Peter Thiel Was Asked About Palantir & Terrorism.

In 2014, Peter Thiel did a interview with Bloomberg. Palantir was still a private company, subsidized by the CIA with funding, and gaining merit across the intelligence community.

The origins of Palantir date back to 2003. Alex Karp, current CEO and cofounder, openly admits that Palantir was created as a response to 9/11.

The government did not have the technology in place to allow different agencies to cross communicate and share data that was meant to be seen and protect data that wasn't - and as a result were unable to communicate in some of the country's most crucial moments.

If Palantir could create that technology along with identifying patterns within big sets of data, they may actually have a shot of creating a world class counter-terrorism product.

Peter Theil was asked about if Palantir had ever played a role in this fight - here's what he said.

Emily Chang: "To take down the islamic state and terror threats rising in europe australia and potentially right here in the united states could technology be the key to stopping the next major attack paypal co-founder and venture capitalist peter thiel the co-founder of another company called palantir certainly thinks so i spoke with teal about the technology behind palantir and whether it could help stop the next 911."

Peter Thiel:

"Something like Palantir is the key to to stopping major terrorist attacks I don't think we're going to do it by projecting military force throughout the world I think we will do it by sort of very cleverly uncovering um uncovering these conspiracies before they they come together."

Now the the point Peter is making there is the point Alex Karp which is that palantir was created in response to 911. A lot of the creation logic was rooted in the idea that governmental agencies like the FBI and the CIA that are not able to share data with each other but that still have to cross-communicate with each other so there's certain data that is confidential to each of those agencies they can't be shared but there's other forms of data that do need to be cross-communicated in order for pattern recognition to happen in order to figure out if something is happening if there is a terrorist attack that is occurring.

So you need a very sophisticated piece of technology that can centralize all that data exchange that data in a mutually beneficial symbiotic way but protect the data that is not supposed to be shared because some stuff from the CIA is not supposed to go to the FBI

That's why Thiel is talking about how there needs to be some type of technology that is going to do it but it's not going to be monitoring things that are going around the world it's using artificial intelligence and advanced simulation models to figure out when bad things will happen.

Continuing the interview - this is where Emily asks him about if Palantir can be mis used and what he says may surprise you.

Emily: "Some have expressed concern that your clients could actually use palantir to do evil things do you worry about that?"

Peter: Uh it's always there's always a two-edged uh part part to these technologies you know technologies are are never intrinsically good they can all there's always a question how they can be used or abused i do think there are a lot of checks in place in palantir someone described it as it's kind of like plugging into the matrix you know one government agency that gave us a bunch of data and uh during the demo we discovered a terrorist plot that they had not even suspected existed and it led them to conclude they had to reclassify all sorts of data as classified.

Emily: "So would you say that Palantir has helped thwart multiple terrorist plots?"

Peter: "I suspect that's true."

You can watch the full video of it here.

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