Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel speaks at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio REUTERS.
Palantir’s privacy protection: A moral stand or just good business?
Privately-developed data analysis tools are transforming the way intelligence agencies help keep our country safe. But does powerful intelligence software threaten to compromise our privacy in the name of security? Or does it instead render the trade-off between privacy and security a false choice, supporting both increased privacy and better security? Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir, is arguing for the latter. If he is right, the public debate around privacy versus security might be due for a recalibration.
Palantir Technologies provides data analysis services to a host of US government groups, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, and FBI. Its software allows agencies to integrate data stores and draw insights by connecting previously unrelated pieces of information. While the Silicon Valley company’s record of intelligence achievement is kept close to the vest, early and sustained investment from In-Q-Tel (0), the CIA’s venture capital arm, and long-term contracts across the Intelligence Community suggest that Palantir’s products are producing results (1). In response, civil liberties activists have raised the concern that the software makes possible a disturbing use of private information.
The believers: Why powerful intelligence software is good for both privacy and security
Palantir’s leaders respond to privacy concerns with characteristic audacity. Going beyond comparing substantial security gains against marginal privacy losses, the company presents itself as stewards of a revolution in privacy protection. In Thiel’s own words (2), “The government was collecting a lot of data [in the war on terrorism], more than they could analyze. If we could help them make sense of data, they could end indiscriminate surveillance.”
Thiel’s efforts to brand Palantir as pro-privacy are supported by two related but distinct features of the market for intelligence software. First, as Thiel’s remark suggests, a tool which analyzes data with increased power and precision is less likely to encourage surveillance of data irrelevant to security interests or produce false insights about innocent individuals. Demand for effective analysis encourages firms to build software that is efficiently indifferent to useless information.
Second, certain features of Palantir’s software have the happy side effect of easing privacy concerns. Because the software is most valuable for Palantir’s clients when it can be applied to large stores of data, Palantir has an interest in encouraging data sharing between agencies and organizations. But concerns about liability and proper jurisdiction often discourage agencies from sharing information. So to help overcome these barriers, Palantir’s software comes with built-in audit logs, which monitor and record all user activity, and access controls, which make it possible to limit who has access to which aspects of the data. Furthermore, because information sharing requires that agencies trust the reliability and immutability of these safeguards, Palantir has an interest in making them impossible to override. So while these features facilitate data sharing, they also strengthen privacy by making intelligence agencies more transparent and giving lawmakers and overseers the means to hold rogue actors accountable.
The mechanisms of a free market for intelligence software therefore seem to discourage surveillance of irrelevant information and favor a transparent and reliable surveillance record. And if these features encourage increased data collection and sharing, they also protect against invasive surveillance and indiscriminate sharing in times of heightened security risk. The trade-off between privacy and security thus becomes a false choice — developed by private firms, the best security tools also create the best conditions for privacy protection.
The skeptics: How Palantir’s technology spells danger for civil liberties
Palantir’s software has nonetheless drawn strong criticism from civil liberties advocates. American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) analyst Jay Stanley said (3) the software makes possible “a true totalitarian nightmare, monitoring the activities of innocent Americans on a mass scale,” a worry amplified by the Obama administration’s recent push to expand the NSA’s permission (4) to share unprocessed surveillance information. These privacy concerns trade on a clear logic: if data tools are so powerful that mundane shreds of personal information become the practicable missing pieces of national security puzzles, local and national intelligence agencies have an incentive to collect as much of that personal information as possible and to share it liberally.
Palantir has already been linked to real-world surveillance methods that fit this Orwellian narrative. The LAPD uses Palantir’s software (5) to analyze its database of photographic license plate records — photographs snapped from police cruisers and which incidentally capture details such as the car’s location or the kids playing nearby in the yard. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU’s suit over automated collection of license-plate data by the LAPD awaits review by the California Supreme Court (6).
When can we trust the industry to protect our privacy?
It is hard to deny Jay Stanley’s concern that benevolent use of technology like Palantir’s can only be assured by the hands it falls into — and that in the wrong hands the possibilities are scary. In response to these concerns, Thiel and Palantir CEO Alex Karp have often stressed that theirs are the right hands on the basis of their credentials as public intellectuals — Thiel as a libertarian (7) deeply committed to individual freedom and a limited state, Karp as a former neo-Marxist philosopher and self-proclaimed “deviant” with a personal interest in protecting privacy (8). But Palantir’s recent valuation means the two entrepreneurs are now worth a combined 4.3 billion dollars. Their privacy concerns are perhaps most credible, then, when they are supported by the logic of market forces.
Footnotes
- http://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/12/the-cia-backed-start-up-thats-taking-over-palo-alto.html
- http://www.ibtimes.com/palantir-technologies-big-data-firm-purportedly-helped-kill-bin-laden-just-raised-50-1752440
- http://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-revenue-and-bookings-2016-3
- https://www.aclu.org/blog/speakeasy/beware-data-miners-offering-protection
- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/us/politics/obama-administration-set-to-expand-sharing-of-data-that-nsa-intercepts.html
- http://www.laweekly.com/news/forget-the-nsa-the-lapd-spies-on-millions-of-innocent-folks-4473467
- http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/general-news/20150821/lawsuit-over-license-plate-scanners-heading-to-california-supreme-court
- http://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian
- http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/#10d7a67e3da8
Related Articles
BitTorrent Inc.’s business: More “piracy” than “privacy”?
BitTorrent, Inc. recently launched a new ad campaign aimed at branding their services as privacy tools. BitTorrent distributes...
The breeze from Silicon Valley: What real-life entrepreneurs can teach Washington
Over the past month, I’ve had the good luck to sit up on a stage at AEI and spend...
Surveillance versus privacy: The conflict extends far beyond Apple versus and the FBI
Today, American IT companies find themselves caught in the midst of conflicting directives that pit the need for surveillance...
For Americans, cybersecurity outweighs privacy
According to a recent analysis by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), Americans are limiting their...