02.11.11
So-called terror-network finding software used for evil
One of the paradoxes of the corporate spying campaign against WikiLeaks and Glenn Greenwald is the use of Palantir Technologies intellectual property.
If you fish around on the company website, you quickly find stories, usually from business sections of daily newspapers, on the nature of its terror-network finding software.
It’s literally described as almost the best thing since sliced bread.
Palantir will end the devastation in Haiti. Its product is greatly desired by the US government and intelligence agencies who are said to be using it in the war on terror. And Palantir will be used to find fraud in stimulus spending.
What’s absent, of course, is what one of its big applications appears to be now:
Enabling corporate America to dirty-trick and attack critics by establishing their networks, which are generally right out in the open, anyway. And then outlining and defining them as targets or pressure points with reputations, civil liberties and privacy to be potentially rubbished.
One supposes that from the point of view of a Bank of America or US Chamber of Commerce, critics and journalists are considered terrorists.
Which makes the market — the US financial sector — for Palantir’s tools very clearcut.
Although it probably goes without saying, the market for doing evil domestically is now quite a lure. With a company like Palantir, and its obvious desire to market to the private sector as well as government, it is not too hard to imagine employees brainstorming ways to pitch the company’s products as solutions for various ‘problems’ in corporate America.
And such problems now appear to be, obviously, how to define, neutralize, discredit and suppress networks of critics, journalists and leakers.
Lot of business opportunity there.
Which continues to make any corporate claim that its founders prize privacy and civil liberties something of a laugh riot, at this juncture.