Palantir Technologies: 9000 Words about a Secretive Company
April 3, 2017
Palantir Technologies is a search and content processing company. The technology is pretty good. The company’s marketing pretty good. Its public profile is now darned good. I don’t have much to say about Palantir’s wheel interface, its patents, or its usefulness to “operators.” If you are not familiar with the company, you may want to read or at least skim the weirdo Fortune Magazine Web article “Donald Trump, Palantir, and the Crazy Battle to Clean Up a Multibillion Dollar Military Procurement Swamp.” The subtitle is a helpful statement:
Peter Thiel’s software company says it has a product that will save soldiers’ lives—and hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds. The Army, which has spent billions on a failed alternative, isn’t interested. Weill the president and his generals ride to the rescue?”
The article, minus the pull quotes, is more than 9000 words long. The net net of the write up is that changing the US government’s method of purchasing goods and services may be tough to modify. I used to work at a Beltway Bandit outfit. Legend has it that my employer helped set up the US Department of the Navy and many of the business processes so many contractors know and love.
One has to change elected officials, government professionals who operate procurement processes, outfits like Beltway Bandits, and assorted legal eagles.
Why take 9000 words to reach this conclusion. My hunch is that the journey was fun: Fun for the Fortune Magazine staff, fun for the author, and fun for the ad sales person who peppered the infinite page with ads.
Will Palantir Technologies enjoy the write up? I suppose it depends on whom one asks. Perhaps a reader connected to IBM could ask Watson about the Analyst’s Notebook team. What are their views of Palantir? For most folks, my thought is that the Palantir connection to President Trump may provide a viewshed from which to assess the impact of this real journalism essay thing.
Stephen E Arnold, April 3, 2017
Palantir Technology: Making Some Waves
March 16, 2017
I don’t know about you, but I am not keen on waking up one morning and finding protestors with signs in front of my house. Bummer. One of the motive forces behind Palantir had the pleasure of this experience on March 11, 2017. You can see the invitation to the protest against Palantir in general and Peter Thiel in particular at this link. Note that it helpfully provides Mr. Thiel’s private residence address. Nifty.
I also found interesting the article “Palantir’s Man In The Pentagon.” Buzzfeed seems to have a keen interest in Palantir. I follow Palantir’s technology too. Buzzfeed does seem to come up some enthusiastic writing.
I assume, of course, that everything I read on the Internet is accurate. Therefore, I learned:
A former Palantir “evangelist” has taken a top job at the Defense Department, after spending years lobbying the Pentagon on behalf of the Silicon Valley company.
As a former a laborer in the vineyards of Booz, Allen Hamilton, I know that this is not a shocker. People routinely move from outfit to outfit as they try to create the perfect work history, make money, and do some interesting, even entertaining, work.
The write up told me:
Mikolay, 37, worked for Palantir for four years as an “evangelist,” according to his LinkedIn profile, meaning he met with government officials to sell Palantir’s software. According to a confidential email obtained by BuzzFeed News, Mikolay’s role at Palantir involved pitching the Army on the battlefield intelligence contract, which has become something of a white whale for the Silicon Valley firm.
I also noted:
A Defense Department spokesperson, Capt. Jeff Davis, told BuzzFeed News in a statement: “Mr. Mikolay took action to ensure he would not participate in any matters that would have a direct and predictable effect on Palantir, consistent with conflict of interest statutes and government ethics regulations. Further, he worked with the DoD Standards of Conduct Office to implement a screening arrangement to ensure all particular matters involving Palantir are forwarded to another senior defense official for appropriate disposition. Such recusals are not uncommon for civilian appointees who have worked previously in the private sector.”
Frankly I was more interested in this statement:
Mikolay, in joining the Defense Department, is returning to an agency where he once worked as a speechwriter for former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta. He is a Navy veteran who attended the United States Naval Academy and got a master’s degree at Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Yep, shocker. A job change in DC with a new administration if office. Hardly surprising because it is standard operating procedure along the banks of the Potomac.
Stephen E Arnold, March 16, 2017
Vanity Fair and Palantir Technologies: The Focus Is on Peter Thiel
March 6, 2017
My hunch is that Vanity Fair Magazine will sell briskly in and around the Washington, DC beltway. Oh, wait. Most of the newsstands and bookstores have gone out of business. Maybe Giant Foods in Gaithersburg will have some copies? The convenient store in Ashburn may have a copy or two tucked in among the car magazines and Find-A-Word pamphlets?
The article which will make Vanity Fair even fairer this month is “Donald Trump Has Made Peter Thiel Immensely Powerful.” Good news for Palantir; bad news for some of the clear eyed professionals who have been sending the US government big bills for their work on the Distributed Common Ground System or DCGS.
I liked the positioning of Mr. Thiel in the write up. He is called the “shadow president.” Interesting. Does that make Palantir Technologies’ Alex Karp the veep?
The write up deserves your attention. Let me highlight three items from the article which I found interesting:
First, the moniker “shadow president” is a coinage of those who work with Mr. Thiel in California and elsewhere. I was hoping that this was a coinage from the Trump inner circle.
Second, the write up reveals that Mr. Thiel believes in the “move fast and break things” approach to innovation. Who would have guessed? Certainly not the US Army procurement professionals.
Third, Mr. Thiel wants to live a long time. Isn’t that a thing in Silicon Valley?
My hunch is that none of the DCGS contractors will be happy with the visibility that Vanity Fair imparts to the “shadow president.”
Will there be a news conference for those in the shadows?
Stephen E Arnold, March 6, 2017
A Moist Anti Palantir Protest: No Bagels? No Donuts?
January 24, 2017
On January 18, 2017 three score protesters showed up in front of the Shire. (That’s what Palantir Technologies uses as a handle for its Palo Alto headquarters.) According to “Tech Employees Protest in Front of Palantir HQ over Fears It Will Build Trump‘s Muslim Registry,” it was raining. Oh, there were an estimated 50 people experiencing the Great California Drought. I learned:
The organizers behind this particular protest hail from tech, Stanford, and Palo Alto and say they are concerned Palantir and its co-founder and Trump advisor Peter Thiel stand to profit off the makings of a citizen database that could be used against those identifying as followers of Islam in the United States.
I also read “Palantir Tried To Placate Protesters With Free Philz Coffee.” The “real” news service informed me:
The crowd, assembled in waterlogged windbreakers and sopping down coats, included employees from Facebook and other tech companies, along with labor activists, and students from nearby Stanford University. The hour-long protest was staged to pressure Palantir into more accountability and transparency around the databases it has built.
One hour. Wow. What a statement.
The “real” news report said:
The company [Palantir] was also hospitable to protesters, putting out a table of free Philz coffee with a little Palantir logo.
Here in Harrod’s Creek, protestors usually get a snort of moonshine. At least that has some impact. I am not sure if the folks trying to find a parking place were amused with soggy advocates of something which may not happen. But what if there is a registry and Palantir was not involved.
Will the valiant protesters identify the government contractor. Assemble in front of that outfit’s building and make their voices heard? As long as the target of the protest is near at hand and the weather cooperates. That’s a maybe then.
Stephen E Arnold, January 24, 2017
Palantir Technologies: A First for a Content Processing Outfit
January 18, 2017
Palantir Technologies visibility has an upside and a downside. The upside is that the company’s brand, its Gotham system, and its Metropolis are gaining traction among executives in a range of disciplines, not just the heady world of Wall Street or the less well travelled pathways of law enforcement and intelligence professionals.
I read “Tech Workers Are Protesting Palantir’s Involvement with Immigration Data.” If accurate, the write up is one of the first reports of people getting antsy about systems and methods which are going on 30 years old. FYI I did a tiny bit of work for i2 Group, the outfit which developed Analyst’s Notebook in the 1990s. That system used techniques known to researchers in the UK, France, and elsewhere for decades. The point is that the “protest” is something that companies involved in data analysis have not experienced. I am not bringing a dog to this fight. I think it is intersting that awareness of what one can accomplish using graph analysis, centuries old math, and basic information access methods is now triggering what may be a potentially contentious public protest. (Get those permits, folks.)
The write up points out:
As Trump prepares to take office, a Silicon Valley group demands Palantir account for systems that could be used for mass deportation.
From elected officials who disavow the president elect to skilled professionals who are worried about what the president elect “may” do, search and content processing has only rarely faced a group of concerned people. Even Autonomy, an early player with BAE Systems in data analysis for government tasks, is essentially invisible despite a high profile lawsuit with Hewlett Packard. There was a protest more than a decade ago in front of Autonomy’s Cambridge offices, but I can’t recall why a group of about a dozen people showed up and then dispersed. Outfits like FinFisher or Vupen make news in specialist publications. The idea of a mass protest in front of the Gamma Group offices in the UK is a rare event.
The Palantir to-be protest reported in the article pivots on what might happen in the future. Future reporting is an interesting genre. The write up states:
Due in part to a Verge report from last month, a group of tech workers in Silicon Valley has announced that it will hold a demonstration outside the headquarters of Palantir Technologies in Palo Alto next Wednesday to protest the company’s involvement in intelligence systems used by federal immigration authorities.
The news service takes some credit as a catalyst and writes about what will happen on Wednesday, January 18, 2017, in a write up published online on January 13, 2017. (Where are these folks at Kentucky Derby time when I have to pick a horse for the big race?)
I learned (I think this is the correct tense for writing about reporting the future):
We want to make it clear that the overall tech community is watching what Palantir does,” says Jason Prado, a software engineer at Facebook and member of the Tech Workers Coalition, the group organizing the Palantir demonstration. “And we want to hold the tech community overall accountable for the values that we as a community have.”
The write up does some more tense dancing with this statement in the write up:
This week, both Thiel and Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, separately pledged that Palantir will not be used to build a Muslim registry — a demand listed by Prado’s group. “We think that’s fantastic,” says Prado, “but we’re also interested in their possible involvement in what we see as mass deportation and we plan to continue pushing on that.”
More interesting for me was or is this statement in the write up:
Last month, I reported for The Verge that Palantir had provided largely-secret assistance to the US Customs and Border Protection agency in administering a complex intelligence platform known as the Analytical Framework for Intelligence, or AFI, which collects and analyzes troves of information on immigrants and other travelers entering, exiting, and moving within the United States.
The “I” refers to Spencer Woodman, who is both a trigger and a documenter of the present and the future.
The president elect seems to know about Palantir’s platform or “Analytical Framework for Intelligence.” I interpret Palantir’s approach as a series of components which go beyond what the 1990s-anchored i2 system does.
The write up by Mr. Woodman states:
Last month, I also reported that Palantir had signed a $34,650,000 in contracts with ICE to help build and maintain a large database and analytics platform called FALCON, which contains employment information, criminal records, immigration history, family connections, as well as home and work addresses. According to Department of Homeland Security oversight documents, FALCON is meant for use by ICE’s Office of Homeland Security Investigations, which pursues serious cross-border crimes such as human trafficking, drug interdiction, and child pornography and is a separate entity from ERO. Tasked with enforcing unverified employment, HSI has conducted some of ICE’s most controversial recentimmigration raids on businesses employing undocumented Immigrants — the sort of operations that many immigrant advocates fear will expand under Trump.
From my point of view, I made a mental note of several points:
- The article or wrtie up as I term these online news/opinion/commentary essays makes it clear that what will happen in the future is due in part to the information presented in the author’s articles present and past. That’s very interesting.
- The technology revealed as a source of concern is, at least to me, very old news. There are newer and more more effective systems than those offered by Palantir. (No, I will not identify these vendors nor will I respond to email or telephone inquiries on these matters unless the call comes from a present or former client or via a referral from a trusted source. Do your own homework, gentle reader.) Palantir acquiores companies because it must or has to juice up is decade old system.
- The blurred role of the author and the write up as a “report” and a “prediction” makes it difficult for me to know why the article is not labeled as content marketing. I made a mental sticky note, however.
I think the assembly/protest is worth monitoring. I look forward to more “real” journalism on this matter. Frankly mixing up what did happen, what is happening, and what will happen in the future is somewhat confusing to me. I prefer a nice tidy timeline and outputs from a predictive analytics system like Record Future’s to help me make decisions about an event. I am also interested in making bubble gum cards for the individuals of interest, generating a graph of relationships, and pumping open source content through a series of text analysis procedures.
That, hoowever, is a great deal of work. I can understand why some “real” journalists prefer a phone call or two, some self referntial links, and Google Web searches when writing about what will happen on Janaury 18 five or more days before the 18th.
Stephen E Arnold, January 18, 2017
Need a Job at Palantir?
January 8, 2017
Short honk: In the run up to the inauguration, Palantir is adding staff in DC. You can apply to be the people partner at this link.
Beyond Search suggests that candidates not wear a Hillary for President button or express confidence that the DCGS Army system is the cat’s pajamas.
Stephen E Arnold, January 8, 2017
Palantir Factoid: 2016 Government Contract Value
December 21, 2016
I read “Palantir CEO at Trump-Tech Summit Raises Red Flags.” The idea is that Palantir is a peanut when compared to publicly traded giants like IBM and Microsoft. The presence of Peter Thiel, an adviser to the Trumpeteers, adds some zip to both Facebook and Palantir. But Palantir’s Alex Karp was at the meeting as well. The idea is that the Trumpeteers continue to get stereophonic inputs about technology and other matters.
This is the factoid which caught my attention. I assume, of course, that everything I read online is dead center accurate:
Palantir received about $83 million from the government this year tied to 71 transactions, according to USASpending.gov.
What happens to Palantir’s bookings if some changes to the DCGS program come down the pike? Perhaps Palantir will be running some meetings at which giants like IBM are going to be eager participants. On the other hand, IBM and some of the folks at the Trumpeteers’ technology summit might not be happy.
Net net: I was dismayed at the modest bookings Palantir has garnered. I expected heftier numbers.
Stephen E Arnold, December 21, 2016
Palantir Technologies Snags Another $20 Million
November 28, 2016
I read “Secretive Big Data Firm Palantir Raises $20M in Recent Funding Run: Report.” I learned:
Palantir has quietly raised $20 million in a recent funding run.
The article pointed out that Palantir had previously raised $800 million. The write up added:
Based on the Nov. 23 Form D filing, the date of the first sale for the recent round of funding was Nov 8. Coincidentally, the new United States president Donald Trump was elected on the same day.
I found this statement interest:
Including the latest round of funding, Palantir has raised more than $2 billion to date.
Interesting. By the way, the figures seem to be hefty.
Stephen E Arnold, November 28, 2016
More Palantir Pressure on DCGS Vendors?
November 25, 2016
I read a personnel announcement. For most people, the report that a Silicon Valley type joined Donald J. Trump’s transition team is a ho hum, so what moment. You decide for yourself. Navigate to “Trump’s Transition Team Adds VC from Thiel’s Founders Fund.” I highlighted this bit of real news from real journalists as spot on (I assume, of course).
Trae Stephens, a principal at Thiel’s Founders Fund, is being appointed to Trump’s defense transition team, said people familiar with the matter. He will help shape policy and vet Defense Department staff but isn’t expected to take a role in the administration, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly.
When I read this, several ideas flapped across my mind.
First, the DCGS incumbents now have to deal with two Palanterians providing input on how to use information to achieve operational goals. One Hobbit was not good for outfits accustomed to having direct inputs with regard to certain procurements and technology decisions. Two Hobbits. Yikes.
Second, I doubt that Donald J. Trump understands that DCGS is based on a very big vision of federating information from a wide range of sources, deploying systems which can lose connectivity in certain situations, and require that system users keep on their toes with regard to the freshness of the data being manipulated. My hunch is that explaining why a system which has been in the works for more than a decade and has consumed billions of dollars is not going to fit into a sound bite or a tweet. Explanations may be a bigger problem than the venerable traditional Beltway approach to government software. Palantir’s Hobbits show pictures and clever stuff like wheel menus.
Third, the Hobbits are not likely to bring up the past. The future is sort of now in the Donald J. Trump moment. When the Hobbits fire up a laptop and generate a bubble gum card about an alleged bad actor, my thought is that Donald J. Trump will say, “That’s huge.” The fact that Gotham is a product and ready to install and use may elicit a “That’s great.” Who will say that about the DCGS console? I know. The vendors holding the prime DCGS contracts.
In short, some of those vendor meetings underway in Beltway office buildings are likely to be interesting. And stressful. Yep, stressful.
Stephen E Arnold, November 25, 2016
Are Silicon Valley Problems Affecting Palantir Technologies?
November 11, 2016
I read “Silicon Valley Has Much Bigger Problems than Peter Thiel, Tech Investor Says.” The write up tackles Peter Thiel’s endorsement of a presidential candidate. Mr. Thiel is one of the founders of Palantir Technologies, and the company’s headquarters—the Shire—are in Palo Alto, the Delphi of Silicon Valley. I wondered if the maven upon which the write up pivots is talking less about Mr. Thiel and more about one of his companies; specifically, Palantir Technologies, vaquisher of the US Army.
I noted this passage:
Many entrepreneurs are now financially motivated, rather than by an optimism to take risks and improve the world, McNamee [Elevation Partners] said.
The write up reports:
“I think people in Silicon Valley are still open to change,” McNamee said. “But the things that they’re working on aren’t as valuable as the things people used to work on. And sadly, we’ve seen far more fraud in the past couple of years than I can remember any time in the 34 years I’ve been here. And so I think people just want to get rich now, and scams have become part of what goes on in Silicon valley and that troubles me deeply.”
The article includes this statement by the McNamee:
“People have stepped back, if anything,” McNamee said. “The Valley has a real misogyny problem …
If the Elevation Partners’ statement is accurate about Silicon Valley, is Palantir a company which has greed and misogyny problems? One can interpret the Elevation Partners’ comment as identifying systemic flaws affecting many companies in Silicon Valley.
The US Department of Labor has raised questions about Palantir’s hiring practices.
Stephen E Arnold, November 11, 2016
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