Thiel company helped support NSA spy program: report

[bananas]

Source: The Hill

Billionaire Peter Thiel’s company Palantir helped support the National Security Agency’s controversial spy program XKeyscore, according to a report in The Intercept citing previously undisclosed documents from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Palantir helped build software to accelerate and increase the NSA’s use of XKeyscore, according to the documents.

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Thiel is an adviser to President Trump who has reportedly spearheaded the search for chair of the Federal Trade Commission and the antitrust head at the Justice Department.

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According to the new disclosures, Palantir has also been employed by at least three members of the intelligence alliance called “Five Eyes” that connects the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada with the United States.

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Read more: http://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurity/320592-palantir-helped-support-nsa-spy-program-xkeyscore-report

[tenorly]

1. Of course.

All sociopaths are in turn paranoid.

[bananas]

2. New details emerge about Palantirs custom software for spy agencies

https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/22/palantir-xkeyscore-gchq-kite-intercept/

New details emerge about Palantir’s custom software for spy agencies

Posted 40 minutes ago by Taylor Hatmaker (@tayhatmaker)

A new report by the Intercept provides some compelling specifics on collaboration between Palo Alto’s secretive big data shop Palantir and the intelligence agencies that it keeps on its client roster.

While some broad strokes are known about Palantir’s relationship with spy agencies, the finer points seldom see daylight. That guarantee of secrecy that no doubt aids the company’s growth into 2017, though its cozy relationship with a presidency keen on implementing aggressive policies with big opportunities for big data certainly can’t hurt either.

Palantir’s work with state-sponsored spying appears to date back to 2008, when the company demoed its software to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart to the National Security Agency (NSA). According to classified internal documents quoted in the report, Palantir made quite the impression (“We were very impressed. You need to see it to believe it.”)

Apparently, beyond kicking in early money, intelligence agencies actually worked directly with the company to develop custom software “through [an] iterative collaboration between Palantir computer scientists and analysts from various intelligence agencies over the course of nearly three years.”

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