[fishcakes]

Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.

These features are a deep part of the platform (i.e. they can't be turned off) that powers a lot of the other features (entity resolution / de-resolution, for example). Say what you want about the people collecting the data and the data they are collecting, but civil Liberties and privacy protections are an inseparable part of Palantir.

[jaekwon]

>> Palantir stores an audit trail that shows exactly where each piece of data comes from and who has accessed it. This allows citizens, courts, regulators, etc. to see precisely how data is being used.

What are you blabbering about? What you suggest is impossible.

Are you talking about this "immutable audit log" technology? (http://www.palantir.com/wp-content/static/pg-analysis-blog/2...) That's nothing more than marketing speak powered by research papers that have proven to be insufficient. See: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~accorsi/papers/imf09....

Also, see slide 11 and 12 here: http://www.slideshare.net/Nbukhari/audit-trail-protection-av..., and then read this: http://www.std.com/~cme/non-repudiation.htm

Immutable audit trails and non-repudiation without specialized devices (blackboxes) are a lie. It is impossible to create a bulletproof auditing system for access to sensitive data, especially when you're talking about the kind of surveillance that the NSA is doing with PRISM.

I suspect that when government officials cite the "transparency" and "auditability" of NSA PRISM, this is what it all boils down to -- marketing talk from Palantir etc.

[mlinksva]

It is really too bad people are criticizing Lessig, or he thinks he is being critisized, because "Palantir is a bad company, or that it has done bad things, or that it has been funded by bad people".

That's not the first thing that comes to mind when I read "technologies that could give us, and more importantly, reviewing courts, a very high level of confidence that data collected or surveilled was not collected or used in an improper way."

That's incredible!

[jaekwon]

More people need to know about this. I think people get lost in his prose and lose the gist of what he's really trying to do.

[mlinksva]

What do you mean by "what he's really trying to do"?

Anyway, I'm pointing out that he's making/repeating a technically incredible claim. I'm ever so slightly surprised and saddened that scrutiny of that claim isn't the focus here.

[jaekwon]

He's using the issue of copyright to condone the current direction of the surveillance state, and he is offering red herrings as "balancing" compromises.

Yes, I agree with you. I think it is because we are among the first to find it, sparked by that blog post. This seems to be the technical crux of the debate.

[mlinksva]

I doubt his aim is to condone the current direction of the surveillance state, but perhaps pursuit of "balance" plus technical credulity helps achieve the same.

[espeed]

Jeff Jonas has implemented similar systems at IBM...

Sensemaking on Streams – My G2 Skunk Works Project: Privacy by Design (PbD) (2011) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2011/02/sensemaking-...

Found: An Immutable Audit Log (2007) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2007/11/found-an-imm...

Immutable Audit Logs (IAL’s) (2006) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/02/immutable_au...

Yesterday’s Technology Review Story: Blinding Big Brother, Sort of (2006) http://jeffjonas.typepad.com/jeff_jonas/2006/01/yesterdays_t...

[djmdjm]

How can I check my data's audit trail to ensure my it wasn't misused?

[wavefunction]

>>civil Liberties and privacy protections are an inseparable part of Palantir

Other than the whole 4th Amendment thing. Everything you just described is at the very least the bare minimum for chain-of-custody.

So cheers, they aren't apparently "just making stuff up."