The Peril Of Palantir
Trying to explain this for laypeople ...
Robert Reich wrote an article on Peter Thiel’s Palantir and it’s a good read for what’s at stake in America today.
Let me offer a more technical take on this vital issue Reich has elevated.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Network analysis has been part of my duties for the last fifteen years. During that time I’ve actually used Palantir a little bit. I’ll try to make this accessible for non-nerds, but forewarned is forearmed - I may stray into GraphCraft.
Network Analysis Tools:
Palantir is a theater scale link analysis and data visualization tool. You can feed it national sized datasets and it will be able to turn them into visual representations that may provide insight.
Below is an ancient screen shot from Palantir itself. The system lets you see relationships and it’s aware of both geospatial and temporal information. Did Alice, Bob, and Charlie all visit Wahoo, Nebraska? OK … but were they there at the same time? Palantir can answer questions like that at scale.
Did you attend a protest? Carrying your real life cell phone? And it wasn’t turned off and placed inside a Faraday bag? I’ve been lecturing on how to avoid that for nearly two years. Very few of you will put out the misattrib/noattrib that I do, and it’s not reasonable to expect that of law abiding citizens. Our 4th Amendment protections are not sufficient in the face of technology like this.
I managed a little “stick time” with Palantir fifteen years ago. The word that immediately comes to mind is “chonky” - it was a heavy, slow motion affair at the time.
There are other tools that do what Palantir does. I own a now very dated license for Sentinel Visualizer, which is a direct competitor, albeit for smaller problems. I often mention Maltego, which is a penetration tester’s toolkit that has evolved a great deal since its inception. It has rudimentary features for location and time data and I don’t see it evolving that direction, its strength is the enormous number of integrations available from data providers.
A tiny bit further afield, I’ve done a bunch of data visualization with Gephi over the years, and much less but similar work with Graphistry and Tulip. Tools like these are meant for homogenous or bipartite graphs, they don’t have the rich set of entities you find in an intel or penetration testing platform.
On The Receiving End:
What do these things mean for you personally? I’m trying to come up with some relatable examples.
There’s stuff in the ChewToys section of this site, people who could stand more eyeballs on their shitty behavior. The best one is FreelanceTracker.ai - most victims of their “steal no more than $6,900 via Paypal” scheme encounter them at a moment in time. Since I had Maltego and some familiarity with hosting, I can see their back trail, and make it visible for a non-technical person. I hope someone with a badge has been shown this and decided to DO something about it.
Search warrants would get payment information and emails used with VPSes involved in the fraud, perhaps enough to yield another warrant for a specific location. Their crimes depend on concealment; most people don’t have access to this perspective.
Italian grifter Luigi Forino is a similar problem. There was only a tiny clue in this now very dated Twitter friends graph, but it WAS a clue. And if you read Many Small Mistakes, you know that they pile up until the bad actors get caught. I don’t have a graph of this, but I guarantee you there was one involved in spotting the prior fraud alert for the insurance adjustor in that arson case.
Recommendations:
Most of you do nothing cognizable as wrong. But I got where I am today by employing my natural right of free speech to oppose right wing cranks. Do you see how this could become your fate as well?
If you don’t have the motivation yet, then you don’t. I hope you don’t have to develop it while sitting in a crowded cell after merely exercising your natural rights.
OK, that’s enough of that, what can you DO about this? I’m constitutionally incapable of shutting up about such issues …
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But if you can only read ONE thing, let it be Safety Dance, there in the masthead. That’s supposed to be the canonical bare minimum that I keep updated. I just reviewed it and I am not feeling the need to update it today.
Conclusion:
My modus operandi is that of a jackal - I roam the savanna, and when I find lions dining, I’ll dart in and make off with a tasty tidbit. The most notable of these appeared in MIOS: Iran’s PressTV. One of the very first articles here was What Hunts You?, clear back in September f 2023, and these considerations are never far from my mind.
For most of the rest of you, there are two ways this can go:
We all get pissed off enough to drive legislation that puts snoops out of our lives and we’ll compel phone software makers to find other ways to get paid. This includes updating the 4th Amendment for 21st century technology. Palantir and the like will continue to exist, but probable cause as a requirement for collection will be restored.
We all let this run on until the streets run with blood, our faucets run dry, climate change takes out our thermal power plants, and the cellular network collapses. We go back to HAM radio and there are a network of spectrum analyzers triangulating our physical locations for the sake of signature strikes.
Unless one has been through repeated personal loss, the ability to recognize and accept when a major loss has happened is generally just not there. I’m already Mourning Mankind, but I don’t think Millennials who still envision careers, kids, retirement similar to their parents/grandparents are going to take it well.
So my money is on the latter scenario …