Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link

Not really a surprise. Palantir has always been secretive about what <i>exactly</i> it is they do every day, though it&#x27;s always been implied and rumored that a large part is government intelligence work.<p>Also the reason why I&#x27;ve ignored every contact from a Palantir recruiter so far. This smells like working for the white collar, air-conditioned, catered-lunch version of Blackwater.

The link between the U.S. government&#x27;s program codenamed PRISM and Palantir&#x27;s internal software called Prism is completely coincidental. If you take a look at their site, you will learn that Metropolis is Palantir&#x27;s alias for their finance product[1]. This is obvious just looking at the page in question as it [2] describes how to add Timeseries data. Timeseries data is usually composed of information about stocks or derivatives.<p>I don&#x27;t dispute that Palantir deals with much of the nation&#x27;s intelligence, but attempting to draw a link between two pieces of software that happen to be named the same seems like pretty bad reporting to me. Even if there is a disclaimer at the top of the page.<p>Full Disclosure: I&#x27;m an ex-Palantir employee.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;platforms&#x2F;#metropolis" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;platforms&#x2F;#metropolis</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.palantir.com&#x2F;metropolisdev&#x2F;prism-overview.html#PrismOverview-AddTimeseriesData" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.palantir.com&#x2F;metropolisdev&#x2F;prism-overview.html#...</a>

Full Disclosure: I&#x27;m ex-Palantir Government Dev<p>Ok guys. Let&#x27;s use Occam&#x27;s Razor for a second. What&#x27;s more likely?<p>1) A company that purposefully goes around blackmailing people to make deals, uses underhanded tactics, and spies on the people, yet is able to hire amazingly talented (and opinionated supporters of the EFF) engineers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.<p>Or<p>2)a company that builds a data analytics platform that is useful to a lot of people and honestly believes they&#x27;re helping the world by finding missing children, tracking terrorism, and fighting fraud.<p>Although this article is just ludicrous. All because I think up the same domain name as someone else doesn&#x27;t mean I hacked into their computer and stole their code.

I told my sister-in-law (a very level-headed economist) about Palantir and she just referred to them as paramilitary thugs. It hadn&#x27;t occurred to me to phrase it like that because they are a young, hip group that borrows from Lord of the Rings and evidently posts cartoons on their walls.<p>Karp&#x27;s M.O. is to simply list off all the possible use cases of data inference, including good ones. It makes him sound like a wise judge who will exercise restraint. However, these use cases are sometimes simply incompatible with each other, no matter how you slice it. Even IF he&#x27;s a well-intentioned judge (which I doubt), political forces are likely to overrule his control when the kitchen gets hot enough.<p>We must stop excusing bad behavior from our elites.

Seriously, there&#x27;s a lot of FUD on this thread. Right now it&#x27;s anecdotal evidence at best that there is a relationship there at all. But most people here seem to be talking about it as if it&#x27;s already proven fact. Come on HN.

Palantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something.<p>There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don&#x27;t engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and are just out in California for a short time, and don&#x27;t see themselves staying here. Like expats in their own country. Maybe they are from NSA families. Maybe Palantir functions effectively like an internship program for future NSA employees.

While links are never impossible, I am ever optimistic and hope that their employees actually do watch out for the red flags they just spoke about on their blog two months ago.<p>&quot;Every Palantirian is trained to look out for “red flags” at deployments that might indicate activities that are antithetical to our commitment to privacy and civil liberties.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;dont-just-trust-us&amp;#x2F" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.palantir.com&#x2F;2013&#x2F;04&#x2F;dont-just-trust-us&amp;#x2F</a>;

Someone at Palantir has just explicitly denied this connection, for what it&#x27;s worth.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;andygreenberg&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;07&#x2F;startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;andygreenberg&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;07&#x2F;startup...</a><p>Relevant bit: &quot;Palantir’s Prism platform is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name. Prism is Palantir’s name for a data integration technology used in the Palantir Metropolis platform (formerly branded as Palantir Finance). This software has been licensed to banks and hedge funds for quantitative analysis and research.&quot;

I cannot believe the link between palantir and prism is by the mere NAME of the software package as alleged in this article. That&#x27;s some weak journalism. I mean, just check out github while you&#x27;re at it: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=PRISM&amp;ref=cmdform" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;search?q=PRISM&amp;ref=cmdform</a>

Hmmm, that makes it clearer why their CEO is at Bildeberg this year (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.rapgenius.com&#x2F;The-bilderberg-group-list-of-attendees-for-2013-bilderburg-group-meeting-lyrics" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.rapgenius.com&#x2F;The-bilderberg-group-list-of-atten...</a>).<p>I once had a startup project (shot down by internal &quot;concerns&quot;) to spin-off an intelligence software for social network exploration &amp; analysis that I build at the company I worked for, I remember browsing through Palantir&#x27;s portfolio and thinking they had quite the arsenal for surveillance and intelligence.<p>PS: Does this information being on RapGenius indicates something significant about their mid-term strategy?

Alexander Karp was interviewed by Charlie Rose[1]:<p>&quot;Most of our business is in government, and it all involves both sides of this equation -- finding people who are up to essentially bad things...&quot;<p>&quot;So, let’s say you go to the market and you buy something. You talk on your cell phone, and you send an SMS. You send every little -- you write a report. All those are data, and massive scale, it is very hard for you to see that as a pattern.<p>So what is the pattern of Charlie Rose? Each Charlie Rose interacting with people that are up to no good?<p>And then it is very hard for me, the citizen of America, to look at the government and say, did they look at Charlie Rose because he was up to no good or did they look at Charlie Rose because they didn’t like his hair color?<p>And by the way, did they use Charlie Rose as a way to look at Charlie Rose’s audience and find out who is in the audience?&quot;<p>[1]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charlierose.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;interview&#x2F;10549" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charlierose.com&#x2F;view&#x2F;interview&#x2F;10549</a><p>[2]<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charlierose.com&#x2F;download&#x2F;transcript&#x2F;10549" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.charlierose.com&#x2F;download&#x2F;transcript&#x2F;10549</a>

This is our future. A fascist with asymmetrical hair standing in front of a hip, edgy bit of art, who&#x27;s funded by a fascist who calls himself a libertarian, waxing eloquently about how good a person he is because the company he founded is protecting the shire by injecting the increasingly unaccountable security apparatus into every single aspect of our lives where they will enforce conformity.

is this what stands for journalism now? taking random anonymous reader email, googling it casually, and then writing a story on it behind the facade of &quot;oh please don&#x27;t hold us responsible, we&#x27;re just quoting random anonymous email&quot;

Okay I may be nighmar-ishing here, but is it possible that since Peter Thiel owns&#x2F;owned large chunk of Facebook and also owns Palantir that works for government contracts, is it possible that Thiel could have been passing by info from Facebook servers via Palantir to the Government?<p>Wouldn&#x27;t that make sense? I mean, lets say you own Facebook so what you say needs to be programmed or Facebook employees get pink slips, simple. Is it possible that Government does not tap into Facebook servers, BUT it does contract Palantir that the owner owns Facebook at the same time and thats how Governement gets up to date access to Facebook servers?

Semi related: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikileaks.org&#x2F;gifiles&#x2F;docs&#x2F;745547_re-ct-tactical-palantir-software-.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wikileaks.org&#x2F;gifiles&#x2F;docs&#x2F;745547_re-ct-tactical-pala...</a>

Whenever Thiel talks about Palantir, I get a bit confused.<p>I wonder if he suffers from cognitive dissonance.<p>One of his most successful companies is a company that does big data analysis for the DOD (likely the Intelligence Community)...yet he is stridently libertarian - to the point where he is a Seasteader.<p>So I can&#x27;t quite reconcile the two.

A few months back I met a building contractor at a party outside of SV who was going on and on about installing &quot;bullet proof glass&quot; inside various areas of a tech company headquarters. I asked a few questions about the environs and it was clear it was the Palantir office he was talking about.<p>I&#x27;ve never heard a single good thing from my friends who had interviewed or had brushes with the company.<p>Do the employees get stock options or just U.S. Treasury bonds?

That&#x27;s not how Palantir works. Palantir is a platform, if it were part of Prism the government would still be the one collecting and storing the data. They may have had a hand in setting the system up so that it integrates with that data but at the end of the day it would be no different than the government using IBM&#x27;s or Oracle&#x27;s big data tools.

Of course there&#x27;s a link.<p>Palantir basically allows for analysis across federated data sources. It&#x27;s a data fusion platform along the lines of other C4ISR programs.<p>One of those federated sources is now SNA (Social Network Analysis) and&#x2F;or other Internet sources.<p>One way for Facebook to share information the gov&#x27;t requests is through this: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;safety&#x2F;groups&#x2F;law&#x2F;guidelines&amp;#x2F" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;safety&#x2F;groups&#x2F;law&#x2F;guidelines&amp;#x2F</a>;<p>This next part is speculation, but if you were servicing many of these requests, wouldn&#x27;t you just create an API to help you out? You aren&#x27;t getting paid (much? Note: &quot;Cost Reimbursement&quot; section in above link) to help them out.

I&#x27;d like to see that blurb about Fikri at the bottom rewritten multiple times over for each of the 205 people on the list that McCarthy bandied about during his Wheeling speech in 1950.<p>That story sounds very different when it can be used to describe the escapades of a free citizen, especially when the details of those escapades can be used as blackmail against them by another individual with an agenda.<p>What stops a politician with ties to the intelligence community from using this system to coerce others around him. This is the conversation we should be having, because this very real possibility is what makes these systems sound reprehensible to red-blooded terrorist hating &#x27;mericans who generally defend these actions by the government in day-to-day conversations.

Do they hire H1B&#x27;s? That would be a really quick clue as to whether or not they are doing work for NSA. None of my Indian friends know any H1B that works at Palantir, which is really odd, but maybe other people have different anecdotes.

finally a topic comes up on HN that I&#x27;m an expert in, and yet I&#x27;m legally unable to talk about it.<p>... crap.

Palantir may not be printing this on t-shirts, but they aren&#x27;t that secretive about what they do.<p>Let&#x27;s say you&#x27;re an FBI agent with a warrant that allows you to spy on Joe Schmo, and any of his foreign contacts (not named individually). And maybe you&#x27;re doing this because of ties to drug smuggling, so you&#x27;re allowed to ignore the fourth amendment when dealing with some particular data source, but other sources are only allowed within the scope of the warrant.<p>Palantir (or at least one of their products) allows querying across those data sources within the bounds of the warrant. So rather than the good old days when &quot;secure in their persons and papers&quot; meant that you could actually keep your data private, with Palantir, the government has moved the position that until a human sees it, it doesn&#x27;t count.

Anomaly Hunting: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theness.com&#x2F;neurologicablog&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;anomaly-hunting&amp;#x2F" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theness.com&#x2F;neurologicablog&#x2F;index.php&#x2F;anomaly-hunting...</a>;<p>Not to be confused with investigating.

In case you missed it. UPDATE: Startup Palantir Denies Its &#x27;Prism&#x27; Software Is The NSA&#x27;s &#x27;PRISM&#x27; Surveillance System <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;andygreenberg&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;07&#x2F;startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system&amp;#x2F" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.forbes.com&#x2F;sites&#x2F;andygreenberg&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;07&#x2F;startup...</a>;

If I wrote a screenplay, then Palantir is exactly the name I would give the evil Mega Corp (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;MegaCorp" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tvtropes.org&#x2F;pmwiki&#x2F;pmwiki.php&#x2F;Main&#x2F;MegaCorp</a>).

I&#x27;ve been following their repos for awhile now <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;palantir" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;palantir</a> what exactly is SYSMON anyway! monitoring tools indeed.

This is a ridiculous suggestion. The NSA employs an incredible concentration of some of the smartest people in their fields to work on analysis. I am certain they don&#x27;t outsource their core purpose.

Palantir did develop a database to store scraped data from social media sites. According to Chamber of Commerce meetings, data was uploaded to it from HBGary and Berico.

Whether its Palantir or not, it does make perfect sense that the NSA would subcontract this work to a 3rd party. Someone is out there with this contract

I love how their hypothetical reads like an episode of 24.

been watching their repos for awhile now <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;palantir" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;palantir</a>

Guys, guys. Listen. They both start with a &#x27;P&#x27;. We&#x27;ve cracked it. It&#x27;s them. We can all unclench now.

What an embarrassing thread.