Re:Palantir: The War on Terror's Secret Weapon
by psychotik on Sunday November 27, 2011 @10:23PM
(#3284331)
What sort of influence does the government have on the actual algorithms/data mining done by Palantir? Basically, it feels like a way for the government to spend a bunch of taxpayer money to provide a false sense of security, while making folks at Palantir rich. Feels a lot like a digital version of those airport scanners we love so much.
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Re:Palantir: The War on Terror's Secret Weapon
by MattLaroche on Monday November 28, 2011 @12:14AM
(#3284638)
Disclaimer: I used to work at Palantir. However, I never used the Government product, and never as much as saw a demo of the Government product. I'll talk mostly about the Government product, but much of this goes for the Finance product too.
Seems like there's a bit of a misunderstanding of what Palantir does. Palantir Government does not do data mining natively. The best explanation of this is from Palantir themselves: http://blog.palantir.com/2007/12/04/what-do-we-do/. There's impressive algorithms under the hood of Palantir Government, but the insight and analysis is provided by government analysts.
Palantir provides software, services, and support. The services are mostly data integration, training, and some custom software built on top of the Palantir Government product. Palantir isn't providing analysis for money, they're providing a product that enables analysts to analyze.