Palantir background
- Funded by the CIA via In-Q-Tel, and is now one of the most valuable private companies in tech (valued at $20 billion). The CEO has no plans on going public, as that would make "running a company like ours very difficult".
- Advisors include Condoleezza Rice, former CIA director George Tenet, and John Poindexter (director of DARPA Information Awareness Office, the symbol for which is an all seeing eye)
- In 2011 the EFF Pioneer Awards were sponsored by Palantir. The conflict of interest between the EFF and Palantir was striking, and online privacy and freedom activists duly took the EFF to task for taking Palantir’s money. The EFF responded by saying that it doesn’t matter whose money they take, and that such arrangements in no way compromise their mission.
- Emails indicate that Eric Schmidt's daughter Sophie once suggested that Cambridge Analytica's parent company work with Palantir. Cambridge Analytica later developed a relationship with a Palantir staffer that produced the idea to use an app to harvest Facebook user data.
- Go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, turning messy swamps of information into intuitively visualed maps, histograms, and link charts. A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In addition to this, last month Palantir won a $876 Million U.S. Army Contract.
- Palantir’s work with state-sponsored spying appears to date back to 2008, when the company demoed its software to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart to the National Security Agency (NSA). According to classified internal documents quoted in the report, Palantir made quite the impression (“We were very impressed. You need to see it to believe it.”) According to an Intercept's report, by 2010, three members of the "Five Eyes" spy alliance between the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand were making use of Palantir to help collect and process data from across the globe.
- Palantir developed a product named XKEYSCORE helper, a tool programmed by Palantir (and thoroughly stamped with XKEYSCORE's logo) that allowed analysts to essentially analyze data from the NSA’s XKEYSCORE. According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” This would allow people using the surveillance programme to identify social connections and ideological groupings, by examining people's online activities, including monitoring social media accounts, and then presumably pass it to fellow analysts or Five Eyes intelligence partners.
- Develops a product named Prism, which Palantir describes as "a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases". This sparked controversy when the Snowden leaks revealed the PRISM program, which allows the NSA to tap directly into the central servers of 9 big Internet companies: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. A source told the Post that with PRISM, the NSA can "quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type." To be able to do that, the NSA would need some seriously impressive "big data" tools to analyze the terabytes of messages, videos, images, and metadata streaming through. Palantir denies Prism and PRISM are the same program, however it does not deny creating XKEYSCORE helper, something that would be used alongside XKEYSCORE and the PRISM database.