LE's Automated Privacy Invasions: Palantir Gotham Software

[Any of N]

Curious to know what our forum members think of this development. The Vice Motherboard publication obtained a certain software user manual via the freedom of information act.

Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis. The company acts as an information management service for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, corporations like JP Morgan and Airbus, and dozens of other local, state, and federal agencies. It’s been described by scholars as a “secondary surveillance network,” since it extensively catalogs and maps interpersonal relationships between individuals, even those who aren't suspected of a crime.

...

Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir’s other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a "fusion center," a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir.

...

The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide:

• If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period.
• With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database.
• The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too.

All of this information is aggregated and synthesized in a way that gives law enforcement nearly omniscient knowledge over any suspect they decide to surveil.


www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx4z8/revealed-this-is-palantirs-top-secret-user-manual-for-cops

(Emphasis added by me.)

No doubt they'd love to have everyone's full genome sequence in there as well, ready to cross-reference at a moment's notice. You never know. Maybe that's only a few upgrades away.

All snark aside, it's not the software but the underlying system that's at issue. The manual is what gives the game away.


Other links:

Schneier on Security blog post

Portions of the manual itself

[almagata]

I'm not surprised. If you watched the movie "Snowden", the movie showed a computer system that did what you describe and more. In the "Snowden" movie, the government computer guys could actually login into anyone's computer on the internet.

Spokeo used to have a somewhat similar setup but they changed their display a couple of years ago. Of course Spokeo did not have some of the info that the government has access to like driver's license and car registration info.

[elroacho]

I put my email address into spokeo and bam! it showed everything except my drivers license and car info. Try it and see for yourself. Time to move over to protonmail...damn too late.

[spodey]

This sounds like a derivative of the old NORA system used by casinos.


www.888casino.com/blog/casino-security-exposed

[Any of N]

Haven't seen Snowden, but I read Glen Greenwald's book (No Place to Hide) and the watched the documentary (Citizenfour). It was all quite eye opening. As the blogger mentioned in one of the links, "This seems like a commercial version of the NSA's XKEYSCORE."

With it being so easy for LE to pull all the information together, the potential for abuse is sky high. Recall that the furor over GEDmatch started by somebody in LE pushing boundaries. Not to mention that the EAR, the man whose crimes inspired this very forum, turned out to be, of all things, a former cop. Regardless of how much things have changed since the 70's and 80's, that's a harsh reminder of how things can go terribly wrong.

[starsky]

The PALANTIR name comes from Lord of the Rings (Tolkien), and is an artifact (dark crystal ball) used by Sauron to see events in other parts of the world or in the distant past or in the future. So of course "Palantir" uses big data analytics to basically do what this dark crystal ball (probably the most hated part of Lord of the Rings) did--to spy on other countries, and businesses and people within our own country (using Data Science and AI). I couldn't think of a worse name for a company. Might as well be called "Satan".

More on the company here:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies

Ana the Stanford grad founder:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel

[Red909XMZ1]

This is tremendous progress and prevention, in my opinion.💡🌠💫

Let us not be Luddites.

I am all for establishing as many ways as we can to make it as difficult as possible for criminals to engage in their deviant, harmful crimes against society.