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A comment on How Theranos Misled Me. Parent comment

Re:How Theranos Misled Me by randycupertino on Monday December 21, 2015 @03:49AM (#10770230)
And also, why does Theranos need such a sleazy board chock full of senators, military generals and other political players? They're a freaking biotech company without scientists and physicians on the board, wtf. The whole Theranos scam really reminds me of Palantir.

Government contractors masquerading as tech companies. So sketchy.

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Re:How Theranos Misled Me by bsaul on Monday December 21, 2015 @03:55AM (#10770241)
Palantir was a scam ??
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Re:How Theranos Misled Me by randycupertino on Monday December 21, 2015 @04:01AM (#10770249)
They're incredibly shady.

$750k in lobbying helps

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/clientsum.php?id=D00005517...

Their VC firm was the CIA:

http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB125200842406984303

Cashing fat the .gov to "fight terrorism" doesn't help make US citizens any safer, but does the founder wealthy enough to buy castles & fly his Stanford undergrad floozy around the world on private jets. Nice work if you can get it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/the-stanford-unde...

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Re:How Theranos Misled Me by ryporter on Monday December 21, 2015 @05:34AM (#10770482)
If $750K of lobbying makes them shady, what do you think of millions of dollars spent on lobbying per-quarter by the likes of Google, Amazon, and Apple? [1]

Their VC firm was not the CIA. It was In-Q-Tel, which was founded by the CIA (yes, there is a difference). In-Q-Tel has also funded companies such as FireEye. [2] What's your opinion of them?

I don't really know how to respond to the claim about "Cashing fat the .gov", because I can't parse that sentence. I will point out that Palantir has been increasingly shifting to a corporate client base.

[1] http://www.wired.com/2015/07/google-facebook-amazon-lobbying...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel

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Re:How Theranos Misled Me by Kalium on Monday December 21, 2015 @06:27PM (#10774364)
It's semi-public knowledge that In-Q-Tel is the investment arm of the government. They make investments on behalf of any government department that puts up the money.
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Re:How Theranos Misled Me by chrisseaton on Monday December 21, 2015 @05:26AM (#10770449)
But why does any of that mean they aren't a technology company?

It's as if by 'tech company' you really mean 'fashionable, liberal, consumer web startup or ex-startup', which isn't a reasonable definition of 'technology'.

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Re:How Theranos Misled Me by auganov on Monday December 21, 2015 @06:19AM (#10770592)
Palantir getting investment from In-Q-Tel gives them more credibility. The intelligence community is clearly their target market. Getting investment from that community in an overt and legit way doesn't fire any alarms to me.
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