Palantir: A Blinded Seeing Stone?
August 27, 2021
I try to keep pace with the innovations in intelware. That’s my term for specialized software designed to provide the actionable information required by intel professionals, law enforcement, and one or two attorneys who have moved past thumbtyping.
I am not sure if the article “FBI Palantir Glitch Allowed Unauthorized Access to Private Data” is on the money. The “real news” story asserted:
A computer glitch in a secretive software program used by the FBI allowed some unauthorized employees to access private data for more than a year, prosecutors revealed in a new court filing. The screw-up in the Palantir program — a software created by a sprawling data analytics company co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel — was detailed in a letter by prosecutors in the Manhattan federal court case against accused hacker Virgil Griffith.
Please, read the source document. Also, my personal view is that such an access lapse is not good, but if the story is accurate, I am less concerned that other FBI officials may have had access to content in Gotham or whatever the system is branded these days is less problematic than oligarchs snooping or a Xi Jinping linked tong IT wonk poking around FBI only data.
My thoughts went in a different direction, and I want to capture them. Keep in mind, I don’t know if the access revelation is “true.” Nevertheless, here’s what I jotted down whilst sitting in a lecture about a smart bung for booze lovers:
- Was the access issue related to Microsoft Windows or to the AWS-type services on which some Palantir installations depend? Microsoft is another “here we go again” question, but the AWS question puts the Bezos bulldozer squarely in the security breach spotlight.
- How many days, weeks, or months was the access control out of bounds? An hour is one thing; the answer “We don’t have a clue” is another.
- If — note the if, please — the access issue is due to a Palantir specific feature or function, is there a current security audit of LE, military, and intel related installations of the “seeing stone” itself? If the answer is “yes”, why was this access issue missed? Who did the audit? Who vetted the auditor? If the answer is “no,” what are the consequences for the other software vendors and IT professionals in the “fault chain”?
The article points out that a royal “we” is troubled. That’s nice. But let’s focus on more pointed questions and deal with what might be a digital Humpty Dumpty. Just my opinion from the underground bunker in rural Kentucky.
Stephen E Arnold, August 27, 2021
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