How the Government Outsourced Intelligence to Silicon Valley

But it is clear that the company, from its inception, had made its primary function the designing of surveillance programs for the spy agencies. In fact, Palantir would not have managed to stay in existence were it not for a multimillion-dollar investment and substantial technical support provided by the CIA.

When the CIA and NSA first approached Palantir with funds and support in 2004, the Palo Alto-based "computer software and services company" was a fledgling start-up. Since then, as a contractor for top intelligence agencies -- as well as some major private banks, like JPMorgan Chase, and multinational corporations -- Palantir is valued at $9 billion and has become the most successful among the numerous CIA-backed data analyzation companies.

Peter Thiel, whose PayPal investment had left him a billionaire, founded Palantir. He was convinced that the tactics that had allowed PayPal to predict credit card fraud would work in identifying terrorists. Other investors, however, were not as convinced, and by 2005, a year after Palantir was incorporated, the company was without a single customer or investor other than Thiel.

Palantir was rescued by a referral to In-Q-Tel. It was that fortuitous contact that resulted in a $2 million CIA investment and the subsequent success of Palantir. But far more important than the CIA's injection of financial capital was its support -- access to the CIA's secret databases, in-house technical experts, and a rolodex of prospective clients on the Hill. These would give Palantir the lift it needed over the next three years.

Alex Karp, Palantir's CEO -- a hipster exec who obtained his PhD in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt (earned, he might remind us, under the mentorship of the eminent philosopher Jurgen Habermas) and a JD at Stanford Law School -- is possessed of "progressive" politics and software engineering ignorance. This eclectic persona is enormously useful to Palantir, which effectively plays the role formerly assigned to the Total Information Awareness program: a monstrous government snoop, mining our most intimate data.

This point was obviously not lost on Poindexter -- seemingly the complete antithesis of Karp in terms of personal style and political outlook -- as he was casting about to keep his program alive after Congress shut it down.

Palantir has a carefully honed image as a sort of countercultural spy outfit committed to privacy and individual rights in the pursuit of national security. The company's home page and other marketing devices reek of a virtuous win-win alternative, speaking to the concern imbedded in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution that spying on the citizenry is an intrinsically doubtful proposition in a free society and needs to be carefully regulated. Paying homage to that notion, Palantir makes much of its built-in "audit trail," which presumably prevents unauthorized use of private data by individuals working within a government agency. The company plays up the supposed virtues of this mechanism in the "privacy and civil liberties" section of its official website:

"Palantir's immutable and real-time audit logging technologies help ensure compliance with applicable policies designed to protect privacy and civil liberties. Palantir's audit logs can be configured to capture the information a particular customer requires in order to identify behavior that might indicate misuse of data. Audit logs can record everything from login attempts to specific user search queries to user views of individual records. ... Using Palantir, an investigator is able to quickly sift through large amounts of auditing data, identifying suspicious activity, and drill down to that activity to determine whether there may have been a violation of law or policy."

But the grievous problem with this formula is obvious on two counts. One is that using the audit trail to monitor a government agency's or private corporation's spying activity is totally self-enforcing. If a company decides to be indifferent to that trail, the Palantir system continues to mine the data just fine. However, a more serious concern is that it may not be an aberrant individual employee who is using the software to monitor a private citizen's activities but, in fact, the organization itself.

This is of course routinely true of the NSA, FBI, and CIA, as we have learned through the years from the revelations by whistleblowers of unauthorized spying activities. It is far more likely that the Palantir-designed audit trail will be used to identify not agency-approved practices that violate the law but, rather, that rare whistleblower within the organization who dares to tell the truth about such illegal practices.

So there you have it. So-called private companies that either are directly funded by the US government or profit from US government contracts move to destroy organizations and individuals who dare to expose the reach of government and corporate power -- a classic manifestation of the government's threat to our constitutionally protected freedoms.

But because for-profit private companies are used as proxies to engage in such nefarious behavior, the government threat to freedom goes largely unnoticed. Hence the prowess and danger of the military-intelligence complex.