More stealth!
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/22/palantir-2018-disruptor-50.html
Palantir
They know you, even if you don’t know them.
PUBLISHED 6:03 AM ET TUE, 22 MAY 2018
Founders: Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings, Alexander Karp (CEO), Peter Thiel
Launched: 2004
Headquarters: Palo Alto, California
Funding: $2.8 billion (Pitchbook)
Valuation: $20.5 billion (Pitchbook)
Key technologies: Artificial intelligence, machine learning, software-defined security
Disrupting: Business services, data mining, cybersecurity
George Kavallines | CNBC
For a company that prides itself as being a secretive outfit, Palantir has certainly been in the news lately. In March, as Facebook was vilified for not adequately protecting the data of up to 87 million users, it was revealed that a former computer engineer for Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm that worked for President Donald Trump’s campaign, testified that a Palantir employee helped the consulting firm develop profiles of individual voters based on their Facebook data. (The company has said the employee worked with Cambridge Analytica on his own time.)
The incident, nonetheless, shows just how stealth the Silicon Valley firm is. It was started by PayPal founder Peter Thiel and some other company alumni, and in its early days did most of its work for the Pentagon and the CIA in Iraq and Afghanistan. Its software can take mounds of data from an organization — financial reports, cellphone records, social media postings, for example — and transform it into maps, charts and other actionable forms of intelligence. Palantir can then report back to a client any news of potential trouble, such as acts of terrorism, financial fraud or even human trafficking. The government success has led to contracts with the private sector, including BP, Merck, Airbus and Fiat Chrysler’s North American factories.
Trump agenda boosts secretive tech firms Palantir and Amazon, leading to a fight
Palantir, co-founded by polarizing Silicon Valley figure Peter Thiel, is building the case-management software for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, technology that “allows immigration agents to scour regional, local, state, and federal databases across the country, build profiles of immigrants and their friends and family based on both private and public information, and use those profiles to surveil, track, and ultimately deport immigrants,” the report alleged.
Amazon’s world-dominant cloud services unit hosts state and federal data systems “key to immigration enforcement,” including Palantir’s case-management system, and Amazon Web Services also sells cloud services to state law enforcement agencies that share information with the Department of Homeland Security, the report said.
The groups behind the report, and other opponents of Trump’s immigration and border agenda, have seized on companies’ federal contract work as a pressure point, seeking to enlist company employees and the public in opposing the firms’ work for the feds — and by extension, the work of the feds.
******
So will Amazon become the enemy to the other side?
Will SJW employees sabotage the cloud storage or corrupt the data collection/storage?
Interesting.