Kudos to Palantir from the GAO
Last Updated on Wednesday, 9 December 2009 11:37 Written by Jeffreycarr Wednesday, 9 December 2009 11:37
This is probably as close as the General Accounting Office would ever come to endorsing a product (I’m guessing that they don’t give endorsements). Since I receive quite a few inquiries about whether or not Palantir is “really” that good of a product, I thought I’d reproduce this news as a way of sending my congratulations to all of the passionate, hard-working folks at Palantir Technologies. You guys have really earned this.
RATB Highly Successful at Overseeing Stimulus
The Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board (RATB) oversees spending under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009. At the center of the Board’s oversight efforts is the Recovery Operations Center (ROC). Recent reports have highlighted success stories at the ROC that emerged from advanced analytical software the Board’s staff of investigators uses.
The Government Accountability Office reports:
The Recovery Operations Center provides two core functions—predictive analytics and in-depth risk analysis….According to Board staff, the results provide oversight authorities with information to focus limited resources on cities, regions, and high-risk government programs where historical data and current trends suggest the likelihood of future risk.
The Board found success early on using the analysis software. Within two weeks the Board was running investigations into likely fraud based on the insights discovered through our in-depth analysis software. The GAO concluded:
“We believe the activities of the board, and in particular the predictive analysis effort, are a positive step in coordinating and marshaling the resources of the inspector general community to strengthen the oversight of federal spending.”
The story was picked up by Nextgov.com, which reported:
The technology analyzes expansive amounts of data on the recipients of Recovery Act funds to filter out relationships between communities, programs and contractors that past events indicate could present a risk of wrongdoing. The software synthesizes data from court and criminal records, news articles, previous agency audits, confidential law enforcement data and other public sources to uncover nonobvious relationships between parties.
Until the government bought the software in October, federal inspectors did not have a central system capable of connecting the dots between repeat instances of project mismanagement. “This is a big advance for the IG community,” said GAO Director John Needham.
Palantir is proud to be the analysis platform at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board. Our advanced analysis platform enables in depth analysis and predictive resource allocation. This allows the community to leverage a unified view of data to investigate illicit activity where it occurs today and understand where it is likely to occur in the future.
See what else Palantir is doing in the oversight community and beyond:
- Preventing Fraud, Waste, and Abuse: http://www.palantirtech.com/government/videos/stim-reg
- Analyzing Mortgage Fraud: http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/mortgage-fraud
- Investigating Insider Trading: http://www.palantirtech.com/government/analysis-blog/sec-trader-oversight
- Analyze The US: https://AnalyzeThe.US – Try Palantir applied to Data.Gov from your PC right now
The Weekend Brief
Last Updated on Saturday, 28 November 2009 09:16 Written by Jeffreycarr Saturday, 28 November 2009 09:16
The holiday weekend notwithstanding, a lot is going on. Here’s some of the more interesting stories in my newsreader to tide you over until Monday, when I’ll be announcing the start of a weekly series of reports that I’m very excited about.
- “Let’s taste it.” This is one of those interesting translations that comes from machine translation software. In this case, it’s the recommendation of a Bulgarian poster on Russian hacker forum Форум АНТИЧАТ who posted about SHODAN, a new search engine which enables users to find servers by type, country, host name and port. Richard at Taosecurity has some concerns about it.
- Cool video demo of Palantir’s use in cyber security analysis is up at the Palantirtech blog.
- Nikita Borovikov, leader of the Russian youth organization Nashi, is upset over the dismantling of historical statues in Tashkent, Uzbekistan and plans a protest there. It will be interesting to see if there are any DDoS attacks against Tashkent websites in the near future similar to those launched against Estonian websites (also over a statue issue).
- DST sold an undisclosed percentage of its shares of the hugely profitable Mail.ru and Astrum Online to Naspers. It’ll be interesting to see where Yuri Milner (CEO of DST) decides to reinvest the proceeds of the sale – acquiring more shares of Facebook stock perhaps?
- Perhaps this proposed Canadian law will force ISP providers to start paying attention to who they sell their services to and what type of data they’re hosting. That would be a welcome change from the present situation of some ISPs shrugging their shoulders and taking the position of “if you find it, we’ll take it down – maybe”.
Have a good weekend. See you Monday.
The Democratization of Espionage
Last Updated on Thursday, 13 August 2009 08:15 Written by Jeffreycarr Thursday, 13 August 2009 08:15
Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir Technologies, was on The Charlie Rose Show recently and delivered a metaphor that describes what the Internet has done to traditional spycraft:
“Software and technology has democratized espionage.”
We often think of this new turn of events from the perspective of a country on the receiving end, but the reverse is also true. During my briefing at DIA I pointed out the tremendous opportunity that exists for identifying, friending, and recruiting technologists and members of the Armed Forces of foreign states through social networks. This is a covert activity that is as old as warfare itself, but never has it been this easy to do with nothing more than free open source applications and some technical know-how.
I was also pleasantly surprised by a video that Palantir recently created demonstrating how Project Grey Goose used Palantir’s analytic platform in its investigation of the Russia Georgia cyber war last year.
A shortened YouTube version of the Karp interview is available for viewing in case the Charlie Rose Web site is unavailable.
Inside Cyber Warfare
