| You should provide links to where this is "explained in great detail", rather than more vague assertions. If out of all the compromised HB Gary emails, one about sharing a license to third-party "application integration" software is the most incriminating one you can reference, that suggests a pretty flimsy case. HB Gary's entire corpus of email was compromised! Shouldn't there be at least one email from a Palantir employee showing enthusiasm about the offensive tactics, or review/approval of the deck, or something? (And how exactly would the milquetoast not-created-by-Palantir Kapow Katalyst 'application integration platform' be "used for the tactics shown in the presentation", tactics like 'disinformation', 'fake documents', and 'cyber attacks'?) Palantir's explanation remains unrefuted: that an employee gave the mistaken impression of participation in a specific effort that the company itself did not and would not support, as a matter of both policy and software capabilities. Update: Looking for a good 'explained in great detail' overview, this write-up seems credible and balanced: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/the-ridiculo... It suggests HB Gary was financially desperate to propose something big; Palantir was enticed by the size of the potential deal, but Palantir's payment demands were problematic for HB Gary. The Palantir employee(s) chasing the sale clearly knew and repeated HB Gary's dirty tactics bullet points, but it's not clear Palantir higher-ups saw the proposal as anything other than a potential large sale of their standard passive analysis stuff. I know 'misrepresentation by overzealous employee' is a convenient excuse deserving some suspicion. But I also know that such vaguely-rogue sales-motivated oversteps happen all the time, even in much smaller organizations than Palantir. |