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

[Opyros]

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

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

[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.

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/

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

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.

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.