Peter Thiel's Hush-Hush Palantir Technologies to Raise More Capital

Peter Thiel

Silicon Valley-based and venture capital darling Palantir Technologies provides an interesting case study of today's military-tech complex. The firm, founded by PayPal and Facebook zillionaire Peter Thiel, "sells software for data mining and data visualization," according to reporter Heather Somerville's recent story posted in siliconvalley.com. That bland definition gains color and form when one learns more about the enterprise's hush-hush client list. A story appearing earlier this year on techcrunch.com cited internal Palantir documents from 2013 noting the company's contractual relationships with the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, portions of the Armed Services, and the Los Angeles Police Department.

In this context, Thiel is marching in step with Amazon's notoriously secretive Jeff Bezos. As you may recall, Amazon controversially won a CIA data management contract, as well as a similar deal with NASA. Big Data's coziness and opaque contracts with the military and especially the intelligence communities should give one pause. As the Snowden revelations made clear, it's a very short step from dodgy data collection to unacknowledged data sharing.

Meanwhile, federal contracts, such as those obtained by Palantir and Amazon, are money magnets. That's why Palantir was able to land a half-billion dollars from VC investors in 2014. The siliconvalley.com story notes that Thiel's data gold mine is looking for more money, and is very likely to get it. Palantir's ability to easily obtain venture capital suggests the company may generate a financial windfall. The bet is that the firm's lucrative connections with the "military" side of the military-tech complex will become entrenched and, ironically, insulated from partisan politics.

Amazon v. IBM: The Redacted Lawsuit Over CIA Contract Publicly Available

When IBM recently persuaded the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO) to review the CIA's award of a $600 million cloud computing contract to Amazon, the corporate steam from Jeff Bezos' world headquarters could be felt even in insular Washington, D.C. Amazon did not take the GAO's review of the contract lying down. Amazon legal counsel filed suit against the United States government, of which the GAO is a part, protesting the contract review.

The court papers Amazon filed were released today; a story about Amazon's month-old, hush-hush legal snit appeared in today's Seattle Times.

The most delicious part of the story involved Amazon's assertion that IBM was essentially unworthy of winning any crumb from the CIA data management pie. Why? The sore losers from Seattle claimed that Big Blue should not be permitted to enjoy "the undeserved windfall opportunity to make its otherwise uncompetitive, materially deficient proposal competitive now that it has AWS' price and ratings in hand."

It is ironic that Amazon, which is notoriously secretive and leverages tremendous competitive advantages from its data mining and collection efforts, should complain about another firm's "early information" and ability to undercut its competitor. Mr. Bezos does not apparently like that feeling at all. Don't be surprised if there's some quiet outreach from Seattle to sympathetic ears in the Amazon-friendly Obama Administration.

Amazon Deepens Reach into Federal Contracts

In March 2013, I wrote a blog post about Jeff Bezos' Amazon juggernaut landing a contract to handle CIA data storage and related data management needs. The Seattle-based firm muscled out IBM to win the deal. IBM squawked and had the contract assignment reviewed.

Reuters reporter Alistair Barr has followed up on the contretemps. His piece, which was picked up by the Mercury News, notes the impact of the shock waves the Amazon cloud computing triumph on Old School tech firms, including "Big Blue," as IBM is sometimes known.

The story quoted some investment analysts for attribution. They noted how AWS -- the heart of Amazon's cloud computing initiative -- allegedly strongly shapes Amazon's current stock market valuation. Reuters' Barr grasps the notion that Amazon is really a tech company, an inconvenient fact most journalists ignore. To that end, his article cites AWS' impact on Oracle, cloud computing competitor Rackspace Holding, Microsoft, and other tech heavyweights.

Barr also cites some of AWS' publicly identified clients. One of them is NASA, which, as with the CIA, happens to be involved in highly classified operations. (An ironic aspect of this situation is that Jeff Bezos recently sponsored the retrieval from the Atlantic Ocean of what he claimed were Apollo 11 rockets. A related report and images appear in a gizmodo.com post.)

Another AWS client is PBS. Inquiring minds are wondering why a federally and viewer-subsidized media outlet requires Amazon's cloud computing clout. (In late 2011, PBS and Amazon signed a deal in which PBS would show some of its programming on Amazon Prime.)

What's most interesting in the increased coziness of the Obama Administration's bureaucracy and Amazon is why it's happening at all. Just don't expect that story to appear on the News Hour anytime soon.

IBM Protests Amazon-CIA Deal

Image source redacted
(Just kidding!)

It's rarely a good idea to wake up a sleeping giant. However, it appears Amazon's deal to provide data services for the Central Intelligence Agency has provoked computer and data titan IBM into action.

Big Blue, as IBM used to be known in what now seems like ancient digital history, launched a successful protest of the Amazon-CIA deal. According to the tech reporting site the register.com, IBM got the feds' General Accounting Office (GAO) into the act. Like any worthy Captain Reynaud, the GAO found reasons to compel reconsideration of the CIA agreement. (It's worth comparing notes on this story. To that end, read federaltimes.com's version of events. The site is owned by the Gannett media chain.)

Amazon's muscling into lucrative, long-term, no-questions-asked federal contracts clearly alarmed the relatively Old School corporate suite at IBM. What Amazon might not have fully considered was IBM's friends. And their friends also have friends. As the Donald Sutherland spook character in the movie JFK noted, "They fight back -- their way."

Image: forbes.com

Theregister.com post noted that IBM's protest comes at a most inconvenient time for Jeff Bezos' tech empire. Amazon may soon be tarred in the intelligence mining scandal, as Dropbox, which uses Amazon Web Services (AWS), may be fingered as another participant in the NSA data sweep.

The choicest part of theregister.com's post is its quote from the Amazon statement on the contract issue: "Providing true cloud computing services to the intelligence community requires a transformative approach with superior technology. The CIA selected AWS based on its superior technological platform..."

Report: Amazon Lands Contract to House CIA Data

Here's something to think about as you cozy up to your Kindle Reader: Amazon may soon be a CIA contractor.

As reported originally in Federal Computer Weekly and picked up by the LA Times and The Christian Science Monitor, Amazon Web Services has landed a $600 million deal to provide a cloud-computing "solution" for the intelligence service The two entities may be a perfect match, as both share a penchant for secrecy and a lust for data. The CIA at least has to undergo Congressional oversight, something Amazon often dodges artfully.

Both Amazon and the CIA also prefer storing data indefinitely. The CIA's CIO, Gus Hunt, recently told a tech-heavy gathering in New York that "connecting the dots" in intelligence gathering required the CIA to "collect everything and hang on to it forever." Amazon's M.O. is essentially the same as the spooks' approach to everyday business, except that Big A's clients and prospects offer up their data without question. The CIA just takes.

For some time, the Obama Administration has been cozy with Amazon. The Obama re-election campaign's successful use of "big data" showed the president's awareness of this tool's scope and reach. For some time, I've wondered why the Department of Justice would go out of its way to conduct investigations whose principal commercial beneficiary was unquestionably Amazon.  Of course, Amazon has the data capacity to make many things happen, even for an institution with unique needs, such as the CIA. Perhaps the calculation was that it would be best to keep Big A happy, and keep it on your side. Maybe some top-secret data business could be "accommodated" by the secretive Seattle-based firm. (Keep in mind that Amazon chief Jeff Bezos' "Blue Origin" project is building a rocket for manned space flight.)

Oh yes, for the record, neither the CIA nor Amazon would comment to the media on the reported cloud-computing contract.

CIA OKs Xe (Blackwater) Contract

Think the Big O's inside players don't know what they're doing? On the day the Prez gave McChrystal the bum's rush and brought in Petraeus as the Afghan campaign's savior, insiders leaked word of another Xe contract for security services.

Xe is the firm formerly known as Blackwater. Yes, they're still in business, well connected, and ready for action -- in all the wrong places.

Here's today's WaPo story on the topic.