How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

>“How could it be the case that this person is cofounder and CEO since 2005 and the company still exists?” The answer dates back to Karp’s decades-long friendship with Peter Thiel,

>Thiel had cofounded PayPal and sold it to eBay in October 2002 for $1.5 billion.

>Enter Karp, whose Krameresque brown curls, European wealth connections and Ph.D. masked his business inexperience.

And thus we enter the Establishment's presentation of hippie-cum-suit stories, presenting data miners for the Man as rock stars [1]. Sound familiar? It's the same story that worked on the baby boomer generation. "First I was a hippie, then I was a stock broker, now I am a hippie again."

[1] Let's see them give the token opposing community activist on page 4 the same photography treatment instead of photographing him on the margins of the frame so he looks even more obese and distended.

Also, let's not forget that Palantir helps the FBI infiltrate and attempt to destroy domestic political groups like Occupy.

“If we as a democratic society believe that license plates in public trigger Fourth Amendment protections, our product can make sure you can’t cross that line”

The majoritarian argument - That's a popular one amongst libertarians /s.

On the other hand, Jimmy Wales considers himself an Objectivist... I guess, forget the mumbo-jumbo and judge people by their works?

    Palantir’s privacy and civil liberties team created an 
    ethics hotline for engineers called the Batphone: Any 
    engineer can use it to anonymously report to Palantir’s 
    directors work on behalf of a customer they consider 
    unethical. As the result of one Batphone communication,   
    for instance, the company backed out of a job that involved 
    analyzing information on public Facebook pages. Karp has 
    also stated that Palantir turned down a chance to work with 
    a tobacco firm, and overall the company walks away from as 
    much as 20% of its possible revenue for ethical reasons.

> He goes on to argue that even Palantir’s founders don’t quite understand the Palantiri seeing stones in The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien’s orbs, he points out, didn’t actually give their holders honest insights. "The Palantiri distort the truth," he says. And those who look into them, he adds, "only see what they want to see."

  A Palantir user at a bank can, in seconds, see connections between a Nigerian
  Internet protocol address, a proxy server somewhere within the U.S. and
  payments flowing out from a hijacked home equity line of credit, just as
  military customers piece together fingerprints on artillery shell fragments,
  location data, anonymous tips and social media to track down Afghani
  bombmakers.

The stable state we'll probably reach is a more extreme version of what Karp mentions: next to zero privacy, but also high levels of transparency into the operations of our authorities, and, as a result of both, much more cultural acceptance of "deviancy".

Their civil liberties controls seem like a fairly sane attempt to smooth out the transition to that sort of society (but admittedly of unclear effectiveness). They're trying to avoid a detour into a totalitarian police state while our laws and cultural norms catch up with the reality of our growing data collection and data mining capabilities.

Edit: To clarify the logic of my first sentence above: if we keep voting out elected officials who fail to stop terrorist attacks (which are almost always disproportionately sensational compared to their actual death tolls), we're basically evolving our set of politicians into people who will stop at nothing to prevent them.

It would be amazing if Palantir was a 5-10x better tool for CIA, but came with non-overridable limits which actually protected individual liberty (of US citizens and non-citizens).

There are certain things Palantir can be used for which are essentially purely good -- identifying disease outbreaks, other potential environmental danger, etc. -- which they will hopefully emphasize.

Sorry but I cannot admire that.

But some people will never learn. Fortunately, he decided not to have kids.