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

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?