So the landlubbers across the street from my clan’s hideout in Palo Alto used to be Facebookers. They occupied multiple locations around PA, but recently, they moved into a Facebooker-plex campus. The 4 story building has sat empty except for a human-sized hamster ball (Yeah, I can’t figure that one out either).
Human-Sized Hamster Ball
Until now.
We have seen characteristic military-esque in-civilian-clothing types in and out of the building for a few weeks now. An example of the kind of guys I mean (portrayed by Barry Pepper) courtesy of one of the brilliant Will Smith flicks, Enemy of the State, is just below.
"Enemy of the State" Spooks
I finally saw the company name on one of their shirts the other day: Palantir.
Palantir Technologies is a techno-spook outfit with new software that connects those damn elusive dots our intelligence agencies never appear to be capable of doing – or at least we never hear about it when they are successful. Here is a write up in the Wall Street Journal. The most sobering aspect of this company is that the innovation they achieved is apparently allowing low security-level analysts to search multiple classified databases simultaneously to look for patterns – in hopes of more readily connecting the dots. I don’t mean to discount what Palantir has developed – the point is that why the hell haven’t we spent some money on building this already! These guys were funded for only like 30 million Doubloons and they’ve already caught patterns of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq, stopped a suicide bombing in Pakistan and discovered a spy ring in an allied government!
The only pattern here is that our government is woefully unable to do the most obvious things to serve this country’s citizens. Organizing and making use of the plethora of information our government agencies obtain was a key recommendation of the 9/11 Commission:
Unity of Effort: Sharing Information
The U.S. government has access to a vast amount of information. But it has a weak system for processing and using what it has. The system of “need to know” should be replaced by a system of “need to share.”
- The President should lead a government-wide effort to bring the major national security institutions into the information revolution, turning a mainframe system into a decentralized network. The obstacles are not technological. Official after official has urged us to call attention to problems with the unglamorous “back office” side of government operations.
- But no agency can solve the problems on its own-to build the network requires an effort that transcends old divides, solving common legal and policy issues in ways that can help officials know what they can and cannot do. Again, in tackling information issues, America needs unity of effort.
Mission Accomplished.
I’m right next door to Palantir’s main office. Those are some of the smartest people in the Valley, which is saying a lot.
Yeah I know about 30 Stanford CS guys — the sort of ppl everybody went to for help when they got stuck — who joined up.
The “whitevideos” on the site are pretty cool, if you take a look they’re actually working on some really hard technology challenges, and I hear they’re also making money in areas outside of the government with what they’re building.
Glad we have these sort of people focusing on civil liberties along with the huge IT issues our govt has.
The human-sized hamster ball belongs to the good folks at seasteading.org (another company funded by Peter Thiel).
As one of our great presidents has said
“It behooves every man to remember that the work of the critic is of altogether secondary importance, and that, in the end, progress is accomplished by the man who does things”.
Theodore Roosevelt
Palantir is at least doing things. What are you doing??