Palantir Technologies

Palantir Technologies
Formation	2004
Founder	•  Peter Thiel •  Alex Karp •  Joe Lonsdale •  Stephen Cohen (entrepreneur) •  Nathan Gettings
Headquarters	Palo Alto, California
Type	commercial
Staff	1,500
Interest of	Barrett Brown
Member of	Council on Foreign Relations/Corporate Members, WEF/Strategic Partners

Palantir Technologies is a software company with a reputation for secrecy which focuses on mass surveillance and data analysis. It is closely connected to the MICC; "among the list of past and current Palantir clients are the NSA, CIA, Department of Homeland Security and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement — which directly uses its technology to fuel its controversial raids on undocument[ed] workers."

Activities

Palantir has been called "Silicon Valley's Most Secretive Company". and the "War on Terror's Secret Weapon". "Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss. It then presents the linkages in colorful, easy-to-interpret graphics that look like spider webs."

Palantir helped create the visual mapping software for XKeyscore, an NSA hacking tool that was disclosed by Edward Snowden.

Ownership

As of December 2014, Peter Thiel was Palantir's largest shareholder.

Military contracts

In 2018, Palantir won a $876 million contract from the US Army.

Cambridge Analytica

On 27 March 2018, whistleblower Christopher Wylie told a House of Commons select committee that Palantir had worked with Cambridge Analytica:

“That was not an official contract between Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, but there were Palantir staff that would come into the office and work on that data, and helped build the models we were working on.”

COVID-19

In early April "The Silicon Valley company said its technology is helping officials predict the locations of outbreaks and determine where to deploy medical staff and supplies, but the initiative is testing governments’ ability to balance privacy with public health." Palantir was providing COVID-19 tracking software to the CDC and NHS by April 2020 and was pitching to European health agencies. It was been awarded various contracts as a result of COVID-19, and has accessed health data from UK as well as the US.

Tiberius

Palantir developed Tiberius, a platform to facilitate the rollout of vaccines.The Illinois state government's COVID-19 vaccine plan describes it as "a vaccine allocation tool to be utilized at the state level... designed to calculate each jurisdiction’s allocation... developed by Operation Warp Speed". CBS News described it as "a custom computer program that will track the whole endeavour".

 

Related Document

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Civil Liberty Vanishes	blog post	6 May 2020	Craig Murray	"Serious questions have to be asked about why the UK government has developed its own unique app, universally criticised for its permanent central data collection and ability to identify individuals from their unique codes. That this is overseen by NHSX CEO Matthew Gould who held all those secret meetings with Liam Fox and Adam Werritty, including with Mossad, frankly stinks."

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