See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7294743 and Thomas' reply. That's the extent to which Palantir was "involved" with HBGary Federal. (And while it should go without saying, I'll say it anyway: There was no attempt to infiltrate and destroy Wikileaks. Just a lot of hairbrained talk.)

Why should it "go without saying"? Have the facts been laid out and proven in an exceptionally clear and public way? I don't think so.

And "hairbrained" is an strange adjective to use for a company that is almost 100% engineers from top schools, pulling in a billion in funding, and working for the CIA.

All I know is the contents of the leaked presentation that laid out the plans against Wikileaks. I will ignore any PR and damage control about "hairbrained talk".

Right. All due respect to Thomas, but downplaying/minimizing literally every single shady thing the government does is par for the course for him. As his recent concession on Dual_EC_DRBG demonstrates, sometimes the government really does engage in damaging, moustache-twirling villainy.

I hate to be this guy, but "just a lot of hairbrained talk" is what puts people behind bars in America and all around the world, all around the clock.

You don't need to carry out a crime to be convicted of a conspiracy to commit it, and as a result put in jail for a long time.

One of their investors is In-Q-Tel, a CIA organization that's apparently designed to bring the best technology into the Agency's hands.

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

Correct, In-Q-Tel wrote initial checks for Google and Facebook. Someone figured that instead of having a fancy logo of an octopus reaching out over the globe of earth (or an eye above pyramid), its much better to just found a company with fancy logo with colored fonts, or an F, and make them harvest intel instead.

One wonders if they've got any NSA connections.

Only if we got a chance to look at their emails à la Hacking team style… Maybe they'll be the first to join the 1TB+ data dump club to go along with all their rounds of funding ;)