While there is extensive infrastructure for detecting active transmitting devices like Stingrays, there's no discussion (or tooling) around passive IMSI grabbers. These devices are significantly more limited (no IMEI or MSISDN, GSM-only), they remain pretty effective in areas/networks where GSM is still in place.
For what it's worth, PBS has an app[1] for Apple TV, and it has much of PBS' content.
With that said, the general problem of certain services being restricted from/to specific platforms is extremely frustrating, and will only get more painful as exclusives become common.
I'm not convinced this localization argument holds so much water. Consider the following:
Case 1: If you're using a search engine not based in the US, and you're not a US person, then the NSA probably can't use any legal tools against you (depending on country). However, the NSA is allowed to use the full range of its capabilities to collect against you (PPD28 notwithstanding). They can infiltrate that service by technical or human means and carry out espionage activity without legal restriction (Title 50/EO12333). Further, they can retain the data unredacted for a long time.*
Case 2: On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a US person and you're using a US-based search engine, surveillance activities against you are far more complex. Warrants, NSLs, and/or other legal paperwork is involved, and there are strict rules on data retention, sharing, and minimization. That's not to say that there isn't surveillance, just that it comes with substantially more overhead. Meanwhile, most of the NSA's technical exploitation approaches are off-limits, and any collection/exploitation activity must be carefully managed.
Case 3: The intermediate case, where you're a non-US person using a US service, is a bit more hairy but still is better than the first case. While the NSA/FBI can utilize a range of legal tools (again, warrants, NSLs, etc) against you, because your data is likely entangled with US-persons data, it must also deal with all the overhead of minimizing and redacting that data (same as case 2). Similarly, the use of technical means against US providers is heavily restricted, so you won't be fighting against the same capabilities as you would be in case 1.
At the end of the day, which do you think is easier for the engineers at NSA: exploiting, entering, and just taking everything (case 1) or filling out a huge amount of paperwork and carefully handling the redacted scraps of data that comes back from the provider eventually (cases 2 and 3)?
I think you can make an argument for either side, but I tend to believe that technical exploitation is easier than legal, for now.
*Caveat here is that this intelligence data is hard[er] to use in US law enforcement activity against you. It's worth noting, however, that NSLs and FISA data are also non-trivial.
Maybe I'm just out of the loop, but the author doesn't make it clear what exactly is objectionable about Palantir with respect to privacy issues. That's not to say that there isn't anything, but just that it would be helpful to have a synopsis of what exactly they're doing wrong.
I understand that they do work with governments, but that's as much as I've seen in the press. There has been far wider discussion of the privacy challenges facing Facebook and Google.
Among other things, Palantir enjoys exorbitant privilege due to its ties with the US government and its "intelligence" tentacles. It is stands to reason that there is little or no firewall between the taxpayer funded technology/data assets that Palantir has amassed and what they are marketing to private industry. As a state sponsored entity, the burden should be placed on them to ensure transparency, and they should not be given the benefit of the doubt if they fail to assuage such implications.
Additionally, it might be good to understand the mentality of an activist or even just a person that is passionate about something. For instance, if you are anti-war, there is no such thing as an ethical defense contractor. If you are an anarchist, there is no such thing as a just government. If you are an activist against "surveillance capitalism" it stands to reason that there is no "good" enterprise that comes out of In-Q-Tel.
They collect health and financial data on people to help health insurance companies deny claim to people who want their medical expense reimbursed. And they are suspected to be in the chain of data (probably phone data collection and mining) to drone people in Yemen and Afghanistan.
In this case, it's appropriate. Palantir doesn't "collect health and financial data on people", and I've never seen anything in the press that suggests they do.
Well, how do you do health care insurance fraud detection without data when your expertise is big data? they might technically just create and manage collection and storage tools for others, but the end goal is that grandpa can't get his cancer treatment reimbursed thanks to data that has been collected on him with the help of Palantir.
Sure. Palantir, like other successful enterprise software companies, has a variety of large, enterprisey customers. But saying that Palantir collects health and financial data on people sounds super scary, when in fact Palantir isn't in the data collection business in the first place.
It's not really though. The "citation please" is usually the first punch in a one-two of cite/attack-source. Palantir analyzes, yes, not collect. But what is done with that data is not exactly innocent either.
"Citation please" is a gentle reminder - that pops up whenever someone spouts some unfounded or unverifiable opinion - for people doing so in future to please save us all time and give a source upfront. And from what I've seen, it is usually only applied to comments that can't be backed up.
Maybe that was a kneejerk on my part. There are times its useful, and in the cold decontextualized space of "online" it can be hard to read. I just want to note it's also used as a kind of attack, often on things that, as the poster I was attempting to support noted, could be discovered with literally the time it takes to open another browser tab.
you know that precise documentation of the exact role of Palantir in the drone attacks could lead you to jail? Palantir works in Yemen, works with all the agencies involved in drone attacks, has the perfect tools to find a phone to lock a hellfire on according to the quite lax US definition of "terrorist", and is always bragging about its role in the US wars abroad. So yes, every time I hear about Palantir, I suppose they were involved in the bombing of a wedding or of an EMT crew in a far away country, if they did not want to be associated with that, they can cut all their ties with the US wars on brown people, or publicly declare that they are just managing the meals and cleaning supplies.
You're getting downvoted but this is a critique thats getting more and more valid, especially around topics that are more likely to provoke emotional responses, like politics, surveillance, etc.
Palantir started as a data intelligence firm focusing on predictive analysis, shopping its wares to the government. They have gotten really, really, really amazing at predictive data and are now moving into the private sector, selling predictive analysis tools to healthcare, insurance, security, etc for all kinds of applications.
Palantir has technologies that see everything, scrape everything, and store everything. They are not public with all of their products or capabilities, and their choice of bedfellows doesn't inspire confidence that they are altruistic with regards to who they do business with. From what I've heard by way of one-off comments and drunken bragging from people who work/have worked their, their capabilities are far beyond even the remotest of media speculation.
Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In the last five years, Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, with a slick software interface and coders who parachute into clients’ headquarters to customize its programs. Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called “forward-deployed engineers” a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer’s data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.
Palantir’s advisors include Condoleezza Rice and former CIA director George Tenet, who says in an interview that “I wish we had a tool of its power” before 9/11. General David Petraeus, the most recent former CIA chief, describes Palantir to FORBES as “a better mousetrap when a better mousetrap was needed” and calls Karp “sheer brilliant.”
Among those using Palantir to connect the dots are the Marines, who have deployed its tools in Afghanistan for forensic analysis of roadside bombs and predicting insurgent attacks. The software helped locate Mexican drug cartel members who murdered an American customs agent and tracked down hackers who installed spyware on the computer of the Dalai Lama. In the book The Finish, detailing the killing of Osama bin Laden, author Mark Bowden writes that Palantir’s software “actually deserves the popular designation Killer App.” [1]
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Clients include the Los Angeles Police Department which used Palantir to parse and connect 160 data sets: Everyone from detectives to transit cops to homeland security officials uses Palantir at the LAPD. According to the document, Palantir provides a timeline of events and has helped the massive police department sort its records.
As of 2013, Palantir was used by at least 12 groups within the US Government including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED-defeat organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services were planning on pilot testing the use of Palantir in 2013 to investigate tips received through a hotline. A second test was run by the same organization to identify potentially fraudulent medical providers in the Southern region of the US.
The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir. In fact, cyber analysts working for the now-defunct Information Warfare Monitor used the system to mine data on the China-based cyber groups GhostNet and The Shadow Network.[2]
From my vantage point, Palantir appears to be an amusing house of cards.
The gossip on this coast, where most of their government and corporate overlords live, is much less rosy.
Basically, any civilian agency that gets told it needs a "data science" or "predictive analytics" capability from the executive Cyber initiatives just buys what the law enforcement and intelligence guys bought. Silicon Valley is also widely believed to be superior to the local scene.
These factors drive a cycle of government purchase leading to sweetheart maintenance deals leading to product validation leading to more government purchases.
Their "forward deployed engineers" are what the rest of us call "software development consultants." Their tool stack is a series of pretty visualizations over a typical data lake setup.
It is designed to be accessed by techs (analysts) and not devs. The essential algos were forked from Paypal's fraud detection code. Their products (Gotham, Metropolis, etc.) are all derivatives of that initial decade-old effort.
Palantir is still just a $250 mil revenue, zero profit startup. It runs on private investment cash that it will never be able to afford to repay, absent continued infusions of revenue from a confused government patron.
Their CEO announced in 2013 they won't IPO because disclosure rules for public company reporting requirements would make "running a company like [Palantir] very difficult".
My sense is that they'll never IPO because it would collapse the company.
If they truly have insider government backing, they may never collapse for the same reason as GM, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, etc. If your backer is a state with access to a printing press, failure is synonymous with either failure of said state or loss of political favor. Such entities are de-facto government agencies and are not subject to the normal rules of economics.
From the government's POV the advantage of creating and sustaining these kinds of private sector de-facto government agencies is that by being nominally private they escape reams of government red tape as well as FOIA and congressional oversight requirements. You get all the (ironically) privacy benefits of being private but are still more or less a government agency. It's basically a cut-out. The CIA is fairly well known to do this a lot since it also lets them conduct domestic operations that are technically forbidden to them. It's also done for a lot of black project government R&D to exempt said projects from disclosure requirements that would bust their secrecy.
As with all government activities, whether this practice is "evil" or not depends quite a bit on the details of what is being done and why. Federal red tape is so onerous that to some extent you have to escape it to get certain kinds of work done at all.
I don't know just how in bed Palantir is, but they certainly seem to be such an entity from an outsider's perspective.
If your backer is a state with access to a printing press, failure is synonymous with either failure of said state or loss of political favor. Such entities are de-facto government agencies and are not subject to the normal rules of economics.
Very true. It makes me sad when people continue to refer to the USA as a capitalist country, especially in the context of a criticism of capitalism.
Neither the F-35B nor the F-35C carries a gun. The USAF's F-35A is the only model affected by this issue.
Also, the Marines want the STOVL F-35B for operation on LHA/LHDs, as well as small island bases with short/limited runways. It's not just the ski-jumping Brits who want that feature.
With that said, you're right that the STOVL capability has added substantial complexity to the airframe.
That's the problem, the Marines want to field their own superfluous air force. USN carriers routinely go to sea with understrength airwings, its not as if there's not enough room on CVNs to support Marine F-35Cs.
Eh, something like a F/A-18 has somewhat short range but the Super Hornet is better in that regard and there's always mid-air refueling. It simply doesn't make sense to jeopardize the success of the backbone of American airpower for a mission capability that is niche.
I mean, when has the Harrier ever been the difference between success and failure for a USMC operation? Sure it's nice, but it's also a jet that is very difficult to fly and prone to crashes.
The Super Hornet has something like a 350 mile radius with a "normal" strike package. That's not very much, and it gets worse every year as US carrier fleets are forced further into blue water to deal with the latest Moskit descendants.
That's why the Navy is so hot to develop the X-47 into something they can deploy.
If refueling aircraft are available then far more capable land-based aircraft should have been used anyway.
As far as when the Harrier has made the difference, well, we haven't fought many pitched battles lately, so it's hard to say. But you can't design a military with the idea you'll never have to fight a pitched battle.
EDIT: By the way, one of the advantages of the F-35B is supposed to be that its design is inherently less crash prone. We'll see.
> As far as when the Harrier has made the difference, well, we haven't fought many pitched battles lately, so it's hard to say. But you can't design a military with the idea you'll never have to fight a pitched battle.
That's the thing though, by shoehorning that VSTOL requirement into the program, we've made the F35A and F35C significantly worse aircraft. That in turn may mean that we may end up in a more difficult conflict because of the shortcomings of the aircraft.
Sure, if at all possible you want your military to be able to handle all scenarios. But truth is that the budget is not unlimited (as the USSR found out) so you have to distribute your eggs such that you get the best capabilities for the most likely scenarios.
I'm sure the F-35B will be less crash prone than the Harrier as well as more capable. I just don't think the costs justify it.
Marine squadrons routinely fly off CVNs with their F/A-18 Hornets. Institutionally, they have a long memory of not having carrier support in WW2, so they cling to this notion of operating their own air force.
For more details on exactly why the USMC is so afraid of being without carrier support, see accounts of the Battle of Guadalcanal. I recommend "Helmet For My Pillow" by Robert Leckie, which was also one of the books used as a basis for the HBO miniseries "The Pacific".
If you find the work in cancer interesting, it's worth looking into a few commercial outfits that are doing this type of testing:
* Genomic Health ($GHDX) with OncotypeDX
* Foundation Medicine ($FMI) with FoundationOne
Both of these companies have tests on the market that analyze tumor genomes (sequencing or microarray-based) and provide information to oncologists to better treat their patients. Information like drug efficacy and tumor aggressiveness (requiring chemo-/radiotherapy).
I completely agree. IMO email is the correct platform for this service, not text messaging. I often perform this exact workflow manually by walking over to a colleague's desk: "Can you look over this email to <sensitive client> before I send it?"
Your explanation is clever and could account for most of the behavior of the product. Certainly the environments, rapid booting, and even hot resizing.
What's missing, however, is how they do machine state snapshots (not supported in any container system afaik). I know Xen/VMWare support these, but if they are running atop AWS they will not have access to the hypervisor. I can imagine kludgily running another hypervisor atop AWS, but there would appear to be a more clever solution.
Xen/VMWare also support hot resizing of CPU and RAM.
What's interesting is that neither LXC nor Docker support memory snapshots (machine state), which Terminal.com has demonstrated. Xen, KVM, and VMWare do, but I can't really imagine people running these atop AWS infrastructure (Xen underneath).
Your demos show impressive speed in booting, machine resizing, and snapshotting. Kudos.
With that said, several hypervisors do support hot-resizing, snapshotting, and cross machine migration. Xen has excellent hot resize support, where VMWare has pushed hard for live migration and proper snapshotting over the years.
