Can a California-based company that takes its names from The Lord of the Rings solve the problem of terrorism? Perhaps not, but it may do a better job than traditional defense contractors.
An enthusiastic article in today's Wall Street Journal describes Palantir Technologies, a thoroughly California software company that is earning accolades from inside the Beltway. "Palantir's software has helped root out terrorist financing networks, revealed new trends in roadside bomb attacks, and uncovered details of Syrian suicide bombing networks in Iraq, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the events," reports the* Journal*. "It has also foiled a Pakistani suicide bombing plot on Western targets and discovered a spy infiltration of an allied government. It is now being used by the Central Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation."
The company has received funding from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, which likely helps explain how the upstart company was able to break into the government market. Palantir has, as the Journal articles notes, a number of competitors among more established defense contractors. More Google than Lockheed, Palantir is known for its ahi tuna, video games, and a room painted with Care Bears.
Palantir's software, according to the firm's description, "enables human analysts to harness the power of computers in an intuitive way to quickly and deeply analyze large amounts of data. "The most interesting part of Palantir may be its approach to rooting out terrorist networks, which draws on PayPal's model for identifying cybercriminals (the company was founded by former employees of PayPal and Stanford computer scientists). The system worked by drawing links between fraudulent transactions that, at first glance, seemed unrelated.
One thing, however, that the company does likes to emphasize about its software: it's not doing data mining.
[PHOTO: Palantir]
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