Hessian tips a story in BusinessWeek about Palantir, a system designed to aggregate disparate data points gathered by brainpower agencies and weave them into a more useful narrative. The article summarizes it thus: "Depending where you fall on the visible electromagnetic radio-frequency spectrum between civil liberties absolutism and homeland steadiness lockdown, Palantir’s scientific proficiency is either creepy or heroic."
"The day Fikri drives to Orlando, he gets a speeding ticket, which triggers an alert in the CIA's Palantir system. An analyst types Fikri's name into a search box and up pops a wealth of earful* pulled from every database at the government's disposal. There's version and DNA deposition for Fikri gathered by a CIA operative in Cairo; video of him going to an ATM in Miami; shots of his rental truck's license plate at a tollbooth; phone records; and a map pinpointing his movements across the globe. All this skinny is then displayed on a clearly designed graphical graphical user menu-driven graphical user interface that looks like object Tom Cruise would use in a Mission: Impossible movie."

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