# How a "Deviant" Philosopher Founded Palantir



## Marauder06 (Aug 14, 2013)

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygre...palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/



> Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In the last five years Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, with a slick software interface and coders who parachute into clients’ headquarters to customize its programs. Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called “forward-deployed engineers” a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer’s data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.
> 
> Palantir’s advisors include Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet, who says in an interview that “I wish we had a tool of its power” before 9/11. General David Petraeus, the most recent former CIA chief, describes Palantir to FORBES as “a better mousetrap when a better mousetrap was needed” and calls Karp “sheer brilliant.”
> 
> ...


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## Florida173 (Aug 14, 2013)

This is pretty much all BS


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## Marauder06 (Aug 14, 2013)

What's BS about it?


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## Florida173 (Aug 14, 2013)

The usefulness of the software


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## Marauder06 (Aug 14, 2013)

OK, fair enough.  Our unit used it pretty regularly in Afghanistan, and I got the sense my analysts loved it.


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## Karoshi (Aug 15, 2013)

For what I do while deployed, Palantir wasn't any better than the Google KML feeds I was able to pull down. It didn't tie into the organic systems that we bring to support the MEF and the FSRs made it a hassle to manually upload data to the server at times. It is definitely a tool that I know the IO loved to use, especially to build link analysis charts. I wish I was able to better implement it for some of my work, but it doesn't play nice with SAP.


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## AWP (Aug 15, 2013)

Karoshi said:


> doesn't play nice with SAP.


 
Nothing does.


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## Florida173 (Aug 15, 2013)

The software is a joke.  Any analyst that has experience with analyzing INTs and not just limited to M3 queries would know that Palantir is about as useful as CTAVRS is.. except with as useless as CTAVRS is at least there is specific guidelines to tagging whereas Palantir is only as smart as the most retarded analyst.  I see officers drink the koolaid all the time where I'm at on catchy software and good marketing.  It's retarded how expensive it is too.


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## enceladus (Aug 15, 2013)

I used Palantir at my old (civilian) job and loved it.  I had waaaay fewer issues with it than some our other applications, particularly ANB.


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## Florida173 (Aug 15, 2013)

ANB is just a tool that you can relate items in a network.. good for an analyst.. and definitely better than Palantir when dealing with certain "special intelligence," although dealing with any really high level metrics I'm going to be using ORA.. which Palantir and ANB can't come close to.


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