| Type | Private |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2004 |
| Founder(s) | Peter Thiel, Joe Lonsdale, Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California |
| Products | Palantir Government, Palantir Finance |
| Employees | 345[1] |
| Website | palantir.com |
Palantir Technologies, Inc., headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in Tysons Corner, Virginia, New York City and Covent Garden, London, is a software company that produces the Palantir Government and Palantir Finance platforms. Palantir offers a Java-based platform for analyzing, integrating, and visualizing data of all kinds, including structured, unstructured, relational, temporal, and geospatial.
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Palantir was founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel, Dr. Alex Karp[2], Joe Lonsdale[3], Stephen Cohen, and Nathan Gettings. Early investments came in the form of $2 million from the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel and $30 million from Thiel and his firm, The Founders Fund.[4][5][6][7] Dr. Alex Karp is Palantir’s CEO.[8] Palantir’s name comes from the "seeing stones" in the Lord of the Rings.
Palantir was built through iterative collaboration between computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years, through pilots facilitated by In-Q-Tel.[9] The software concept grew out of technology developed at PayPal to detect fraudulent activity, much of it conducted by Russian organized crime syndicates.[10] The team leveraged the fundamental insight that computers alone (Artificial Intelligence) could not defeat an adaptive adversary. Palantir allows human analysts to quickly explore data from many sources in conceptual ways (Intelligence Augmentation).[11]
In April 2010, Palantir announced a partnership with Thomson Reuters to sell the Palantir Finance product as QA Studio.[12]
On June 18, 2010, Vice President Joe Biden and Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag held a press conference at the White House announcing the success of fighting fraud in the stimulus by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB). Biden credited the success to the software, Palantir, being deployed by the federal government.[13] He announced that the capability will be deployed at other government agencies, starting with Medicare and Medicaid. [14][15][16][17]
Palantir Government integrates structured and unstructured data, provides advanced search and discovery capabilities, enables knowledge management, and facilitates secure collaboration. The Palantir platform includes the privacy and civil liberties protections mandated by legal requirements such as those in the 9/11 Commission Implementation Act. Palantir’s privacy controls keep investigations focused, as opposed to the expansive data mining techniques that have drawn criticiscm from privacy advocates concerned about civil liberties protection. Palantir maintains security tags at a granular level such that analysts can only see the specific information they have permission to see.[18][19]
Palantir runs the site AnalyzeThe.US[20], which allows the public to use Palantir Government to perform analysis on publicly available data from data.gov, usaspending.gov, the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets Database, and Community Health Data from HHS.gov.[21]
Palantir Finance is a software platform for data integration, information management and quantitative analysis. The software connects to commercial, proprietary and public data sets and discovers trends, relationships and anomalies. Palantir Finance is used to study the markets, test and refine trading strategies, and generate complex signals across asset classes.
JoyRide is a public demo of Palantir Finance. It offers training exercises and the data is provided by Thomson Reuters.
Palantir Government is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices of the FBI and CIA, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor (responsible for the GhostNet and the Shadow Network investigation). Palantir Finance is used by a number of well-known hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms.[22][23][24][25]
Palantir partner Information Warfare Monitor used Palantir software to uncover both the Ghostnet and the Shadow Network. The Ghostnet was a China-based cyber espionage network targeting 1,295 computers in 103 countries, including the Dalai Lama’s office, a NATO computer and various embassies.[26] The Shadow Network was also a China-based espionage operation that hacked into the Indian security and defense apparatus. Cyber spies stole documents related to Indian security, embassies abroad, and NATO troop activity in Afghanistan.[27][28]
Palantir’s software is used by the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board to detect and investigate fraud and abuse in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Specifically the Recovery Operations Center (ROC) uses Palantir to integrate transactional data with open-source and private data sets that describe the entities receiving Stimulus funds.[29]
Palantir hosts Palantir Night Live at Palantir’s Tysons Corner and Palo Alto offices. The event brings speakers from the intelligence community and technology space to discuss topics of common interest. Past speakers include Garry Kasparov, Nart Villeneuve from Information Warfare Monitor, Andrew McAfee, author of Enterprise 2.0, and Michael Chertoff.[30]
According to leaked documents, in December 2010 the law firm Hunton & Williams approached Palantir, HBGary Federal, and Berico Technologies to draft a report on the threat posed by WikiLeaks. The report recommends attacking constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald for his support of WikiLeaks, launching a "media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities" and obtaining data on document submitters by hacking Wikileaks' servers.[31]
On Feb 11, 2011, Dr. Karp issued an apology to Mr Greenwald, and "directed the company to sever any and all contacts with HBGary.".[32]
"The right to free speech and the right to privacy are critical to a flourishing democracy. From its inception, Palantir Technologies has supported these ideals and demonstrated a commitment to building software that protects privacy and civil liberties. Furthermore, personally and on behalf of the entire company, I want to publicly apologize to progressive organizations in general, and Mr. Greenwald in particular, for any involvement that we may have had in these matters." - Dr Alex Karp, CEO, 2-11-2011[33]
In subsequent weeks, some started to question Palantir over the full scope of their role, pointing out comments and actions made by a company engineer, Matthew Steckman, who was suspended by the company over the affair. Internal emails from Steckman seem to confirm that Karp approved a payment split for plans relating to another Hunton & Williams target, critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Palantir's General Counsel, Matt Long, responded that the remarks from Steckman regarding Karp's approval "was classic salesmanship," and "meant to impress," since "In our case we don't have sales people so it is very transparent/obvious coming from a 26-year-old engineer. Dr. Karp and the Board did not know about the specifics of the proposal - including pricing." The second employee involved was not suspended. [34]
March 16, 2011: The House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities asked the Defense Department and the National Security Agency to provide any contracts with Palantir Technologies for investigation.