Palantir

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/?comments=1#comments

It is Sunday morning.  My favorite time to deep dive into a thing of interest to me.  This link is where I dove.  It takes some time to read and the comments add a great amount of perspective.  I have previously commented in this blog about Palantir and those entities associated with it.  Corporate, government, academic, as well as broad problem domains of Artificial Intelligence and, in general,  (because it is my frame of looking at all things) the Object Oriented Approach to relating all these things in some kind of an over all high abstract level big picture Operating System and Application Programs

Palantir certainly has its hands in and on a vast amount of data!  It has the tools to make some thing out of all that data producing information, and knowledge.  It is a complicated domain that covers the problem of figuring all this out to distill a pure result for action application to accomplish purpose and objectives!  The big picture is not hard see and does not require my use of a Palantir level data base or programs to see it.

One arbitrary point of entry just to get started with a big picture look is Information Asymmetry.
The advantage of having information that another entity does not.  Information derived from data.  Information that can be related in various ways leading to production of knowledge about the nature and content of a broad spectrum of information at a macro level that involve relationships among a number of problem domains.

Think of it like a doctor relating to the human body.  A complex physical system of an instance of all human beings.  It is studied from micro to macro level. What it is and what it does.  Data about the structure and operation of a single person leads to information and knowledge.  Aggregates of individuals leads to an expanded problem domain.

It is the Information Age.  We have a window on it to extract information from data and to create knowledge that is the World Wide Web.  Everything that the WWW is and does is available to us in a limited way but available in a controlled system in an unlimited fashion to those that have permissions to access it and/or create their own access methods and tools to get it.

Selective government agencies have various degrees of data access all the way up to unlimited.  Their systems are  all protected by security systems that hide their degree of access as well as how that access is used.  The private sector has similar data access related to their commercial operations domains.  Government Intelligence is simply called Business Intelligence on the private sector side.  the Intelligence System is generally the product of public/private collaboration.  Palantir is an excellent example.  There are many other private enterprise entities operating in the same or closely related relate domain that Palantir operates.  In addition many are operating in the public/private/academic relationship domain.

Open Systems expose an amazing amount of unrestricted data and information to the general public.  The WWW also offers knowledge of how it all works from macro to micro levels.  If anyone using the WWW can gather information about any chosen entity to create some degree of knowledge about the entity by integrating public information it is astounding to think about what public and private entities with special access beyond the WWW can gather and analyze using tools created for Intelligence gathering.

Anybody can gather a vast amount of information about anybody or any entity using the WWW.  Anybody can put the information gathered together to create more information about anything to create knowledge about it.  Anybody can be an information analyst.  Anyone can do investigative research and discover interesting things about anything.  It is something that I enjoy doing.

A google search on Palantir produces more information than I could analyze in a year and the information is dynamic over time as Palantir grows.  Born in government Intelligence it has expanded to the private sector as it continues its leading edge advancement in the Intelligence sector of government agencies.  The initial link in this blog entry gives a look at where Palantir is now.

One significant thing that is obvious by omission that Palantir must be involved in, or some other company like Palantir is Financial Information Intelligence.  A tap or access into all financial transactions.  Just imagine what can be learned from that access!  Following the money is a source of Intelligence.  Laws requiring the identification of beneficial owners would seem to open the door to gathering information that links specific individuals to their ownership of assets.   I see laws that do that as beneficial and public information regarding who are the beneficial owners of anything as good.

Discovering beneficial ownership is an investigative challenge.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/02/wolf-richter-much-money-laundering-going-housing-market-lot.html

Data resources such as available at the Palantir level of Intelligence operations would discover beneficial ownership quickly.  Discovery would untangle the web that intends to hide beneficial ownership for tax evasion purposes and name names.  Lots of names.  The big names would of course be the most important to identify but the low level evaders are too numerous to deal with.  I suppose that there may be some low level evaders right in my home town.  How might they be discovered?  Is there enough open source information available to discover them?

What nefarious things are going on in my home town that can be discovered by Open Source intelligence?  What gross inefficiencies could be identified?   I wish I had Palantir level access and ability to discover that!