THE WAR APP

"Thiel, a Tolkien obsessive of long standing, named the company after the palantíri in The Lord of the Rings—the “far-seeing stones,” one of which was used by the dark lord Sauron to surveil, from his seat of power in Mordor, the inhabitants of Middle Earth. Palantir’s critics, though, are less inclined to invoke Tolkien than they are Philip K. Dick, whose short story “The Minority Report” concerns an authoritarian future society in which “precrime” detectives arrest people for crimes they have not yet carried out but merely formed the intention of committing. Here’s how Karp put it in an interview with Charlie Rose in 2009: “What we do is we use what legal scholars call predicate-based search. So we would look at you, and then we would go out and say, oh, there’s lots of different things in your life that may be indicative of someone involved in bad behavior.”

"We’re doing it! And I’m sure you’re enjoying this as much as I am…. We are crushing it…. We have dedicated our company to the service of the West, and to the United States of America…. Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world, and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them."

READ THE REVIEW BY MARK O'CONNELL