{"id":5183,"date":"2013-06-07T11:32:02","date_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:32:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5183"},"modified":"2013-06-07T11:32:02","modified_gmt":"2013-06-07T17:32:02","slug":"palantir-data-mining-and-the-wot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/?p=5183","title":{"rendered":"Palantir, Data Mining and the WOT"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessweek.com\/printer\/articles\/5771-palantir-the-war-on-terrors-secret-weapon\">By Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone on November 22, 2011<\/a>: <\/p>\n<blockquote><p>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 data\u2014sales 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 \u201cmake it really easy to mine these big data sets.\u201d The company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n<p>Depending where you fall on the spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland security lockdown, Palantir\u2019s technology is either creepy or heroic. Judging by the company\u2019s 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 Valley\u2014it\u2019s on track to hit $250 million in sales this year\u2014and 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. \u201cIt\u2019s like plugging into the Matrix,\u201d says a Special Forces member stationed in Afghanistan who requested anonymity out of security concerns. \u201cThe first time I saw it, I was like, \u2018Holy crap. Holy crap. Holy crap.\u2019 \u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Ashlee Vance and Brad Stone on November 22, 2011: 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5183"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.zmetro.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}