cos'è Palantir?

Che tipo di azienda ha clienti la CIA, l'FBI e l'NSA o il governo Israeliano o del Regno Unito o JPMorgan Chase o il fondo di investimento Bridgewater Associates?

Cosa collega Silicon Valley, Peter Thiel, le agenzie di Intelligence i governi USA e del mondo?

Palantir, il braccio tecnologico della Cia ora i privati fanno a gara per i suoi software

NATA SULL’ONDA DELLA NECESSITÀ DI INNOVAZIONE DELLE AGENZIE DI SICUREZZA, ANALIZZA I BIG DATA RICAVANDONE INFORMAZIONI CRUCIALI SU PERSONE, SPOSTAMENTI, COMPORTAMENTI. ED È USATA CONTRO LO SPIONAGGIO INDUSTRIALE

https://www.repubblica.it/economia/affari-e-finanza/2017/03/13/news/palantir_il_braccio_tecnologico_della_cia_ora_i_privati_fanno_a_gara_per_i_suoi_software-160502661/

- mappedinisrael.com

address: Rothschild Blvd 46, Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel

About: Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal, along with other key PayPal employees and computer scientists from Stanford University. Palantir's software is used at many of the most critical intelligence, law enforcement, finance, healthcare, and defense organizations in the world. Our software represents the intersection of data, technology, and human expertise.

- intelligenceonline.com

The Palo Alto-based data-mining specialist Palantir is a leader in Data mining operations for its main clients, the US intelligence agencies. It has been expanding into the finance and insurance fields and has begun working with clients in Europe, such as French Internal Intelligence agency, DGSI.

- inc.com

Taking Data Analysis to the Next Level.
There are data companies... and then there's THIS data company.
Get to know Palantir, one of Silicon Valley's best-kept secrets.

- quora.com - What specifically does Palantir do?

This is how they explain it on their blog - [...] In real-world terms, we are building a software platform that enables people to take whatever data is relevant to them and understand it more easily and thoroughly than ever before, using concepts that they already understand. And we are applying this vision, at first, to solving problems in the finance sector and the government intelligence community.

Power As Google

Palantir is a black-ops big data mining firm funded by the CIA, Peter Thiel and other Technocrats who are bent on installing a direct Technocracy in America. It operates in total secrecy and yet has tentacles into every aspect of government, business, politics and economics.

Palantir Solutions

intelligence on line - Thiel is Trump's intelligence guru

Peter Thiel, who was the only Silicon Valley entrepreneur to support Donald Trump during the presidential election campaign, has become the American president's principal unofficial technology adviser, particularly with regard to intelligence and surveillance. Thiel, founder of the Paypal online payment system and big data analysis specialist Palantir, is making use of his White House connections to make his companies key sub-contractors to the American intelligence community. Having revolutionized signals intelligence (SIGINT), he is today working on space surveillance using technology which is beyond the means of most of his competitors and even of most sovereign states. His hunger for new business has even led him to go after contracts for the provision of assistance to foreign intelligence services. The first major country to have had recourse to his services is France. In recent months, Intelligence Online has carried out an in-depth investigation into the global strategy of this libertarian who likes nothing better than investing surveillance technology.

Palantir Technologies - Palantir Solutions

[briefly from wikipedia: Palantir]

Palantir technologies è un'azienda privata americana di software e servizi specializzata nell'analisi dei big data - big data analysis.

Palantir Technologies is a private American software and services company which specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, the company is known for two projects in particular: Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor, while Palantir Metropolis is used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.[3][4] The company gets its name from The Lord of the Rings, as a palantír was an object that could be used to communicate to or see far away parts of the world. Translated from Tolkien's constructed language of Sindarin, it means "that which looks far away."

Founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp, Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve state and local governments, as well as private companies in the financial and healthcare industries.[5] Karp, Palantir's chief executive officer, announced in 2013 that the company would not pursue an IPO, as going public would make "running a company like ours very difficult".[6]

Palantir's original clients were federal agencies of the USIC. It has since expanded its customer base to serve state and local governments, as well as private companies in the financial and healthcare industries.

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. However, at the time the United States Army continued to use its own data analysis tool. Also, according to TechCrunch, the U.S. spy agencies such as the CIA and FBI were linked for the first time with Palantir software, as their databases had previously been "siloed. - Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients

In February 2016, Palantir bought Kimono Labs, a startup which makes it easy to collect information from public facing websites.

In August 2016, Palantir acquired data visualization startup Silk.

Its UK based data mining startup Gray Havens is the central point for the European expansion of the company.

Some of the clients:

Future Technologies, Inc. - ftechi.com
PRAESCIENT ANALYTICS, LLC - praescientanalytics.com
BRIDGEWATER ASSOCIATES, LP - bwater.com
C4ADS - c4ads.org

Unlocking Secrets, if Not Its Own Value
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/business/unlocking-secrets-if-not-its-own-value.html

[...] Mr. Karp said. Palantir does not charge for most humanitarian work, which is a source of internal pride. “What concerns me,” he said, “is working with commercial entities, and non-U.S. governments.”

[...] There is the rub. Mr. Karp is eloquent on the subject of Palantir saving lives, but it is in business to make money — as are its eager investors. It actively seeks corporate contracts worth tens of millions, and is getting bigger by the day. People familiar with the company say it has big deals with insurers, health care companies and media corporations, among others. Its advisers include James Carville, the Democratic strategist; Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state; George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director; and Michael Ovitz, the former head of Disney Studios and Hollywood superagent.

Palantir is growing by selling software to private companies.

Palantir & Facebook & CIA

from: Stratfor on Iran, Palantir and Goldman Sachs
https://securityaffairs.co/wordpress/2946/intelligence/stratfor-on-iran-palantir-and-goldman-sachs.html

Another interesting news is related to the alleged relationship between the popular social network Facebook and company close to the CIA. Social networks are now recognized as powerful tools for the collection of information and the definition of profiles related to particular interest subject. Friendships, relationships, photos, contacts and data on space-time location of an entity makes social networks privileged tools for the investigation. The news is not new, already circulated in recent weeks, regarding the insistence of the FBI involvement in the development of systems analysis software for monitoring social media. Of particular interest is the popular sentiment, opinions on specific topics, utterances, membership in social and political campaigns, a privileged and indispensable source of information.

Many people, myself included, do not believe the Zuckerberg’s story, the platform is actually a machine with an immense potential impossible to believe that its genesis is casual, it is for sure the result of a complex project, targeted at a mass voluntary filing. Impossible to know if there is behind the CIA or some group of hungry multinationals.

In an email published expressly refers to the Palantir as a possible funder of Facebook. In that email between two Stratfor’s analysts one of them writes: “I think Palantir is involved in things less clear, including the financing of Facebook.” The Palantir is a California company that project platform for complex information analysis. It was founded in 2004 and currently offer two main system Palantir Government and Palantir Finance, both are platforms for integrating, visualizing, and analyzing the world’s information. Palantir Government is broadly deployed in the intelligence, defense, and law enforcement communities, and is spreading rapidly by word-of-mouth. Palantir Finance is in use at some of the world’s leading hedge funds and financial institutions.

Finance and Government two worlds, one soul.

The name of Palantir appeared for the first time during the hacking of HBGary Federal company, when documents were some stolen detailing the involvement of the Palantir to attack and destroy WikiLeaks.

Do not you find it interesting?

The company’s position is even worse if it is assumed the possibility of use information gained through insider, “convinced” to cooperate, to make huge profits. Stratfor was then scheduled with the management of Goldman Sachs’ use of information gained from intelligence operations. Several emails demonstrate that in 2009 then-Goldman Sachs Managing Director Shea Morenz and Stratfor CEO George Friedman have had the idea to make profit of the intelligence operations made by Stratfor utilizing the acquired information to start up a strategic investment fund. CEO George Friedman explained in a confidential August 2011 document, marked DO NOT SHARE OR DISCUSS :

“What StratCap (the new fund) will do is use our Stratfor’s intelligence and analysis to trade in a range of geopolitical instruments, particularly government bonds, currencies and the like“.

Intercept 2017
HOW PETER THIEL’S PALANTIR HELPED THE NSA SPY ON THE WHOLE WORLD

DONALD TRUMP HAS inherited the most powerful machine for spying ever devised. How this petty, vengeful man might wield and expand the sprawling American spy apparatus, already vulnerable to abuse, is disturbing enough on its own. But the outlook is even worse considering Trump’s vast preference for private sector expertise and new strategic friendship with Silicon Valley billionaire investor Peter Thiel, whose controversial (and opaque) company Palantir has long sought to sell governments an unmatched power to sift and exploit information of any kind. Thiel represents a perfect nexus of government clout with the kind of corporate swagger Trump loves. The Intercept can now reveal that Palantir has worked for years to boost the global dragnet of the NSA and its international partners, and was in fact co-created with American spies.

Peter Thiel became one of the American political mainstream’s most notorious figures in 2016 (when it emerged he was bankrolling a lawsuit against Gawker Media, my former employer) even before he won a direct line to the White House. Now he brings to his role as presidential adviser decades of experience as kingly investor and token nonliberal on Facebook’s board of directors, a Rolodex of software luminaries, and a decidedly Trumpian devotion to controversy and contrarianism. But perhaps the most appealing asset Thiel can offer our bewildered new president will be Palantir Technologies, which Thiel founded with Alex Karp and Joe Lonsdale in 2004.

Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009, according to an August 2016 report in Politico. The company was last valued at $20 billion and is expected to pursue an IPO in the near future. In a 2012 interview with TechCrunch, while boasting of ties to the intelligence community, Karp said nondisclosure contracts prevent him from speaking about Palantir’s government work.

2012 Science - Social Media and the Elections

In the United States, social media sites—such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube—are currently being used by two out of three people (1), and search engines are used daily (2). Monitoring what users share or search for in social media and on the Web has led to greater insights into what people care about or pay attention to at any moment in time. Furthermore, it is also helping segments of the world population to be informed, to organize, and to react rapidly. However, social media and search results can be readily manipulated, which is something that has been underappreciated by the press and the general public

the Guardian 2017: Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google

Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments.

Se ogni tanto qualcuno si sente infastidito dal controllo dei social media, dall'influenza prepotente di Google, e in generale dall'onnipresenza di queste piattaforme senza stato e senza legge, provi ad immaginare tutti i dati di agenzie e intelligence, di eserciti, sistemi di giustizia e polizia, registri penali e sanitari.. in pratica tutto quello che sta dietro le cosidette istituzioni pubbliche siano ora gestiti attraverso una propria intelligenza artificiale (che deve correlare questo universo di dati) da un'unico operatore nel mondo... che dire?

Le linee di gioco per la paranoia estrema sono infinite, una facile a caso:

eh.. Facebook e Google spiano tutto, cioè l'NSA spia tutto, cioè Palantir spia tutto..
ed è capace di trarne conclusioni - decision making, tuna!.

Forbes 2011 - Facebook Investor Peter Thiel: Palantir Is The Next Facebook Or Google

For a FORBES magazine story I recently wrote on cyber-security software-maker Palantir Technologies, I spoke with billionaire Facebook investor Peter Thiel, who said that Palantir is "tracking like the really great tech companies, like Facebook or Google."

Palantir has already been able to line up a number of other top banks and hedge funds. One of these is JPMorgan Chase. Palantir signed a multi-year contract with the bank in December 2009 in the $5 million to $20 million range, and JPMorgan Chase Chief Information Officer Guy Chiarello gushes about the company, calling Palantir "the best bet I've made in quite a while."

World Economic Forum: Palantir

Palantir Technologies sta cambiando il modo in cui le istituzioni egemoni risolvono le sfide dei dati sensibili. Le sue piattaforme analitiche sono dispiegate tra l'intelligence, la difesa, l'applicazione della legge, le comunità di regolamentazione e cyber-sicurezza, il settore commerciale e le organizzazioni filantropiche.

La sede a Palo Alto, California, con uffici a New York, Washington DC, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tel Aviv, Ottawa, Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Canberra e Wellington.

the Intercept: How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Helped the NSA Spy on the Whole World

Intercept 2017

[...] Palantir has never masked its ambitions, in particular the desire to sell its services to the U.S. government — the CIA itself was an early investor in the startup through In-Q-Tel, the agency’s venture capital branch. But Palantir refuses to discuss or even name its government clientele, despite landing “at least $1.2 billion” in federal contracts since 2009, according to an August 2016 report in Politico.

[...] It’s hard to square this purported commitment to privacy with proof, garnered from documents provided by Edward Snowden, that Palantir has helped expand and accelerate the NSA’s global spy network, which is jointly administered with allied foreign agencies around the world. Notably, the partnership has included building software specifically to facilitate, augment, and accelerate the use of XKEYSCORE, one of the most expansive and potentially intrusive tools in the NSA’s arsenal. 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.

[...] Anyone worried that the most powerful spy agencies on Earth might use Palantir software to violate the privacy or civil rights of the vast number of people under constant surveillance may derive some cold comfort in a portion of the user agreement language Palantir provided for the Kite plug-in, which stipulates that the user will not violate “any applicable law” or the privacy or the rights “of any third party.” The world will just have to hope Palantir’s most powerful customers follow the rules.

esempio di azienda che usa Palantir?

BRIDGEWATER ASSOCIATES, LP bwater.com

Fortune 2016 - Palantir Connects the Dots With Big Data

With a growing book of corporate clients and a high-profile Syrian relief project, the data-analysis startup is branching out beyond its roots in the war on terror.

http://fortune.com/palantir-big-data-analysis/

Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel argues that smart intrusion ultimately means less intrusion. “The government was collecting a lot of data [in the war on terrorism], more than they could analyze,” says Thiel. “If we could help them make sense of data, they could end indiscriminate surveillance.”

[...] Today Santander is using Palantir’s tools to figure out whether their customers are up to anything nefarious. Palantir’s analytics software can harness the bank’s proprietary data and match it against public information to check whether customers have been connected to bad acts, past or present. That “public information” typically includes criminal databases, huge streams of data from social media, and a variety of other sources.

[...] Palantir’s roots are intensely Hobbesian. It’s impossible to write about the company without writing about the Central Intelligence Agency. While Palantir’s technology first took shape as a homegrown antifraud algorithm at PayPal, the CIA’s venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, was its first outside investor, and until 2010, its only customers were in intelligence, law enforcement, and defense. (Such users now include the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Navy Seals, among many others.)

Nota: letteralmente nel linguaggio ideato da Tolkien, Palantir significa:

Coloro che sorvegliano da lontano

Note e Riferimenti

Axios - How Palantir and the NSA connect Peter Thiel to Snowden

The Intercept has a look at Palantir's deployment by world intelligence agencies, specifically its use with the NSA's XKEYSCORE, a tool unmasked by Edward Snowden's leaks that captures "nearly everything a typical user does on the Internet."

Palantir and XKEYSCORE: Back in 2014, Snowden described XKEYSCORE as "a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA's information," allowing the agency to read emails, track web traffic, and watch computer activity. But XKEYSCORE produces an incomprehensible amount of data, which is where Palantir's software (named Gotham) comes in handy. The Intercept uses the example of being able to pin down which IP addresses in specific locations visited a certain website at a given time.

The problem: Palantir, chaired by Trump supporter Peter Thiel, makes it so easy to visualize these data connections that British intelligence warned it gives analysts "too many analytical paths which could distract from the intelligence requirement." Privacy is a concern in any industry, but the clear implication is that analysts are then able to view the world's Internet traffic as they please. (The NSA declined to comment to Axios this story, while Palantir did not respond.)

the Guardian - Palantir: the ‘special ops’ tech giant that wields as much real-world power as Google

Peter Thiel’s CIA-backed, data-mining firm honed its ‘crime predicting’ techniques against insurgents in Iraq. The same methods are now being sold to police departments. Will they inflame already tense relations between the public and the police?

Palantir, the CIA-backed startup, is Minority Report come true. It is all-powerful, yet no one knows it even exists. Palantir does not have an office, it has a “SCIF” on a back street in Palo Alto, California. SCIF stands for “sensitive compartmentalised information facility”. Palantir says its building “must be built to be resistant to attempts to access the information within. The network must be ‘airgapped’ from the public internet to prevent information leakage.”

Palantir’s defence systems include advanced biometrics and walls impenetrable to radio waves, phone signal or internet. Its data storage is blockchained: it cannot be accessed by merely sophisticated hacking, it requires digital pass codes held by dozens of independent parties, whose identities are themselves protected by blockchain.

Using the most sophisticated data mining, Palantir can predict the future, seconds or years before it happens. Samuel Reading – a former marine who has worked in Afghanistan for NEK Advanced Securities Group, a US military contractor – has said: “It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of. You will know every single bad guy in your area.”

Must Read 2016 - The CIA’s Massive Expansion in Social Media Surveillance is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The US intelligence is massively expanding in Social Media surveillance pushing new technologies, including artificial intelligence for data mining.

“Over the last decade, In-Q-Tel has made a number of public investments in companies that specialize in scanning large sets of online data. In 2009, the fund partnered with Visible Technologies, which specializes in reputation management over the internet by identifying the influence of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ authors on a range of platforms for a given subject. And six years ago, In-Q-Tel formed partnerships with NetBase, another social media analysis firm that touts its ability to scan ‘billions of sources in public and private online information,’ and Recorded Future, a firm that monitors the web to predict events in the future.”

Interestingly, “Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiation for a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a ‘tech unicorn’ — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.”

wired: how peter thiel's secretive data company pushed into policing

Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads.

Law enforcement accounts for just a small part of Palantir’s business, which mostly consists of military clients, intelligence outfits like the CIA or Homeland Security, and large financial institutions. In police departments, Palantir’s tools are now being used to flag traffic scofflaws, parole violators, and other everyday infractions. But the police departments that deploy Palantir are also dependent upon it for some of their most sensitive work. Palantir’s software can ingest and sift through millions of digital records across multiple jurisdictions, spotting links and sharing data to make or break cases.

The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are willing to talk about it.

Tech Crunch: The rise of big data policing

Patrol officers receive digital maps of today’s “crime forecast.” Small red boxes signify areas of predicted crime. These boxes represent algorithmic forecasts of heightened criminal activity: years of accumulated crime data crunched by powerful computers to target precise city blocks. Informed by the data, “predictive policing” patrols will give additional attention to these “hot” areas during the shift.

Every day, police wait in the predicted locations looking for the forecast crime. The theory: put police in the box at the right time and stop a crime. The goal: to deter the criminal actors from victimizing that location.

Soon, real-time facial-recognition software will link existing video surveillance cameras and massive biometric databases to automatically identify people with open warrants.

Soon, social media feeds will alert police to imminent violence from rival gangs.

Soon, data-matching technologies will find suspicious activity from billions of otherwise-anonymous consumer transactions and personal communications. By digitizing faces, communications, and patterns, police will instantly and accurately be able to investigate billions of all-too-human clues.

This is the future. This is the present. This is the beginning of big data policing.

securityaffairs - intelligence - Stratfor on Iran, Palantir and Goldman Sachs