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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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.

Deeply creepy

[Jawnn]

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

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: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.

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.

[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.

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.

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?

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.