Posted on 11/30/2011 6:58:23 AM PST by ShadowAce
And guess where theyre located? Thats right: Facebooks former building.
I couldnt make it up if I tried.
Via: Bloomberg:
An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of datasales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is make it really easy to mine these big data sets. The companys software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place. Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantirs technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the companys growth, opinion in Washington and elsewhere has veered toward the latter. Palantir has built a customer list that includes the U.S. Defense Dept., CIA, FBI, Army, Marines, Air Force, the police departments of New York and Los Angeles, and a growing number of financial institutions trying to detect bank fraud. These deals have turned the company into one of the quietest success stories in Silicon Valleyits on track to hit $250 million in sales this yearand a candidate for an initial public offering. Palantir has been used to find suspects in a case involving the murder of a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement special agent, and to uncover bombing networks in Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Its like plugging into the Matrix, says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns.
Palantirs engineers fill the former headquarters of Facebook along University Avenue in the heart of Palo Altos main commercial district. Over the past few years, Palantir has expanded to four other nearby buildings as well. Its security peoplewho wear black gloves and Secret Service-style earpiecesoften pop out of the office to grab their lunch, making downtown Palo Alto feel, at times, a bit like Langley.
The origins of Palantir go back to PayPal, the online payments pioneer founded in 1998. A hit with consumers and businesses, PayPal also attracted criminals who used the service for money laundering and fraud. By 2000, PayPal looked like it was just going to go out of business because of the cost of keeping up with the bad guys, says Peter Thiel, a PayPal co-founder. The antifraud tools of the time could not keep up with the crooks. PayPals engineers would train computers to look out for suspicious transfersa number of large transactions between U.S. and Russian accounts, for exampleand then have human analysts review each flagged deal. But each time PayPal cottoned to a new ploy, the criminals changed tactics. The computers would miss these shifts, and the humans were overwhelmed by the explosion of transactions the company handled. PayPals computer scientists set to work building a software system that would treat each transaction as part of a pattern rather than just an entry in a database. They devised ways to get information about a persons computer, the other people he did business with, and how all this fit into the history of transactions. These techniques let human analysts see networks of suspicious accounts and pick up on patterns missed by the computers. PayPal could start freezing dodgy payments before they were processed. It saved hundreds of millions of dollars, says Bob McGrew, a former PayPal engineer and the current director of engineering at Palantir.
After EBay (EBAY) acquired PayPal in 2002, Thiel left to start a hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management. He and Joe Lonsdale, a Clarium executive whod been a PayPal intern, decided to turn PayPals fraud detection into a business by building a data analysis system that married artificial intelligence software with human skills. Washington, they guessed, would be a natural place to begin selling such technology.
Palintir? Weren’t they created by Feanor? One wonders how the faithful were able to smuggle them out of Numnenor.
I hate when spelling ruins a fun post.
I have a paypal account that typically has a balance of about $15. I used to buy peripheral stuff on eBay from time to time until someone told me about Amazon. I’m talking stuff like the adapters I got for my 4/3 digital camera to accept 1960’s Nikon and Minolta lenses, or owners manuals for old stuff. I haven’t done eBay now for years. The Paypal thing really killed it for me.
“...... In Mordor, where the shadows lie.......:
So the liberals are called shadows there?
Of course. ‘Cuz Shadows always lie
Hey now--watch who you're calling a liar! :)
LOL........
Thanks for the ping.
Good catch...
Nerd Chick digs it.
Caught onto?
Exactly. I haven’t seen that in a long time.
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