Voyager Labs Exposed: Another NSO Group?

May 10, 2022

I read “Voyager Labs: L’Arma spuntata dell’intelienza artificiale.” I was expecting some high-flying smart software. What the article delivers is some juicy detail about intelware, conferences where quite non-public stories are told, and an alleged tie up between those fine folks at Palantir Technologies and the shadowy Israeli company. One caveat: One has to be able to read Italian or have a way to work around the limitations of online translation systems. (Good luck with finding a free to use system. I just asked my local Pizza Hut delivery person, who speaks and reads Italian like a Roma fan.)

Here are some allegedly spot on factoids from the write up:

One of the directors of the company has a remarkably unusual career at a US government agency. The individual presided over specialized interrogation activities and allowing a person with a bomb to enter a government facility. There were a handful of deaths.
The Voyager Labs’ cloud services are allegedly “managed globally by Palantir’s Gotham platform.
Voyager’s Labs’ content was described at an intelligence conference owned and managed by an American in this way: “usable and previously unattainable information by analyzing and understanding huge amounts of open, deep and obscure Web data.”
Allegations about the use of Voyager Labs’ system to influence an Italian election.
Voyager Labs identifies for licensees people with red, orange, and green icons. Green is good; red is bad; orange is in the middle?

Interesting stuff. But the zinger is the assertion that Voyager Labs’ smart software can output either dumb or aberrant results. The whiz kids at Gartner Group concluded in 2017 that Voyager Labs was a “cool vendor.” That’s good to know. Gartner likes intelware that sort of works. Cool.

Interesting profile and there are more than 100 footnotes. I assume that the founder of Voyager Labs, the conference organizer, and assorted clients were not will to participate in an interview. This is an understandable position, particularly when an Israeli outfit could be the next in the NSO Group spotlight.

Stephen E Arnold, May 10, 2022

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, intelware, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.