Palantir, a CIA funded startup, was created in part by PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel 2004. To date it is a little-known tool that changes the world right under our noses.
After being used to predict Iraqi road bombs based on previous events, Palantir is now developing to stay here and for everything.
The project is currently housed in a building in Palo Alto, California. The exterior shows what can happen internally, but through the technology used is protected by walls that are impenetrable by radio, telephone signals or the Internet: the only input device available, are secured with advanced biometric checks and passwords.
According to Palantir, the building “must be resistant to attempts to access the information within it. The network must be airgapped from the public internet to avoid any information leak».
The eye in the sky - a term of Palantir - sees huge amounts of data, trying to extract useful information from their content. All data collected in the US (and many of them) are simply collected. Nobody is so good as to analyze them. The collection, of course, aims to make some future technologies better able to process them.
The list of her clients startup includes the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the Center for Disease Control, the Navy, the Air Force, the Special Operations Management, the West Point and the IRS. It uses an AI that has the ability to predict the future.
Palantir algorithms track data from previous crimes to generate "hot spots" which they then use to determine which areas need more police presence.
Of course what is very concerned about the activists is the level of militarization of the police. Palantir will do much worse. Ana Muniz, activist and researcher at Inglewood's Youth Justice Coalition, told LA Weekly:
Whenever the military and the police of society look like, the lines go out. The army is supposed to defend the territory from external enemies, which is not the police mission, supposedly not seeing the population as an external enemy.
Palantir can not spy crime and terrorism as a simple predictor. Its algorithms have the potential to grow into a variety of seemingly identical sets of data, which, when combined, draw a comprehensive picture of our everyday life. Even when someone is offline and does not transmit information to the internet for some days, the data they need to paint this image already exists and is in a warehouse waiting to be used.
It is no longer science fiction. Advanced tools such as Palantir make sense from data collected and to date could not be used. That's why everyone wants to get it, from government organizations, hackers, or even companies like Facebook and Amazon.
For the part of Palantir, it is not inherently bad. It is a powerful tool used to sort data and forecast predictions based on their content.
This, like most things, is no more than a tool. Palantir is a toothed wheel in the system where the data is power and the device is just a way of extracting.
But as National Rifle once reported Association of the USA: “Guns do not kill people. People kill people.”
