Hacker News Reader

Comment by sscalia | Hacker News Reader

I'll risk even more downvotes -- but -- Palantir may be the creepiest company in the valley.

The relationship they have with the DOD/NSA is simply unreal. their offices on the east coast are full of high-ranking officials, generals, etc -- all the time.

Palantir powers a lot of the retina-database insurgent tracking software in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I've personally heard from US Army Special Operations forces that the imaging software they use to plan "missions" is powered by Palantir (but is frequently slow and buggy, so they resort to Google maps)

I noticed that an Operator featured in Sanjay Gupthas CNN documentary on Marajuana had a Palantir patch next to his US Flag patch on his carrier chest rig.

Creepy stuff.

View on HN

I don't know what's "creepy" about it. Any DOD contractor will have high-ranking military people coming in and out. The military is an extremely high-tech organization, and there are lots and lots of people building all that software and hardware.

Anecdote: when I was working at a company developing military radio technology, we spent a month doing field testing on a military base. There were a bunch of military people watching the trials (including a general), not to mention dozens of engineers from other defense contractors. There was nothing creepy or unusual about it. Who do you think builds the radios soldiers carry, the radio jammers they use, the binoculars they use, infrared gear, etc? It's all the product of thousands of projects by thousands of engineering teams, and every year there are probably thousands of occasions in which military brass drop by or check in to see what's up.

I won't downvote you, but I'll disagree with you.

We live in the world we live in, and counter intelligence is necessary. The fact that it's privatized is nothing different that what's happening with KBR, Blackwater, Lockheed-Martin, L3, et al. It's more a function of political realities where critical functions are being subcontracted out.

I'd rather have a Palantir than not have one and be outmaneuvered by other geopolitical rivals.

edit: hey, rayiner, fair point. I think that logistics and 'private security contractors' are in a different category than traditional defense contractors. I'm not really sure where Palantir belongs on that spectrum, so I intentional casted a wide net.

At least with Blackwater you can raise the complaint that mercenaries privatize aspects of the military that should be under public control. But to the extent that we have soldiers who carry equipment, nobody seriously thinks that the military should build all that equipment itself.

>We live in the world we live in, and counter intelligence is critical.

especially against your own citizens. Do "fusion center" and "Suspicious Activity Reports" generated by Palantir software ring a bell?

If you remember history, the most amount of intelligence gathered and acted upon in USSR, East Germany were against their own people, while it was supposedly under the great goal of counter intelligence against [foreign] enemy spies, agents, collaborators. Fusion centers with modern equipment and software is KGB & Stasi wet dream.

If you remember history, every single extant liberal democracy has had surveillance capabilities for decades, and continue to be healthy free societies.

>If you remember history, every single extant liberal democracy has had surveillance capabilities for decades, and continue to be healthy free societies.

the difference here is the actual massive surveillance (basically total possible by the technological means of the time) performed by the KGB/Stasi outside of the due process inside the jurisdiction of their respective countries. It is exactly the emerging characteristic of fusion centers and NSA activities. Please name an "extant liberal democracy" which has had such massive surveillance capabilities and applied them in such a way.

The FBI during the 1950's and almost certainly Britain's intelligence agencies post WWII.

Remember, the FISA mechanism that attracts so much flak these days was put into place because in the past the NSA had no restrictions or oversight, effective or ineffective.

>The FBI during the 1950's

yes, great example. If people want back to that game of witch hunting, and with incomparably, multiple orders of magnitude, increased capabilities of witch hunters (like J. Edgar Hoover looking into a fusion center palantir by Palantir) - well, i rest my case.

Hoover would have killed for the kind of capabilities that Palantir provides.

But then again, so would have the KGB and East German Stasi.

Palantir's developers aren't evil, but the fact that so many folks wish to don the rose-colored glasses and assume that their work cannot be used for the wrong things makes me nauseous.

Palantir doesn't generate anything except visualization a and an environment in which to manipulate those visualizations. There's no printer hooked up to Palantir that prints out new people to arrest every hour. In fact, the philosophy (and it's well maintained in their product) is that humans make every decision. The software simply helps elucidate options, costs and benefits, and most importantly, to revert the human decision.

I'm not sure KBR and Blackwater are the best examples of companies in good public standing.

The argument for Palantir is that pattern recognition applied to big data can save lives. That's enough for me.

> The relationship they have with the DOD/NSA is simply unreal. their offices on the east coast are full of high-ranking officials, generals, etc -- all the time.

Silicon Valley in general has always, and will always, be heavily intertwined with military technology.

http://www.inc.com/eric-schurenberg/inconvenient-history-of-...

It sounds to me as though you find anything security, law enforcement, or military-related to be inexcusably "creepy". Otherwise, it would seem pretty silly to describe customers hovering over critical suppliers as "simply unreal". Would high-ranking Apple execs constantly showing up at Foxconn offices show a relationship to Apple that you would describe as "simply unreal"? Otherwise, it would seem pretty silly to put scare quotes around Special Forces "missions". Do Special Forces not conduct real missions in your world, only so-called "missions"?

"Creepy stuff"? Silly stuff.

Negative. I have nothing but love for LEO/MIL.

However, when a company has access to state data, and banking data, and social data, and... etc.

Not hard to see how they can build a network.

You think DOD isn't begging Palantir for AMEX's customer data, even anonymized? Or any of the other financial institutions they provide services for?

... probably not. But it's easy to see how they could.

I would be much more creeped out if Peter Thiel wasn't running the company. I'm intrigued by that man, and for some reason he seems to be able to bank that for trust, at least for me.

Additionally - their logo, while they sheepishly claim is inspired by The Lord of the Rings (along with their name and product names) -- honestly looks like something supporting the earth.

Looks like the top half of a person to me. Arms and head.

> sheepishly claim is inspired by The Lord of the Rings

And, for those who missed the reference, the Palantir is the "all-seeing" device used by the formerly good wizard who defects to the dark side partway through the series.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir

Ah. It does look like a crystal ball on a stand, once you know what you're looking at.

Which the founders surely know. Unless you believe they model themselves after the evil wizards (and barely anyone ever thinks of themselves as evil), it's more of an acknowledgement of the risk.

I've wondered whether the name is intentionally a kind of warning. I'm assuming that the company founders knew LoTR well enough to understand what connotations 'Palantir' brings, and while I expect not every customer would, enough might that it might give pause.

here's an interesting quora post by Garry Tan about designing the Palantir logo -- it's both supposed to be a crystal ball & look like a human reading a book. you can read the whole thing here: http://www.quora.com/Logos/What-does-Palantirs-logo-symboliz...

Apologies, my post is riddled with misspellings. I haven't had coffee yet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com