups have been.

Mission Impossible?

[sirdude]

What clearly designed graphical interface is TFA talking about in Mission Impossible? Shouldn't the reference be to Minority Report instead? :S

Re:And everything falls into place when you rememb

[migla]

Hi guys! Is this the meeting at the docks? About the revolution? You have my ... [looks around for axe, sword or bow] ... camera and pen.

We don't have an individual ringbearer, do we? We have a lot of them, distributed, decentralized.

All that data...

[Commontwist]

Now all they have to do is turn all that data into pictures, feed it into a tech nerd working at a tech store, and then recruit them as a super-spy.

Re:Ron Paul 2012

[Anonymous Coward]

How can the patriot act be unpatriotic?

they were part of Team Themis with Berico + HBGary

[decora]

look up any of the stories on Team Themis, Bank of America, Glenn Greenwald, etc. they were planning to character-assassinate people who were sympathetic to anonymous, including journalists.

Data mining is not the problem

[fa2k]

Since the CIA have all this info, they should be allowed to data mine it as much as they please. They get most of this info from people using credit cards (at least in the example). It's entirely optional to use credit cards, and people should be more careful about using them if they think it's creepy that the government can put together the info they are handing over. Alternatively, I think there would be large demand for a financial service that was easier to use than cash, but didn't hand over all the transactions to the CIA. Either way the problem, and the solution, are not related to Palantir.

Their salaries are capped at $127k/yr

[decora]

Oh those poor bastards! my heart bleeds, absolutely bleeds for them.

please, hold that thought while i cut the flesh off my arm so i can salt it an mail it to them, lest they go hungry.

127k/year--- not that much when you think about it!

especially considering they get most of their funding from the government. i am glad my tax dollars can go to support these poor people, earning only 127k/year.

Re:Their salaries are capped at $127k/yr

[stewbacca]

Do you have proof that "most of their funding [comes] from the government"? They sell Palantir Financial to non-government entities as well. Unless you can produce sales numbers, your claim is speculative at best.

Re:Their salaries are capped at $127k/yr

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude it's Palo Alto, a crappy condo cost $700 per ft^2, so 800k min. That, property tax and HOA fees you are not going to ever be able to buy a condo on 127k a year.

no, it's not

[decora]

echelon is old. it has evolved into other things.

they have replaced it with newer stuff. see for example NSA's Thinthread, Trailblazer, and Turbulence projects.

i dont know much about the biometrics in Afghanistan, the first step would be figuring out which agency is responsible for gathering the data, then figuring out which agency is responsible for storing the data.

Mod Parent Up

[bughunter]

This needs to be repeated anytime this product or its creator is mentioned in the press. These are not good guys, and this work will not be put to virtuous use.

Do people ever study the SS and the NKVD?

[decora]

"IBM and the Holocaust" by Edwin Black will teach you more about the mechanics of a totalitarian state than all of the dystopian novels we had to read in high school.

Re:Do people ever study the SS and the NKVD?

[dkleinsc]

Well, there's clearly a human side to it as well. That means reading Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt and Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram.

Must be nice wherever you live.

[khasim]

Yes. Yes, I do.

Strange, because the statistics show 88,097 cases of forcible rape reporting in 2009 in the USofA.
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2009/data/table_02.html

Now, how many deaths by terrorists in the USofA in 2009?
Zero.

88,097 vs 0.
And yet you believe that the system will be good enough to keep out the perverts who would abuse it.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[artor3]

How many of those forcible rapes were by intelligence agents who used their work tools as part of the rape, over the past ten years?

Now how many deaths by terrorists in the same time period?

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, you can skip over the 9/11 terrorist attacks and claim there we 0 deaths by terrorists in 2009?!

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[Anonymous Coward]

9/2011! NOT 2009/11!

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[sdguero]

Lets say the 10,000 people have access to the system, and they rape as often as the average US citizen (88,097 of 300 million). Since 10,000 creepy feds is .003% of the total US population we can calculate .00003 (percentage of citizens with access) X 88097 (rapes for all of USofA) = 2.64 rapes per year

So around 3 rapes a year to help stop terrorism. I guess that's a judgement call eh?

And then there are the hundreds of other crimes that can be committed against you and your family by someone with access, not to mention the general loss of privacy and liberty that Americans have traditionally enjoyed, and under appreciated (like, ahem, an open internet).

To me, its not worth it. But I'm just one voter with libertarian leanings. Judging by the change in tone of the comments on here over the last year with old UIDs, I think the /. crowd is starting to run scared and cowtow to the man. Maybe that's part of the reason why taco bounced. Just yesterday I saw a post modded +5 that said "and lets face it, all libertarians are either just plain crazy or sociopaths." How is that not flamebait????

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[rtfa-troll]

45,462 of them were by intelligence agents abusing their work position. This is an estimate based on classified information which I am unable to share with you for various reasons, but please feel free to disprove it.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[artor3]

Okay, let's work off these statistics, since you at least provided some. However, your math is off.

First of all, you are assuming that there are no repeat offenders. The number of rapists will almost certainly be less than the number of rapes. Secondly, you assume they're evenly distributed across society. That seems unlikely. I'm sure that there are certain demographics (poor people, college students, gang members) that are more likely to be rapists and less likely to be working for the government. So as a rough estimate, it would work out to 2 or less rapes per year, to prevent a terrorist attack.

Now you need to weigh rapes against murders. Murders are pretty obviously worse, so allowing two rapes to prevent one murder is a good trade. Which means that if this system saves just one life per year, it's a good thing. If it prevents the next Fort Hood shooting, then it's paid for itself for over a decade.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of Abu Gharaib? I spent 13 years in Intelligence of a certain type, mostly in the Middle East. Fools like you are part of the problem. You don't deserve liberty or security.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[element-o.p.]

Have you been living under a rock? How about these, for starters:

TSO molesting children when off-duty
Another TSO molesting children
TSO rapist
TSO fired after sexual assault while in uniform and off-duty


Okay, you specifically said "rape", and I took a few liberties with the term, as well as limiting my replies to (mostly) TSA agents. Nevertheless, I'm sure you get the picture.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure that there are certain demographics (poor people, college students, gang members)

You can't correct someone by pulling shit out of your ass. Rape has a little to do with power so trying to argue that people in power would be less likely to be rapists is backwards.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[tehcyder]

Just yesterday I saw a post modded +5 that said "and lets face it, all libertarians are either just plain crazy or sociopaths." How is that not flamebait????

For many of us not in the US, libertarianism appears to be a mashup of Ayn Rand, Dirty Harry and Senator McCarthy.

Re:Must be nice wherever you live.

[Lucractius]

Dont know where you get that idea... sounds very much like a tea party type member of the NRA..

When people say Libertarian it tends to bring to mind people like Benjamin Franklin in my mind. Im not from the USA either btw.

Were is the line

[deodiaus2]

Unfortunately, there is very little enforcement about the line between terrorists and dissidents. Suppose that the African Civil Rights program were in motion right now, instead of during the 1960's. How many of the activities that happened then would be considered fighting for freedom vs fighting against the US. Or suppose that the South were trying to succeed from the Union. Would that be considered treason, or fighting for one's own liberty?
Fundamentally, a government which has enormous power over the constituents is considered right no matter what the fundamental issues are at hand. People are very persuaded and easily motivated to tow the party line, especially if they have somewhat of a stake in the outcome.
Consider the bail out of the US banks in 2008. Something like 70% of the people did not support the bailout, yet it went through. Suppose that citizens had taken up arms to influence this decision. How many of those people would have been successful in stopping their future tax revenues from ending up in the hands of rich and elite gamblers who decided to speculate in MBSs? With this level of surveillance, it would be easy to round up and send off to detention camps those who publicly opposed OUR government. The rest would fall into line. We laugh at the Soviets, but we have the best form of government that money can buy.

Typing ?!?!

[robi5]

WTF would there be a need for typing anything into anything? It could be automated!

Re:And everything falls into place when you rememb

[HiThere]

Well, if you want to get technical they were originally used in Numenor for communication among the great houses. We have no idea how many originally existed, but only nine were brought by ship when the continent? Large Island? sank. These were originally used by the lords of the survivors for communication, and only later were they lodged in towers (after many had been lost). At the time of the "Lord of the Rings" only 3 were known to be surviving. And only one of those was usable by the end of the book. Even that one would bend itself to look only at Orthanc unless the mind had great fixity of purpose. (It was stated that this was because it had been used to look in that direction so often, so I don't think the fall of Sauron would have changed things. It was more wear grooves than compulsion by that time, though originally it was entrapment by Sauron.)

Sauron didn't create the palantiri

[Malibee]

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.

Re:And everything falls into place when you rememb

[artor3]

And Saturn is a planet, therefore my car must be a planet!!! Now I just need to figure out why my Android doesn't look even remotely human.

Ridiculus

[dbcad7]

Even before 911, the US had a pretty strict visa policy.. Yes there were/are abuses, mostly people coming and never going back. It's part of what makes 911 so suspicious. People were, and are, declined visas every day even without explanation. People with legitimate passports and visa's were and are turned back at the port of entry.. There is no "right to visit the US".. The whole point of a visa system is to weed out bad intent.. The whole point of a passport system, is to control entry.. It's why we have US embassies, and why we have immigration and customs,, In the "scenario" provided, why would such a person be given a visa in the first place ?.. Wouldn't it be easier to collect a list of known bad people and their friends, and just deny them at the get go ?.. In "visa required countries", even people unknown to intelligence agencies, have to provide proof as to who they are and reasonable explanations about their visit, and convince the embassy of their intentions to return.. The sorting it out after someone has arrived method, does not make sense.. It's like installing anti-virus after you have already been infected.

Meh

[PPH]

Just catching up with FaceBook.

Nice try.

[khasim]

How many of those forcible rapes were by intelligence agents who used their work tools as part of the rape, over the past ten years?

So, from 11-26-2001 until 11-26-2011 (10 years) you want me to provide you with statistics for forcible rape?

Why can't you provide them? After all, that is your new claim, isn't it?

Now how many deaths by terrorists in the same time period?

Again, from 11-26-2001 through 11-26-2011 (10 years) ....

Oh, I see what you were trying to do. You were trying to get the WTC attacks included to make the numbers look more favourable to your new claim.

Except you didn't realize that they had happened more than 10 years ago.

Anyway, I've already supported my position with the statistics. If you want to change your position to include the WTC attacks then you're going to have to do your own research on rape statistics for whatever time frame you finally settle upon.

Remember, statistics first. Then opinions.
You run into problems when you get that backwards.

Re:Nice try.

[artor3]

No, dipshit, I specifically didn't include Sept 11, because it's an outlier. My original point, still unchanged, is that the notion that there are a bunch of perverted government agents out there, using their systems to track down people to rape, is absurd fear-mongering. You, being the liar you are, came in and tried to confuse the issue by giving out numbers for EVERY RAPE IN THE COUNTRY, as if the government is responsible for them all.

Your statistics are irrelevant. You may as well rattle off the number of murders in Bolivia. You need to compare the number of people hurt by terrorists to the number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job. That is the relevant statistic. And use a ten year window, because both incidents are rare and we need to use a larger window to get a better sample size.

Re:Nice try.

[causality]

No, dipshit, I specifically didn't include Sept 11, because it's an outlier. My original point, still unchanged, is that the notion that there are a bunch of perverted government agents out there, using their systems to track down people to rape, is absurd fear-mongering. You, being the liar you are, came in and tried to confuse the issue by giving out numbers for EVERY RAPE IN THE COUNTRY, as if the government is responsible for them all.

Your statistics are irrelevant. You may as well rattle off the number of murders in Bolivia. You need to compare the number of people hurt by terrorists to the number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job. That is the relevant statistic. And use a ten year window, because both incidents are rare and we need to use a larger window to get a better sample size.

The danger isn't rape. The danger is that it's getting increasingly easier for anyone to be declared a "terrorist" with little or no burden of proof from the government making the accusation. Then they play games with "enemy combatant" status and want the power to assassinate US citizens with no trial or other due process. Now they want more surveillance tools?

What's getting raped is whatever trust, credibility, and goodwill the US federal government has left. If it helps them obtain more power (that will never be relinquished, that will continue to find reasons to justify its use) then I'm sure they consider those things to be "collateral damage".

Re:Nice try.

[artor3]

Hahaha, nice. Falsely accuse me of trying to include Sept 11, then mod me troll for setting the record straight. Much easier than actually trying to make a point.

Re:Nice try.

[Sabriel]

Apologies for interrupting from the sidelines, but should we be using the general or sexual definition of perverted? Because if it's the former, "number of people hurt by perverted government agents using the tools of their job" has been going back up lately. ;)

Re:Nice try.

[pugugly]

No one arguing with you can mod you. You just naturally come off as a troll.

Well, I would use the term jackass, but there's no listing for that.

Pug

Re:Nice try.

[Hognoxious]

My original point, still unchanged, is that the notion that there are a bunch of perverted government agents out there, using their systems to track down people to rape, is absurd fear-mongering.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if people like that had a tendency to gravitate towards "security" related jobs.

Re:Nice try.

[tehcyder]

My original point, still unchanged, is that the notion that there are a bunch of perverted government agents out there, using their systems to track down people to rape, is absurd fear-mongering.

It wouldn't at all surprise me if people like that had a tendency to gravitate towards "security" related jobs.

But, on the other hand, if I said the same thing about our heroic military personnel, I'd be modded down as Mr Flamebaity Troll because they're somehow not part of ZOG.

Benjamin Franklin

[p51d007]

They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. People want to remain safe, but in a free society, you have to accept that unless you go to a police state, you can never truly be safe, and, even in a police state, you are always in fear of that state.

Only The Beginning

[NicknamesAreStupid]

In a decade, this will be merely commercial grade, and corporations will use it to track their employees. Some people will actually like giving up their anonymity in exchange for a modicum of security. Eventually, everyone will be tracked all the time. Of course, there will be HUGE abuses, as usual. The abuses will not stop it from happening; you know that even as much as you hate to know it.

Watch the watcher

[barv]

The technology is out of Pandora's box. It cannot be wound back by legislation. Even if government doesn't use it, others will.

It should be fairly easy to place "sentinels" on personal data that will warn me when someone is investigating me. So the parent who is worried about security for a teenager will know when someone (possibly exactly who) is taking an unwarranted interest.

Those who fight the spread of this technology also fight the development of an active defense. Appointing guardians will not work.

Qui autem custodit Virgil?

palantir are bastards

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a private company contracting with the government to provide a software solution, first off, not a product of government directly. I thought that should be made clear right off.

Second, they're a bunch of seriously off-the-wall and self-deluded people. The mindset amongst employees seems to be that they're "libertarians", but what they're doing is making complex data tracking and aggregating software to target groups or individuals at the government's whim to find out *everything* about them - and more than likely circumvent some legal and constitutional controls by being a privately held company, not a government entity. The US government has taken to buying data from companies that they themselves are not legally able to collect without the pesky legal difficulties of "warrants", "judicial oversight", or "reasonable cause".

The people at that company are redneck libertarians, really - right wing as hell but convinced that they're leftist somehow. The ones that go for that "free market, regulated culture, and government is only for doing the things I want, not for you" idiom that worships the dollar and will shoot anyone who disagrees or is different.

Overall, it's run and staffed by assholes who don't really give a shit about anything but the paychecks, able to doublethink themselves into a hole where they can make a product that helps make a government more powerfully invasive and yet be "freedom-loving libertarians" at the same time. And their involvement with the HBG and friends scandal with Wikileaks is just another thick black mark on the record of a company that's already tainted and corrupt by nature.

Fuck Palantir and everyone who works there.

Full demo video

[petsounds]

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.

Re:Full demo video

[stewbacca]

If you think Palantir looks like lame Windows dashboard apps, you should see how bad the competition looks (but has more market penetration)...Google Axis Pro and Analyst Notebook if you want to see why Palantir has any traction at all.

Holy Paranoia Batman

[the eric conspiracy]

Palantir is merely a GUI front end to a query engine. In principle it is the same as SAS, R or any other such tool. This particular marketing blurb could have been written with any of these tools as an example.

What makes this software dangerous is how it could be used in the wrong hand, people who have access to sensitive data.

Ultimately there will always be such tools. The issue is controlling the data they can be used on and by who.

Already done: w/Facebok, google, twitter, spokeo

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this already out there with Facebook? Add in a little info from Spokeo.com maybe linkedin.com plus any data google has on you, public or private (like e-mail), I would think this system has been in place for many years. Hardly anything is private anymore....

Put it to good use

[sgt scrub]

If they want to protect the shire they should implement a version of the software for the net so people can use it to determine the quality of people running for office.

What has gone wrong so far?

[retroworks]

Every time there's a NEW way of tracking personal info, the call goes out... The Sky Is Falling!! Before I assume it's Big Brother marries Sauron, how has the information I KNOW is gathered about me used so far and in the past? The creepiest things so far have been credit card companies (but now that porn is free, not nearly as creepy), internet ads, and who knows what the phone company is up to.

In order of ACTUAL risk of loss of privacy

- Banks, credit cards

- Snoopy neighbors, inlaws, and work colleagues

- Social Network Businesses (phone companies, google, Facebook)

- Sauron, Tom Cruise, FBI

The beginning of the problem is that someone actually begins to give a shit what someone else is doing. Actually, I see less and less of that.

Security Theatre

[qualityassurancedept]

If Big Brother can use security theatre to deter threats then Terrorists can also use threat theatre to overwhelm the resources of Big Brother. In other words, a good Terrorist organization would spoof the system by creating a hundred Mike Fikri's all of whom are behaving suspiciously and because Big Brother's whole approach still depends on human observers verifying the data, the system's resources could be overtaxed to the point where it is useless. This is precisely what happened with anti-nuclear missile tracking systems: one missile actually carries twenty warheads that break out into individual missiles once they are over the continental US. So, instead of Mike Fikri planting a single bomb in Times Square, the Terrorist Network just has to spoof 50 bomb threats all over New York City. The bomb squad would not have the resources to filter and sort all the threats in time to find the one legitimate threat. Similarly with 50 spoofed Mike Fikri's: suspicious people all of whom belong to the same network but none of whom are really doing anything at all other than intentionally behaving in ways that light up Big Brother's threat screens. The system would become so overburdened with data that Big Brother would have to just arbitrarily start arresting everyone... which again just over taxes the system's resources. In short, it is a long term losing strategy that only works if the Terrorist Networks can be limited to a small number of real combatants which is unlikely.

Re:Security Theatre

[Anonymous Coward]

aka DDOS

lol.

[Anonymous Coward]

ITT: People who have never used palintir. It's really not that exciting

Nineteen Eighty-Four indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing.

Is Fikri Arabic for Winston?

Seven Stars and *Seven* Stones...

[The_Steel_General]

and one white tree.

The one that required extreme focus was the one that the Denethor brought to his own funeral pyre, which would otherwise only show a pair of aged hands writhing in flames. Or something like that.

TSG

Palatir?

[denebeim]

Let me get this right... They named their program after a device best known for being hacked into by the enemy and used to corrupt information to the point where its users become the enemy. I imagine they don't even recognize the irony.

Palintir - HBGary- Anonymous Idiots

[Weedhopper]

Aren't these the bunch of idiots who were involved with the HBGary and Aaron Barr when they collectively stuck their dicks into the Anonymous hive?

These are not the good guys. They are involved in some shady shit.

They've also shown very bad judgment regarding who they choose to work with.

Fuck these guys and everything to do with them.

Speeding ticket...

[martijnd]

> The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket,

Speeding ticket information is hard to get for the USA as a whole, but in 2011 the NYPD alone has issued:

As for individual Boroughs, Brooklyn saw the most traffic tickets issued (141,971), followed by Queens (128,098), Manhattan (115,428), Bronx (71,786), and Staten Island (27,388). (source

So the chances of an analyst checking this particular drivers information are.... close to zero probably. Another useless system.

Burying the lede

[andy1307]

Fikri isn’t real—he’s the John Doe example Palantir uses in product demonstrations that lay out such hypothetical examples.

Why does anyone work there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brain teasers for the interview and a salary cap of 127k in silicon valley and they work for the bad guys, why does anyone work for them?

well....

[Anonymous Coward]

It is not just used by CIA. It is NOT a secret that Palantir exists, you just can't have access to it and the analysts don't make nearly that much. Finally, the interface is like most DoD tools (i.e. so clunky that we're more likely to win the war on terror and telemarketing by making the enemy use this tool because they'll want to kill themselves.) It's a good tool but the interface was created by the most sadistic person imagineable.

8-bit word processor?

[tadas]

We've had the obligatory LOTR references; does anyone else remember the 8-bit word processor called Palantir for CP/M and TurboDos? This is software so obscure there isn't even a Wikipedia entry...

Summary gives away the primary failure mode ...

[jc42]

An analyst types Fikri's name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government's disposal.

And here we see how this will fail, as so many other "security" systems have failed. The name typed in pulls up a wealth of information from lots of databases -- about everyone with a name spelled (or transliterated) into anything vaguely like "Fikri". Any transgression (real or imagined or planted) by any of those people will be used against our Fikri. The good Anglo-European people in the agencies will be unable to tell any of them apart on sight, because they all look vaguely Middle-Eastern, not like the people running the agency. And once again, the entirely wrong people will be fingered and punished for the sins of others unrelated to them. And the victims will react to this treatment as wrongly-punished people have always reacted.

It's an old, old story. The TSA has been supplying us with lots of similar stories over the past decade.

The right hands?

[Charliemopps]

The problems with systems and weapons like these is they look great... now. Sure, give the president the ability to kill, anyone on earth, at the push of a button, at his leisure. Wouldn't that be great? No more dictators, no more terrorists, it's Perfect! Until we elect the wrong person. Every country will inevitably get their Stalin or Hitler. The only thing that can protect you from such a person is a strong constitution and limits on executive powers. We're on a very steep slope now, and we WILL eventually regret the true security we've given up in exchange for the false security these systems promise.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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As a hardcore civil libertarian, I draw the line

[alispguru]

... at collection and integration of public data only. To go beyond that, there has to be oversight, preferably warrant-based.

Pump the breaks

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like most of the data would already be able to be accessed one way or another... speeding ticket...image of you at an ATM...stupid crap on Facebook that you voluntarily put on....toll booth pic...now it just aggregates it.

  I don't think this is as big of an infringement of civil liberties as the other stuff thats going on. In my opinion what needs to be considered more is the means of which certain data is obtained and what internal controls are in place to safeguard the data and that the data was obtained legally - ie. no warrantless wiretapping etc. Otherwise its your choice to not drive on the road if you don't want your picture taken. Your choice on what ATM/Bank you use, your choice to participate in social network and post data.

The idea of 'Big Data' is a huge buzzword these days, particularly is the business world now. Billions of dollars are being spent on slicing, dicing and aggregating all the data out there to help business make sense of going on. Its really not that surprising that the government is doing it too.

Don't get me wrong, I'm way more on the privacy concern list - but what did you expect? The Government is NOT going to try and make sense of available data?

Nice: War on terror

[Anonymous Coward]

Only one problem, where's the terror.

Sinister? I wouldn't be so sure about that.

[neoshroom]

Oh no, Fikri is real...The problem is he's just on a Disneyworld vacation and put his bank accounts in Russia because he felt his own government was becoming unstable. He's talking to people in Syria due to the influence of the Arab Spring. The problem is a lot of perfectly normal activity can be spun as suspicious activity very easily and suddenly you end up in Gitmo for taking a vacation to Disneyworld.

It's The Umbrella Man effect.

Why are you so unsure about 1984 and so sure these random connections add up to something sinister?

Except you would be wrong

[aepervius]

Foreign terrorist are extremely rare in the USA. They can be counted in double digit at most out of 300 million people. In other word in less than 1 ppm. Pervert, rapist, governement abuser, and totalitarist drooling "what do you have to hide", more or less people which would be likely to abuse this system outnumber terrorist by many factor of magnitude.

The argument about "(...) YOUR DAUGHTER" is simply indicative that there are far far more reason to use this system against american citizens, far more oportunity for abuse, than there will be foreign terrorist attack on American soil. A figurative argument if you prefer.

Minority report de facto and Palantir LotR facts.

[MxMatrix]

Palantir are the Westernesse looking stones once crafted by the skills of the Elves of Valinor. And thus not created for evil use. Sauron obtained one of them, presumably the one from Annunminas. They are in fact neutral, can be used for viewing everywhere as long as you are able to control the magic within. Now for this government system, it's created for a neutral thing in the fist place. Just correlating different sources of info. But sure, it can be used for evil things too ... but more in a minority report way of doing, I think. So time will tell if US government is integer enough to use their system wisely ... or fail and bring down havoc on the meek.

Americans. The state is watching you, even in bed.

[Anonymous Coward]

It is great to read about insecurity and what happens when you give too much liberty to a past president because of 9/11. Palentar and all the crap that HS or FBI or CIA do is hardly or not at all effective.

The true terrorists leave no footprints. If they move from city to city, they will have different credit cards, different cell phone numbers and even different histories and internet footprints. In otherwords, they assume the identification of someone else. And critical purchases will be done with cash.

If a terrorist must remain anonymous, then it is easy to have a collaborator take money from an ATM, provide transportation, and the like.

I am an old geezer, and I can think of hundreds of ways to disappear from surveillance. Pay cash, no credit or debit cards. Rely on associates, drive, dont fly and so forth.

So what is the best way to stop terrorists?. Become one. -- infiltrate the organization. Spy vs Spy. My view is that true professional terrorists are never seen or even aware of with Palentar are 0.00000000001 at a cost of 1,000,000,000.00 per year. That takes low level technology.

Re:they were part of Team Themis with Berico + HBG

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, and that worked *so* well for them.

fixed it for ya

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is not yet empowered to use force against the populace, nor to maintain order, nor to enact law. The Government is. There is a subtle difference.

spy-camera

[Anonymous Coward]

Spy Camera is one of secret weapons
 

Objectivity

[milimetric]

To all the people talking about Big Brother: you are all very shallow. I'm coming at this from a radical left perspective, but I happen to think it's good to think things through before pulling your hair out and running around like a crazy person screaming bloody murder.

This story has no mention of any *new* civil liberties violations. Palantir *aggregates* existing data. This is extremely useful and, if anything, could help *limit* civil liberty violations. Palantir or a similar system means the government can actually use the data they have, which implies they can optimize it and get rid of spying tactics that never help deter crime. A logical person should probably agree that if there's a proven way to stop a crime from happening, it's in society's best interest to use that. The point of civil liberties isn't to protect criminals, it's to protect ourselves from the government's mistakes. I think Palantir will allow the government to make less mistakes and be more efficient.

Echelon

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this any different than Echelon? Which has existed for a while now.

Hardly a secret

[docwatson223]

Hardly a secret since Palantir has been around for nearly a decade.