Ένα startup της Silicon Valley, πολλαπλασιαστής ισχύος στο κυνήγι του OBL

2012-12-24 22:27:15

Απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο του Mark Bowden - The Finish

"Poindexter’s concept did more than survive. It would come to undergird the entire war effort: storing every scrap of intel about al Qaeda and related groups gathered by the nation’s very active military and spy agencies, transforming them into data, and then plumbing that data for leads. The hunt for bin Laden and others eventually drew on an unfathomably rich database, accessible to anyone in the world with the proper security clearance, whether a marine officer at an outpost in Afghanistan or a team of analysts working in Langley. Sifting through it required software capable of ranging deep and fast and with keen discernment—a problem the government itself proved less effective at solving than were teams of young software engineers in Silicon Valley.

A start-up called Palantir, for instance, came up with a program that elegantly accomplished what TIA (Total Information Awareness) had set out to do. Founded in 2004 by Alex Karp and Peter Thiel—the latter is the billionaire cocreator of Paypal and an early Facebook investor—Palantir developed a product that actually deserves the popular designation Killer App.

Newly minted software engineers from the best computer schools in the country were put up in a seven-thousand-square-foot workspace in Palo Alto. It was stocked with junk food and video games and nicknamed “the Shire,” the home of the Hobbits in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. (The company itself is named after a magical stone in the Tolkien saga that confers special powers of sight and communication.)

The software produced from this very unlikely source would help turn America’s special forces into deadly effective hunters. Palantir is now worth billions, and has contracts with, among others, the CIA, the NSA, the Defense Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the FBI, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Department of Homeland Security."

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