Bloomberg<\/a>:<\/p>\nAn organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data\u2014sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is \u201cmake it really easy to mine these big data sets.\u201d The company\u2019s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.<\/p>\nDepending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir\u2019s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company\u2019s growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valley\u2014it\u2019s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year\u2014and a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. \u201cIt\u2019s like plugging into the Matrix,\u201d says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns.<\/p>\n
…<\/p>\n
Palantir\u2019s engineers fill the former headquarters of Facebook<\/strong> along University Avenue in the heart of Palo Alto\u2019s main commercial district. Over the past few years, Palantir has expanded to four other nearby buildings as well. Its security people\u2014who wear black gloves and Secret Service-style earpieces\u2014often pop out of the office to grab their lunch, making downtown Palo Alto feel, at times, a bit like Langley.<\/p>\n…<\/p>\n
The origins of Palantir go back to PayPal<\/strong>, the online payments pioneer founded in 1998. A hit with consumers and businesses, PayPal also attracted criminals who used the service for money laundering and fraud. By 2000, PayPal looked like \u201cit was just going to go out of business\u201d because of the cost of keeping up with the bad guys, says Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder.<\/p>\nThe antifraud tools of the time could not keep up with the crooks. PayPal\u2019s engineers would train computers to look out for suspicious transfers\u2014a number of large transactions between U.S. and Russian accounts, for example\u2014and then have human analysts review each flagged deal. But each time PayPal cottoned to a new ploy, the criminals changed tactics. The computers would miss these shifts, and the humans were overwhelmed by the explosion of transactions the company handled.<\/p>\n
PayPal\u2019s computer scientists set to work building a software system that would treat each transaction as part of a pattern rather than just an entry in a database. They devised ways to get information about a person\u2019s computer, the other people he did business with, and how all this fit into the history of transactions. These techniques let human analysts see networks of suspicious accounts and pick up on patterns missed by the computers. PayPal could start freezing dodgy payments before they were processed. \u201cIt saved hundreds of millions of dollars,\u201d says Bob McGrew, a former PayPal engineer and the current director of engineering at Palantir.<\/p>\n
After EBay (EBAY) acquired PayPal in 2002, Thiel left to start a hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management. He and Joe Lonsdale, a Clarium executive who\u2019d been a PayPal intern, decided to turn PayPal\u2019s fraud detection into a business by building a data analysis system that married artificial intelligence software with human skills. Washington, they guessed, would be a natural place to begin selling such technology.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And guess where they’re located? That’s right: Facebook’s former building. I couldn’t make it up if I tried. Via: Bloomberg: An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,27,22,8,39,21,3,4,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coincidence","category-covert-operations","category-dictatorship","category-economy","category-elite","category-infrastructure","category-rise-of-the-machines","category-surveillance","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cryptogon.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}