Palantir Technologies: Once Secretive Company Explains What It Is Not
November 17, 2020
I enjoy once-secretive companies explaining what they are not. A good example of this type of re-formation is “Palantir Is Not a Data Company (Palantir Explained, #1).” The headline makes it clear to me that there will be additional “we are not” essays coming down the intelware pike. The first installment of what a stealth company communicated incorrectly it seems is:
Palantir is not a data company and not a data aggregator.
The write up wants to differentiate from a company like Datminr or Oracle BlueKai and similar firms. These outfits suck up information and then sell access to those data.
Palantir Technologies is not in that “data” business. The company processes the data its clients have, license, or to which the clients link in an appropriate manner.
The essay makes clear that Palantir is a “software company.” That’s true. Much of the software is open source or crafted to perform specific functions which customers pay Palantir to effectuate. (There are partners and integrators who perform other work for Palantir licensees. Most of these companies keep a low profile and do not advertise their Palantir goodness.
Several observations:
- Palantir is a hybrid outfit; that is, it combines open source software, custom code, and consulting to generate revenue
- Partners and integrators contribute expertise and software shims to allow a licensee obtain a desire output from the Palantir system
- Much of Palantir “runs” on cloud services; for example, Amazon Web Services.
Now that Palantir is a publicly traded company, the once stealthy firm which operated as a start up for more than a decade has to demonstrate that it is avoiding some of the public relations pitfalls for intelware and policeware vendors in the public eye.
How difficult is this task? Quite challenging in my opinion.
I am looking forward to the second installment of explaining Palantir.
Stephen E Arnold, November 17, 2020
Amazon: Glue to Bind Customers to the Bezos Bulldozer
November 13, 2020
Amazon has made public its Glue service. The idea is that messy data can be cleaned up or normalized without writing code. The service is part of the Amazon “no code” or “low code” approach. According to “Announcing AWS Glue DataBrew – A Visual Data Preparation Tool That Helps You Clean and Normalize Data Faster”:
AWS Glue DataBrew is available, a visual data preparation tool that helps you clean and normalize data up to 80% faster so you can focus more on the business value you can get. DataBrew provides a visual interface that quickly connects to your data stored in Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), Amazon Redshift, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), any JDBC accessible data store, or data indexed by the AWS Glue Data Catalog. You can then explore the data, look for patterns, and apply transformations. For example, you can apply joins and pivots, merge different data sets, or use functions to manipulate data.
How useful will the service be to companies deploying intelware on the AWS platform? Very useful. GeoSpark Analytics-type firms have been using AWS for their advanced content systems.
The good news is that the service is more widely available.
Stephen E Arnold, November 13, 2020
Germany Raids Spyware Firm FinFisher
November 3, 2020
Authorities in Germany have acted on suspicions that spyware firm FinFisher, based in Munich, illegally sold its software to the Turkish government. It is believed that regime used the tools to spy on anti-government protesters in 2017. The independent Turkish news site Ahval summarizes the raid and the accusations in, “Spyware Company that Allegedly Sold Spyware to Turkey Raided by German Police.” We’re told:
“Germany’s Customs Investigation Bureau (ZKA) searched 15 properties last week, both in Germany and other countries. Public prosecutors told German media that directors and employees of FinFisher and other companies were being investigated. The investigation follows complaints filed by NGOs Reporters Without Borders, Netzpolitik.org, the Society for Civil Rights (Gesellschafft für Freiheitsrechte, GFF) and the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. The NGOs believe that a spyware product used in 2017 to target anti-government protesters in Turkey was FinFisher’s FinSpy. Germany’s Economy Ministry has issued no new permits for spyware since 2015, while the software in question was written in 2016, meaning that if it was used, it must have been exported in violation of government license restrictions.”
Activist group CitizenLab asserts the Turkish government spread the spyware to protesters through Twitter accounts. These accounts, we’re told, masqueraded as sources of information about upcoming protests. As far back as 2011, FinFisher was suspected of supplying regimes in the Middle East with spyware to track Arab Spring protestors. The software has since been found in use by several authoritarian governments, including Bahrain, Ethiopia, and he UAE. Just this September, Amnesty International reported FinFisher’s spyware was being used by Egypt. For its part, of course, the company denies making any sales to countries not approved by German law. We shall see what the investigation turns up.
Cynthia Murrell, November 3, 2020
France: No Palantir Gotham Clone. Really?
October 29, 2020
DarkCyber noted “A French Alternative to Palantir Would Take Two Years to Make, Thales CEO Says.” The Reuters news story contains information which allegedly originated with Patrice Caine, the CEO of Thales, a rough equivalent to a large US defense contractor like Raytheon or the British outfit BAE Systems.
Factoids which appear in the write up:
- DGSI, the French equivalent of a mash up of the FBI and NSA, said there was no comparable product available from a French company
- France wants to achieve digital sovereignty in the intelware and policeware markets; that is, use French products
- The time required to clone Gotham is 24 months; however, the assistance of the French government would be needed.
DarkCyber observations:
First, the perception that no French company can deliver this type of system may come as a surprise to some French companies. Firms like Sinequa have marketed intelligence capabilities for many years. Some policeware and intelware is just enterprise search gussied up with a stage costume and some eye liner. Plus, there are other companies as well who might interpret the “no comparable product” comment as an affront; for example, hot ticket Datanami or the quite functional Amesys Eagle and Shadow technology.
Second, the desire to use French products is important. However, the French government has not moved with sufficient purpose to cultivate the type of innovation in intelware evident in the UK, for example. The UK is a policeware and intelware hot spot; for instance, the Gamma Group among others. The deanonymization of digital currencies revolution has been chugging along for a number of years because one university moved forward.
Third, the idea that two years are needed before France has a system comparable to Palantir Gotham is either wildly optimistic or an understatement about the time required. Fast ramping is possible with a French nucleus, supplemented with strategic acquisitions. For example, tap Dassault Exalead, provide funding, and recommend that innovative companies be identified and moved lock, stock, and barrel to Montpellier or Toulouse.
DarkCyber’s team can identify what to buy and what to do to assemble a French solution to the need for a Palantir-type system. It is important to remember that Palantir Gotham is “old” in Internet years. There are innovators and talent to create what France wants more in step with the modern era, not the emulation of a i2 Ltd’s late 1990’s thinking.
And where did the phrase “red tape” originate? Yep, France.
Stephen E Arnold, October 29, 2020
Palantir Round Up: The Beyond Search Commentary
October 27, 2020
I received a request for the links to my Palantir Technologies coverage. Here’s a hot linked list to the 17 essays, news items, and analyses which appeared in Beyond Search / Dark Cyber from March to October 2020. Stories prior to this year’s may be located using the search function on the Beyond Search / Dark Cyber blog.
- “Two Palantir Profiles: Some Peculiar Omissions.” This essay identifies several Palantir activities not included in the September 2020 New York Magazine profile of the company and the October 2020 New York Times Magazine article. Why were this events ignored or overlooked by the respective publishing companies?
- “Palantir Technologies: Minor Questions Remain.” A list of nine questions which have not been answered comprehensively. This article appeared in early October 2020.
- “Palantir Technologies: A Problem for Intelware Competitors?” This essay compares Palantir Technologies to Autonomy. Both companies have something in common: Revenue. But Autonomy had generated more revenue than Palantir, and Autonomy chose to sell itself to Hewlett Packard. This essay appeared in September 2020 and included the names of the five prime movers at the company.
- “Palantir: Will Investors Embrace Intelware Outfit Generating Consistent, Substantial Losses for More Than a Decade?” This article appeared in September 2020 and focuses on Palantir’s consistent record of losing money in a boom market for policeware.
- “Palantir Has Only Unicorn Scorn for Fellow Travelers.” The essay identifies Palantir’s signal that it is different from other unicorns. The story appeared on September 7, 2020.
- “Palantir: Planning Ahead.” This is a September 4, 2020, essay about the company’s desire to have a special type of control after the initial public offering.
- “Palantir: Stakeholders May Know Whom to Blame If Money Does Not Flow.” This August 2020 essay considers founder control in perpetuity.
- “Palantir Technologies: Maybe Stealth Is Better for Specialized Services Companies?” This essay explores the upside and downside of a policeware company which goes public, thus exposing more of its information to outsiders. This article appeared on August 24, 2020.
- “Palantir Technologies and Semi Hard Numbers.” A short item about Palantir’s revenues. The story appeared on July 10, 2020.
- “A Peek into Google and Palantir Contracts: The UK National Health Service Versions.” This article provided links to Palantir’s agreements with the UK NHS and was published in June 2020.
- “Palantir Technologies: A Very Unusual Emission from a Specialized Services Firm.” This May 26, 2020, essay points to challenges NSO Group faces and raises the question, “Will Palantir face similar scrutiny when it goes public?”
- “Schmidt Versus Thiel May Be a Proxy for Google Trying Catch Up with Palantir.” This May 2020 article touches on the relationship between Palantir and the current administration in Washington, DC.
- “Palantir to Help HHS Track Coronavirus.” This April 2020 news item points to Palantir’s contract with the US Department of Health and Human Services.
- “Palantir Technologies: Getting the NSO Treatment.” This April 24, 2020, essay points out that Palantir is getting more attention from publications like the Wall Street Journal.
- “Palantir Technologies: Evidence That Making Big Money Comes from a Financial Play, Not a Product.” This April 12, 2020, article raises the question, “Is Palantir a financial play, not a viable company?”
- “MiningLamp Technology: Another Palantir?” This March 30, 2020, article draws attention to a Chinese company which appears to have duplicated some of Palantir’s functionality.
- “DCGS: Palantir and BAE Seem to Be Winners.” This March 9, 2020, article considers the demise of DCGS as a viable wartime information and the pivot to BAE Systems and Palantir as alternatives.
There are other, earlier stories. These provide a snapshot of the Beyond Search and Dark Cyber coverage of the company. Remember. Each of these articles is anchored to an open source news story.
Stephen E Arnold, October 27, 2020
How-To Information from a Low Profile Company
October 26, 2020
Terminating fake social media profiles, especially on Facebook, has been a high priority since the 2016 US presidential election. Social media companies have task forces that diligently remove scam accounts (supposedly), but as technology advances bad actors always find ways to keep the fakes rolling. It comes as a surprise that a social media monitoring company actually created an instruction manual on fake profiles. Vice has the story: “Surveillance Company Explains How To Keep Facebook From Detecting Fake Accounts In Leaked Manual.”
British owned Blackdot Solutions developed the open source based online investigations platform Videris. Videris is used by government organizations, banks, and other businesses. Motherboard obtained a user manual from Blackdot Solutions that instructed its customers how to create fake Facebook and LinkedIn accounts to collect people’s information. The manual also explains how to avoid Facebook detection.
The guide offered a very insightful behind-the-scenes look at how social media monitoring tools work from a layman’s POV.
More and more businesses and law enforcement agencies use social media monitoring tools to collect information. One common tactic is befriending people of interest on social media to work around privacy settings.
When confronted with the leaked manual, a Blackdot Solution spokesperson denied being aware of its existence and Videris was not used in such a manner:
“Videris does not unravel private networks. It can’t do anything that users couldn’t do themselves if they were to log into social networks in the normal way,” Adam Lawrance-Owen, Blackdot’s head of product, said in an email. “The advantage of our software is twofold. It allows for more effective investigations to help catch fraudsters, money-launderers and terrorists. And it allows those investigations to be carried out in the most secure and discreet way possible, which is absolutely essential when dealing with these sorts of matters.”
The user manual proved otherwise. Videris makes any scrapped data readable and it also includes colorful charts and graphs. Blackdot Solutions has since remained mum about the manual.
Whitney Grace, October 26, 2020
Exclusive: Interview with DataWalk’s Chief Analytics Officer Chris Westphal, Who Guides an Analytics Rocket Ship
October 21, 2020
I spoke with Chris Westphal, Chief Analytics Officer for DataWalk about the company’s string of recent contract “wins.” These range from commercial engagements to heavy lifting for the US Department of Justice.
Chris Westphal, founder of Visual Analytics (acquired by Raytheon) brings his one-click approach to advanced analytics.
The firm provides what I have described as an intelware solution. DataWalk ingests data and outputs actionable reports. The company has leap-frogged a number of investigative solutions, including IBM’s Analyst’s Notebook and the much-hyped Palantir Technologies’ Gotham products. This interview took place in a Covid compliant way. In my previous Chris Westphal interviews, we met at intelligence or law enforcement conferences. Now the experience is virtual, but as interesting and information in July 2019. In my most recent interview with Mr. Westphal, I sought to get more information on what’s causing DataWalk to make some competitors take notice of the company and its use of smart software to deliver what customers want: Results, not PowerPoint presentations and promises. We spoke on October 8, 2020.
DataWalk is an advanced analytics tool with several important innovations. On one hand, the company’s information processing system performs IBM i2 Analyst’s Notebook and Palantir Gotham type functions — just with a more sophisticated and intuitive interface. On the other hand, Westphal’s vision for advanced analytics has moved past what he accomplished with his previous venture Visual Analytics. Raytheon bought that company in 2013. Mr. Westphal has turned his attention to DataWalk. The full text of our conversation appears below.
Tickeron: The Commercial System Which Reveals What Some Intel Professionals Have Relied on for Years
October 16, 2020
Are you curious about the capabilities of intelware systems developed by specialized services firms? You can gat a good idea about the type of information available to an authorized user:
- Without doing much more than plugging in an entity with a name
- Without running ad hoc queries like one does on free Web search systems unless there is a specific reason to move beyond the provided output
- Without reading a bunch of stuff and trying to figure out what’s reliable and what’s made up by a human or a text robot
- Without having to spend time decoding a table of numbers, a crazy looking chart, or figuring out weird colored blobs which represent significant correlations.
Sound like magic?
Nope, it is the application of pattern matching and established statistical methods to streams of data.
The company delivering this system, tailored to Robinhood-types and small brokerages, has been assembled by Tickeron. There’s original software, some middleware, and some acquired technology. Data are ingested and outputs indicate what to buy or sell or to know, as a country western star crooned, “know when to hold ‘em.”
A rah rah review appeared in The Stock Dork. “Tickeron Review: An AI-Powered Trading Platform That’s Worth the Hype” provides a reasonably good overview of the system. If you want to check out the system, navigate to Tickeron’s Web site.
Here’s an example of a “card,” the basic unit of information output from the system:
The key elements are:
- Icon to signal “think about buying” the stock
- A chart with red and green cues
- A hot link to text
- A game angle with the “odds” link
- A “more” link
- Hashtags (just like Twitter).
Now imaging this type of data presented to an intel officer monitoring a person of interest. Sound useful? The capability has been available for more than a decade. It’s interesting to see this type of intelware finds its way to those who want to invest like the wizards at the former Bear Stearns (remember that company, the bridge players, the implosion?).
DarkCyber thinks that the high-priced solutions available from Wall Street information providers may wonder about the $15 a month fee for the Tickeron service.
Keep in mind that predictions, if right, can allow you to buy an exotic car, an island, and a nice house in a Covid-free location. If incorrect, there’s van life.
The good news is that the functionality of intelware is finally becoming more widely available.
Stephen E Arnold, October 16, 2020
Google and Its User Privacy: Happy Hunting
October 4, 2020
DarkCyber spotted an open source intelligence tool called GHunt. By the time an open source software becomes publicly available, DarkCyber believes that hardened systems and methods are integrated into specialized policeware and intelware systems. If you want to try to learn more about a particular Google email user, for instance, you may want to take a look at GHunt. There are screenshots and basic information available on Github. Google appears to be taking steps to address some of the “features” which the GHunt software taps. Some interesting open source software becomes available and then disappears; for example, DARPA Memex tools have evidenced this type of behavior. If you want this tool, DarkCyber suggests you move along in a sprightly manner.
Stephen E Arnold, October 4, 2020
Palantir Technologies: Minor Questions Remain
October 1, 2020
DarkCyber noted “Techie Software Soldier Spy: Palantir, Big Data’s Scariest, Most Secretive Unicorn, Is Going Public. But Is Its Crystal Ball Just Smoke and Mirrors?” The write up joins the caravan of publications digging into the ins and outs of the intelware business.
There are precedents for a vendor of specialized services becoming a public company. One example is Verint, and there are others. Sometimes the lineage of an intelware company can be difficult to figure out. There are start ups in Cypress; there are partnerships in Herzliya; and there are Byzantine limited liability operations in midtown Manhattan.
What’s striking about Palantir is that the coverage has been content with the jazzy bits. DarkCyber understands the need to create buzz and capture eyeballs. The write up uses an interesting quotation from Admiral Poindexter, an interesting person who may be qualified to explain intelware:
“When I talked to Peter Thiel early on, I was impressed with the design and the ideas they had for the user interface,” Poindexter told me recently. “But I could see they didn’t have — well, as you call it, the back end, to automatically sort through the data and eliminate that tedious task for the users. And my feedback from the people who used it at the time, they were not happy with it at all. It was just much too manual.”
DarkCyber wondered:
- Why the write up did not explore the i2 Analyst’s Notebook vs.. Palantir legal matter. That activity suggested that Palantir may have had some interest in a proprietary file format and allegedly worked in interesting ways to obtain closely guarded information. A related question is, “Why would bright start up engineers resort to allegedly questionable methods to figure out a file format?” Too bad the write up ignores a legal matter which illuminates Palantir’s methods.
- Why is Palantir running into the revenue ceiling which other vendors of search and content processing systems for government entities hit? Are there too few customers? Did Autonomy, another search and content processing company, bumped into the revenue ceiling too? Is there a elephant standing in a pool of red ink in the accounting departments of some search and content processing companies?
- Why are intelware vendors offering their products and services under generous free trials programs to the known customers with allocated funds for such systems? And in parallel, the vendors are working overtime to find someone with deep pockets to buy these start ups?
- How similar are the products and services of intelware vendors? Why is innovation confined to graphics and innovation confined to recycling ideas in circulation for decades? One of the DarkCyber team observed, “Isn’t Palantir Gotham Titan the old Analyst’s Notebook with a pop up wheel on the right mouse button?” (I hire skeptical and maybe slightly cynical engineers I think.)
- Could it be that in the “real world” of fast-moving events the intelware vendors’ products don’t work all that well? Is it time for deeper analysis of comparable products and services? How does Palantir stack up against Voyager Labs’ offerings or the the LookingGlass system.
- Why doesn’t smart software do a better job of importing data? What has Datawalk figured out that eludes the Palantirians?
- Why do some Palantir Gotham installations remain idle? Is it because even the simpler interface is too quirky to use when real-time events generate pressure? Is it difficult for some licensees to allocate staff to use the system in order to become masters of the dataverse?
- Why haven’t Wall Street pushes generated more revenue? What happened to the Thomson Reuters’ deal?
- How long did it take Palantir to stand up its first version of its system after the core team decided the move forward with Gotham? (If you know the answer, write benkent2020 @ yahoo dot com. We know the answer and the winner will receive a copy of CyberOSINT: Next Generation Information Access. Free too. Almost like a trial of the products and services from an intelware start up.)
There are other questions the DarkCyber team considers important as well. Perhaps a “real news” outfit will dig into the intelware market, track the technologies, the inter-company tie ups, and the use cases or in some cases the dis-use cases for these products and services?
DarkCyber, however, finds the idea of Palantir’s going public interesting. Was the point of the exercise financial escape for increasingly concerned investors and grousing employees? Too many questions and too few answers still I think.
Stephen E Arnold, October 1, 2020
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