What does Palantir actually do?
wired.com
wired.com
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas.
Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
Fucks like Bibi do this successfully (propping up Hamas in detriment of democratic movements). Why wouldn't the MIC do it as well?
There's a lot of "nuance". From understanding that these systems will always "need" to target and strike, and they'll always find an enemy to strike at because it's their sole reason to exist, to the arbitrary definition of "precision" or "success".
The entire system and philosophy become redundant without guaranteed targets and weak without guaranteed success.
What it means today is that a random US citizen in the street can be a target, and arresting him up can mean success. Being infallible by definition is indeed incredible.
Palantir's tech is the opposite of that.
The strikes will happen, and if you did not know of the approximate location, you will then use more saturation strikes for _even more_ locations to ensure target is hit.
The fact that a target _needs_ to be hit is indisputable.
Normally you go with "that didn't actually happen" or "that was an isolated incident by rogue commanders".
One might argue that tech like this was built thanks to terrorism.
Hamas doesn't have an air force, and they're facing an enemy with a good air force and good intelligence. They can't have nice things like "zoning", if they stored rockets away from civilians they would all get destroyed.
So, in order to have rockets, they must be stored under targets that would cause political trouble if they were to be hit: hospitals, churches, mosques and schools.
One you’re occupied, the only way to do resistance is from civil infrastructure.
And here's the thing: hamas has extensive underground tunnel networks, so it actually _isn't_ needed to hide among civilians! They do it purely for the optics: every destroyed school or hospital will help sway Western opinion.
Without the Second Intifada, you mean. That's the moment when Israel's political left was obliterated according to domestic polling, and it hasn't yet recovered.
That is some grand A nonsense. Netanyahu was first elected in 1996. Hamas was a minor force. Back then it was all about Yasser Arafat.
https://qudsnen.co/israels-hidden-front-how-israels-military...
You kill a terrorist. You now have 6
if you know there will be 6 more, get them too
this is evil, but if you believe the logic of kill one, get 6 more, then it's the logical outcome
Lavender AI is one lead-generation tool among several, with human analysts and other intelligence sources involved. It does not “automatically destroy” hospitals, churches or schools, that is an unfounded exaggeration. Many such sites remain standing, and damage in a war zone is not proof of an AI-driven targeting policy.
Social network mapping is used by counterterrorism agencies everywhere. Being on a graph does not mean you are on a kill list. Without solid data on actual misidentifications, repeating anecdotes does not prove the system works the way you claim.
Now, and this is the part that annoys people like me, the problem of a graph and anecdotes. The reason we are discussing anecdotes has some of its source in the nature of the effort, which by default secretive. In other words, we do not find until years after the fact ( if we do ever officially do ). Add to this normal politics, some sad human tendencies and most can reach a rather quick decision why we only seem to have anecdotes.
More to the point, I would like you to invite you to a thought experiment.
If you had the responsibility of running IC in US, what would you do?
You don't need to answer, but the answer should be clear.
I assumed they meant relative to militant casualties. So 10:1 ratio civilian:militant. You could also say 91% , if you use total casualties as the denominator. You could even prefer it. But “nonsense” is uncharitable.
As of early–mid August 2025, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports around 61,600 total deaths in Gaza since the war began, without distinguishing between civilians and militants. The Israeli military’s most recent on-record statement (January 2025) claims it has killed about 20,000 Hamas operatives. Subtracting that claim from the total suggests roughly 41,600 civilians have died, an estimated civilian-to-militant ratio of about 2 to 1, though if lower militant-death estimates from independent analysts (10,000–15,000) are used, the ratio could be closer to 3–4 to 1. Both sides’ figures are contested, and humanitarian agencies such as the UN caution that these numbers are unverified and incomplete due to the difficulty of collecting accurate data in the conflict.
Sources: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2025/8/7/israel-hama... https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/31/gaza-war-isr... https://ochaopt.org/updates/humanitarian-snapshot-casualties...
Before October 2023, several high-profile Hamas claims were later undermined by evidence: after denying involvement in the June 2014 kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers, senior Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri publicly acknowledged the group’s role; while Hamas framed the 2018 “Great March of Return” as largely civilian, its own official Salah al-Bardawil said 50 of the 62 people killed on May 14, 2018 were Hamas members; despite Hamas’s insistence that it did not use civilian sites, the U.N. agency UNRWA repeatedly found rockets stored in its Gaza schools in 2014; and although Hamas dismissed allegations of abuses against Palestinian rivals, Amnesty International documented a 2014 campaign of abductions, torture and summary executions in Gaza.
Sources: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israelg... https://www.memri.org/tv/hamas-politburo-member-bardawil-fif... https://www.unrwa.org/newsroom/press-releases/unrwa-condemns... https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/05/gaza-palestin...
Suggesting “who knows what the future may bring” is not an argument about present facts. Policy and oversight should be debated on actual documented use, not on imagined scenarios.
Algorithmic predictions, https://hn.algolia.com/?query=predictive%20policing
Maybe read some world news outside Fox News once in a while, man.
The name of the documentary (obfuscated to avoid auto flags, because this is HN after all): Gaza: D0ctors under attack (2025).
I agree that the 1000% were hyperbole on my part, but you have to admit that destroying clearly labelled-on-the-outside buildings that are hospitals and houses of international organizations like doctors without borders were all destroyed. Not once, but actually more than 13 hospitals alone (just in case you play the it was a mistake part).
People literally died while the IDF/IOF was "checking" their passports, refusing critical treatment, with people literally bleeding out outside the hospital because they were not allowed to enter.
Nurses and hospital doctors were stripped naked and beaten to death, in mass interrogation camps.
This is not some misidentification issue.
This is post-Desert Storm trying to manufacture evidence, at all cost. These types of actions are absolutely disproportionate.
(Downvote me all you want, I can take it)
Protests outside a broadcaster do not prove that a ban occurred. People protest over editorial decisions, framing, or lack of coverage without there being an actual prohibition. Without a formal statement from the BBC or credible reporting confirming a ban, the claim remains unsubstantiated.
The rest of the comment mixes admitted hyperbole with serious accusations that are either unverified or based on partisan sources. The destruction of “clearly labelled” hospitals and aid facilities has been reported, but such claims require independent investigation to determine context — including whether the sites were being used for military purposes, which changes their legal status under the laws of armed conflict. The figure of “more than 13 hospitals” destroyed is meaningless without distinguishing between those damaged, rendered inoperable, or completely demolished.
Allegations of executions, beatings, or denial of treatment are grave, but they must be supported by verifiable evidence from credible investigators, not presented as conclusive fact. Calling such events “not misidentification” assumes intent without proof. Assertions about “manufacturing evidence” are also speculation unless backed by concrete documentation.
Emotive claims without substantiation do not replace the need for clear, verifiable facts when discussing events of this seriousness.
You know become a normal country.
1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this.
2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for.
So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.
I'm sure it was very shiny looking software though, but that doesn't mean it's good.
You’d be mistaken to think of me as a fan. But, I understand, I think you miss, what Palantir did as a net positive for defense acquisitions and the very legitimate impact on warfigter safety. And, how huge of an achievement it was, given what vendor impact on basic military’ing in the 2000-2010’s was like.
Also, good or bad, all this modern defense innovation new American Century VC stuff, which good or bad is part of the tech industry and it’s continued stability, in my mind sources from this break through.
Also, maybe the software tracked down an IED network or two. And that means there are some limbs on Americans that aren’t robotic. Pretty great too.
The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon. You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Israel is getting sucked into their own quagmire right now as we speak and is taking on an expensive ground invasion and occupation of a territory they don't want to be in (like we did) for an unforeseeable amount of time, over a hostile population, against the advice of their own military leaders. They are also actively starving civilians, who are at this very moment dying of malnutrition in scores every week.
It's easy to win the brute force battle with money in the modern world. But wars aren't about destroying things and people with brute force. They are about achieving political objectives. That's what we failed to understand in Afghanistan and Iraq and what Israel failed to learn from our failures in those regions
How to do counterinsurgency, as I ran into it from the “what works” angle in the formal setting to learn these things.
- the Malaya/British example. Notably Britain doesn’t run Malaya anymore and that country doesn’t exist. This is the direction you’re arguing works fwiw
- COIN and Patraeus (sp), assuming conditions were correct across the board and you could get a unit commander and all related stakeholders to try it. Notably we didn’t “win the insurgency” in Afghanistan
So there are both well established COIN case studies, one heavy and one light, both didn’t work, and no overlap with what you’re arguing.
The US fought for 20 years, could never eliminate the insurgency, and then withdrew with its tail between its legs, leaving the old government to come back to power.
Yes, if you kill 10%, 20%, 30% of the population, maybe you'll eventually destroy the insurgency, though that approach hasn't worked yet for Israel in Gaza. But if you're not completely genocidal, that's not an option.
> This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars
The world wars were not counterinsurgency operations (except from the German and Japanese side in the occupied countries). They were traditional wars between major powers.
Israel didn't suppress anything in Gaza so far, and for sure the next generation of insurgents (not necessarily Hamas) who have nothing to lose since Israel destroyed their homes and killed their families is being cultivated right now. This is why now the government talks openly about their own "final solution"[0][1], as they know that it will be difficult if not impossible to stabilize the situation.
[0]https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2025-07-15/ty-article/.p...
[1]https://www.israelhayom.com/2025/05/06/smotrich-sees-gaza-de...
> The very uncomfortable truth here is that Israel is demonstrating how to effectively destroy insurgencies in Gaza and Lebanon.
Neither Gaza nor Lebanon are insurgencies - Israel is trying to destroy terrorist organizations, not rebellions.
> You cannot pussyfoot with nasty, brutal tactics and expect to accomplish anything. This was a lesson the west learned in the world wars, and we seem to have collectively forgot it again.
Neither world war was either an insurgencies nor a war on a terrorist organization, so unclear why this is a relevant example at all.
A better example of how to win that type of war would be the Malay insurgency (especially when compared to your example of the Vietnam war)
Terrorism and insurgency are not mutually exclusive.
The classic example of a modern insurgency, the Algerian resistance against the French, was led by a terrorist organization, the Front de libération nationale (FLN). More correctly, it was a political organization that used terrorism as a tactic, and which eventually became the government of an independent country.
Hamas is a pretty similar case to the FLN (though the PLO was more similar in the old days, in terms of ideology).
But what the Army, Marines, and all the Air Force can’t do: nation-building.
What the State Dept is supposed to do but didn’t: nation building
What congress never really bothered to do per the Constitution: a non half-assed attempt at routine approval and review to authorize the use of military force
What the public did: super bowls and tech boom, poor people and idealists go to war
What senior officers did: another 18 months of warring and I get a deployment patch and strategic command
What your line officers and NCOs did: love a combat tour, pay and patch, but how much do we dig into the bigger picture mission and put ourselves at risk on (check notes) War Year 19 Strategy #807
Lot of reasons!
Still not clear on how murdering the poorest people in the world with the least reach of anyone on the planet with devastating weapons like the R-9X missile, which has been described as a "samurai sword warhead" because it uses bladed protrusions to penetrate and then mangle it's victims, has solved anything. Other than putting loads of money in Palantir and Raytheon's pockets.
I think these days though they just sell political influence since Trumps brand of populism has made war _slightly_ less popular than it was 10 years ago.
Sounds like a fast path to totalitarianism a la 1930.
- Those weapons get field-tested in a real-life (or rather, real-death) scenario. Kids always want to play with their newest toys. The weakest of the weak also have no lobby and no(?) way to fight back.
- “We kill them all before 0.001% of them could become suicide bombers”. Has the additional dubious “benefit” of being merely incompetence, not malice (/s).
https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice (See the Guardian story)
> - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data
Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend
Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
Who the fuck talks like this, seriously?
As far as Palantir goes, they're just another in a long line of corporations that sell such services to the government. Ever heard of RAND Corp? They undertook all kinds of weird studies during the Vietnam era.
So please, spare me the concealed distaste for the current Administration, as if the previous one was some kind of wonder for America! The left is, on the whole, far more totalitarian than the right in the US. I sleep better knowing our borders are secure, racist or not. I also sleep better knowing that criminals are getting locked up once again--that's an important aspect of even having and maintaining civilization! It's such a simple concept, yet many of you ignore it or misunderstand it or something.
Anyways, if Palantir was anything special, the war in Afghanistan would have turned out much differently. They failed to predict that the Afghan government and military would completely collapse the instant Uncle Sam stopped paying the bills there. It was all a giant scam.
For an extravagant fee, you give them your data, they clean it for you, and then those same FDEs can tell you interesting things that you should have known, had you actually done proper data architecture in the first place.
They're supposedly very aggressive on that point, so once you integrate their solution to your pipeline you're pretty much stuck with them for the foreseeable future.
Many safety/mission critical companies can get really bogged in by this, with too many administrative hoops to detach. which is probably why they're focusing on that industry.
My coworker liked to describe them as a parasite that creates a symbiotic relationship with their host.
I once interviewed at Palantir and at the same they gave a demo of their software to every candidate.
Worked for a similar company with similar clients at the time. Making the data usefull in innovative ways was a big part of it so in a way sure part of it data science related. At the same time I’d say it’s broader than that.
AFAIK, this is the most succinct description of Palantir I've read. A looser-fitting analogy is they come in, replace whatever the hell you were trying to use SAP for with actually competent software. Most "FDEs" can't explain what the company does because what they did was work at $CLIENT for 18 months ripping apart all their internal software with Palantir building blocks.
I will not allow Palantir to extend their reality distortion field to me. They are consultants. They are also engineers. Other places call them FEs. But they didn't invent some new class of engineering, they just rebranded one.
Good lord the egos must be massive.
It would still only be software as a service, but I would just brand it in a way to make it more appealing to certain buyer personas without any actual investment or commitment on my part.
so beautiful.
That’s the thing with government: They always believe you can drown out problems with taxpayer money. They don’t get that what solves problems is never money, but competence, hard work, and having skin in the game.
It is not that they believe more money will solve the problem. It is often cost cutting which makes things this expensive.
Government has of course done, and continues to do, many vital things well for its citizens in many countries around the world (universal healthcare, for ex.).
There has also, of course, been a push for generations by capital to privatize its various functions, and one of the most common approaches is to defund and degrade an aspect of the government (see current admin) and then afterwards point to the degraded entity as an example of ineffective government that must be replaced by private enterprise.
If government were to infiltrate Apple, fire 80% of its staff at random, cut budgets across the board by 50-80%, put in place a CEO that has spent their entire career campaigning to rid society of the scourge of electronics, and refuse to fill necessary vacant positions for years, would it then be an intelligent assessment to say "man, private corporations like Apple really suck at making phones, they should be nationalized"?
They know they can’t drown out the problems, nor do most of them want to. The privatization of government work is just a dog and pony show that lets rich assholes give taxpayer money to other rich assholes.
Not to say the left doesn’t do this too (assuming the US political speak, “left” referring to democrats is really just barely right of center), but part of the conservative playbook has always been to rip apart the federal government (or the parts that they don’t like, such as providing social services). The easiest way is to tank a group by hiring a private company to do a shit job and then saying “see how bad they did? We should just axe food stamps.”
I am based in Europe and one of the younger interviewers let-slip that they will all be working during the local public holiday. lols. No thanks.
Also, I grew up in a mixed ethnic environment. For the last few decades there has been a focus on trying to make society more inclusive. Such that my school exam papers would have questions like "Susan has 6 apples and gets 6 more. How many does she have" or "Rohit is travelling at 50mph ...." So a variety of names and genders etc to reflect the people who live here.
Well, my Palantir interview information was about "networks of people that need to be tracked"... all Muhammads, Omars etc. These names were my school colleagues and friends, so this didn't sit well with me (just to be clear, I didn't want to work somewhere that seemed to be making software to track entire groups of people).
They really should have sanitised their material and made it about helping Susan and Rohit track financial crime or some such. Instead I got vibes of that tv show Homeland.
[1] I know Europe is big etc, but I used to work in UK on particular and everyone took bank holidays seriously.
Simply enough, I am a Blue Card holder currently, haven't filled my 5 years hence it is on the temporary state for now. I have been working many weekends/public holidays & whatnot. This was not even part of the original contract. I was presented an "addendum" roughly after 1 month into starting of work. This being moved from another country, including your family and home, and now either you sign or mutual termination of contract because this is the business needs situation. Not to mention the requirement to pay back _all_ relocation expenses (including their taxes).
If I didn't sign, I would be terminated with a notice of 2 weeks. I have to leave within 3 months of that (of find a new job). Even if I sued, I doubt my first hearing will be within that period... (And again, this is a new country, no contact, no lawyer and haven't been part of an union)
So, it is certainly possible to _force_ people to work on holidays. Larger the company is, higher the leverage... (ie. making the process longer so you'll run out of time)
I can't begin to describe how sick this makes me feel. At the same time, I'm happy that your upbringing resulted in you making the right choice of not pursuing such a horrible company.
I on the other hand was contacted by Helsing, which at the time sounded cool to me (????) (secret agent vibes???). The recruiter however failed to appear at the screening call 2 or 3 times, which I interpreted as a strategy on their part to select for persistence/yes-men (Occam's razor on the other hand is that the recruiter was overworked and/or shitty).
I told the recruiter off.
Only after a while I realized that it really, really was not a good thing that I even considered working for a company that in the end just kills people for money (I know, european defense yadda yadda). I have enough trouble sleeping as it is.
No they shouldn't. I prefer seeing the beast as it is, not as how it would like to be seen.
But that's not sexy for recruitment and the VC investment math does not/did not like to hear the word consulting, so they lipstick the pig and sell depth-first search as some secret voodoo magic.
They have a fucking kanban board for bombing people.
They make dashboards and apps for killing people. With a lot of technical jargon like "integrating disparate weapons and sensor systems for a kill chain".
Somebody in America says "we want to kill somebody" -> satellite gives real-time imagery on location -> weapons systems available nearby are recommended -> user clicks orders and telemetry go out to field operators and ex: drone systems -> predator fires up and flies to location and bombs target -> real-time imagery confirms explosion and results.
Sure war is bad and killing people is bad, but can we stop acting like it's a choice ? Unfortunately, wars will happen as long as humans exist and it's much better to be on the winning side. So yeah, there are a lot of people building dashboards for killing people and it's not necessarily bad. I would even argue that it's much better than a lot of people whose work is to make kids and adults addicted to screens.
By 'it', I assume you mean war? Sure, right after we stop acting like all weapons are only ever used defensively.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the particular weapons being discussed here (precision targeting capabilities) are probably a lot more likely to be useful to an aggressor than to a defender.
I take your general points. There is a saying "there is no right or wrong, but right is right and wrong is wrong."
Violence is the unnecessary use of force. It may occasionally be necessary to kill in self defense, but it is always a tragedy. Killing people is both bad and a choice. This is actually a harder reality to face than "people be violent".
I know a nation need to be powerful to defend it self from evil but you don't have to be evil murdering millions of people because you don't like their faith.
What does it have to do with Nazi Germany ?
These assumptions when they go unquestioned create the landscape for war to be accepted.
There are, unfortunately, many examples of child murderers.
I just assume it is a type of performance.
Incentives are there to make money from weaponry and defense contracts. Further incentives are there to take land or resources, or to simply destabilize competing nations. To stop all of this requires a pretty fundamental shift in a human machine that is still hardwired for survival.
In the same way, do people who do things to paint targets on their foreheads read this stuff, and think twice?
A lot of criminals are rational.
Do you really expect journalists to do that? What's next - expecting them to travel to countries they're reporting on? It's not the 90s for gott's sake
It's such a disgusting modern day leviathan, I roll my eyes to the back of my head when people casually say you should buy their stock
They also have one of the most profitable business models the world has ever seen. Their RPE (revenue per employee) is roughly $1mm and growing at a 50% YoY rate...
They heavily use technology as leverage for insane margin growth. 90% rule of 40 as well.
Meanwhile OnlyFans is at something like $30mm per employee, which is wild.
Revenue 2023: $1.30 billion[1]
Employees: ~1000
So they are at Palantir levels, which still is wild.
so yeah not the top of chain
Is their profitable business model based on the fact that they're good at enabling & profiting from authoritarianism and corruption?
The business model was completely stagnating before LLMs.
They are cashing in on the rush for large firms to wrangle data for LLMs but the entire concept of large firms and FDE has obvious scaling issues.
Which is why they speak in business lingo / vague generalities and not give examples, its to hide the real intent
It's the same model as McKinsey etc, the value add is in feeling like you're getting value out of the money you're spending and half of that is being marketed to personally by the consultant and getting glossy presentations, reports, and dashboards.
1. The products are powerful but complex, and were designed by smart, technical people for smart, technical people. They lack some random-person usability.
2. The average client employee isn't that technical.
Source: worked there for 7 years (my views are my own, of course)
If I suspect my wife is cheating on me (without evidence) but keep that suspicion to myself and treat her no differently than before, that might be OK. But if I treat her accordingly and tell her friends, family, and colleagues about my suspicions, that is probably not good!
Owning the vice president tends to look pretty damn good on a balance sheet. Especially when that admin is pretty openly running pump and dumps on wall street.
Put another way: if you buy, be very ready to sell fast, and very confident that you can gauge when a market turns.
A 54% growth on the commercial side, being added to the S&P500, 1b in free cash flow, etc. Since then there have been constant announcements of more success resulting in buy-ins from all the big institutional funds including sovereign wealth funds.
Sure, the political connections are there, but is that why everyone's buying?
Basically, their entire premise is go into some place, collect all the data and build models that are useful on top that data.
Those models are now pretty much useless in the age of LLMs as the LLMs are so powerful you dont need custom models to predict behavior anymore. The new meta in this space is probably someone taking all the data into some db and using LLM on it either through training or interpretation.
Earning beat after earning beat, increased guidance after increased guidance
Another stock on this trend: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/axon-reports-q2-2025-revenue-...
Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press
https://www.amazon.com/Predict-Surveil-Discretion-Future-Pol...
According to the book, Palantir is one of the largest companies specializing in surveillance data management services for clients in the U.S. military, law enforcement and other corporations. Palantir does not own its data but rather provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems. Palantir gathers its data primarily from "data brokerage firms," including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Cambridge Analytica, Datalogix, Epsilon, Accurint. As Brayne observes, these data brokerage firms "collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, wireless access points at hotels and retailers, phone service providers, Google searches and maps geolocation, and other sources who sell your data to customers willing to pay for it. Yet it is difficult to fully understand the scope of the data brokerage industry: even the FTC cannot find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse to not divulge their sources" (pp. 24-5, 41-2).
Why is this a concern for people living in a democratic society with a supposedly strong legal system that protects individual freedoms? "Big data companies argue that their proprietary algorithms and data are trade secrets, and therefore they refuse to disclose their data, code and techniques with criminal defense attorneys or the public" (p. 135). This means that, "In many cases it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms than to rely on in-house data because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws" (pp. 24-5).
Use Wikipedia to vet the close connections of whatever news outlet you were considering, and stop vetting only once you realize that you almost made a terrible mistake by talking to a reporter there.
Forget whatever dirt you think you know (it doesn't matter in the current political environment), donate your blood money to a good cause, and go do something you feel better about, but without stepping on the toes of the scariest people.
this seems so delusional and divorced from the source material that i sometimes wonder if any of these people are familiar with it at all.
edit to clarify:
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools."
I love Tolkien but using his name in political discussions is pointless. He was basically an anarchist whose views wouldn't support any major active political faction today.
"They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge-bellows, a water-mill, or a hand-loom, though they were skilful with tools." - Concerning Hobbits
The Scouring Of The Shire is the account of anti-industrial direct action, for Iluvatar's sake.
Sigh.
I worked there for 7y, and can confirm Nabeel's post is very accurate.
The general public thinks Palantir's a bunch of moral-less folks grinning over godlike power & privacy violations but in actuality it's a mashup of smart Silicon Valley + military folks trying to make data pipelines & analysis work around the globe, often in achingly bureaucratic organizations.
It sounded a lot like the DOGE playbook. From that vantage point I became skeptical that they did anything good for their clients. It's like "douchebag outsourcing consultant as a service".
Seen this too much to have any other sort of reaction. People come in without fully understanding what the existing solution does. They get overconfident that they can solve it better. They throw out the thing that is fulfilling the needs of many people. Their rewrite breaks a bunch of stuff they don't know about. But they also set the metrics for success so they've judged themselves to be successful.
If the people affected by their breakage ever manage to get back in touch, the guy that broke them is already long gone.
And even on Gotham there is countless footage etc. on Gaia, Dossier, Meta Constellation etc.
They had to disclose this during the IDO, why are journalists just scratching the surface when discussing Palantir.
It is obviously a tech company that has a clever business model, deploying their engineers and PMs into the board room of Fortune500s and solving their problems.
Not trying to defend Palantir, but the journalistic work is just poor.
These match customer support, billing, warehouse inventory from data sources. You've got a rudimentary dashboard where you search for a customer and find his orders, address, phone number.
Gotham appears to be the same for the police. You search for an address and know whether you've been called to this address yesterday, who lives there, whether they have weapons..
But ultimately, it depends on what data sources you connect. Yesterday you tracked criminals, today you can track people to deport and tomorrow you track Jews. It's all up the user of the software.
From what I understand Palantir is basically a data consulting company with a suite of data mining/visualization tools at its core. Essentially, it sends an engineer armed with these tools into the customer organization’s various disparate databases, funnels all that data to one tool, and then gives you some nice graphs or whatever.
IMO it’s mostly bullshit, which is why they make all their customers sign ndas. I’ve still never met anyone who worked with them that could tell me any significant value they brought.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLmKm_LhXXgqRbNwHCSD4Wb-lI...
Hint: Palantir customers sign contracts with them not because they get coerced into it due to some vaguely political reasons, but because they are miles above the competition (with the competition here beiny the usual massive top government contractor suspects).
Which might be saying more about their competition than Palantir itself, but nonetheless. This has been true for at least the past 3 US presidents, and I can confirm as much since the 2nd Obama’s term.
>What it’s ultimately selling them is not just software, but the idea of a seamless, almost magical solution to complex problems
Sound like to me all it does is funnel our tax dollars to the top 1%.
They seem to be involved with the project below. So I cannot help to believe these people with Trump's Admin. is a massive corruption operation on steroids.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/how-unraveling-two-pentagon...
No wonder the deficit is expanding.
> The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over, according to seven sources familiar with the matter.
"To have a chance"?!
> Exodus 23:8 ESV > And you shall take no bribe, for a bribe blinds the clear-sighted and subverts the cause of those who are in the right.
It’s good to build in all of these optional data and privacy knobs, but I fear that’s not enough.
There are 'right hands' apparently.
That said, it's quite an accomplishment how people in the US are conditioned to be fine with spending many many trillions to murder random people everywhere with no real goal or purpose.
Those employees are just in denial.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/survei...
While the predecessors arguably chased profit for its own sake, this is not the case with top Palantir leadership, who have very loudly declared their political ambitions and wallow openly in the nastiest of criminality.
Now, that's not a good sales pitch, and neither would 'we will collapse complexity in your decision making while providing abstractions that add to plausible deniability, and hence make you more efficient at doing crimes while at the same time make it feel more boring to the people that actually do the things'.
Hence the 'we fight for the Western civilisation against the barbarism of the world' branding, tuned to make NATO military personnel feel more or less at home. This is also why the Palantir employees don't have a solid idea about what they do, the same muddying about purpose through abstractions and cult like techniques are what keep them around.