Publications

NPR, by Dina Temple-Raston, July 13, 2009.

That technique, known as data mining, hasn't been the silver bullet officials had hoped it would be, and privacy advocates say it is an affront to Americans' civil liberties, since they have no way of knowing who is looking at their personal information or whether the person looking is actually authorized to see it.

A small start-up company in California's Silicon Valley claims to have a partial solution.

"Most people in America believe you can either fight terrorism - i.e., identify and get the terrorists - or you can protect our civil liberties - i.e., make sure the government isn't looking at our personal information when they are not allowed to," says Palantir Technologies CEO Alex Karp. "And that dichotomy used to be true. We've found a way to tag information so the only people who can see it are those who are allowed to see it, so it takes care of that problem."

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