[MaxScheiber]

Plenty of CIA analysts are non-technical, for starters, and I would imagine the same holds for the other agencies you mentioned. One does not need to be a programmer or especially well-versed in technology to hold those jobs. I think we're splitting hairs on the definition of "non-technical," but we can both agree that parsing large amounts of data isn't the easiest thing in the world to do, especially without formal training. Palantir's software does help with the data exploration process, as their website examples and demos should show.

[ellio]

I've done money laundering and fraud investigations for financial firms. Never got to use Palantir, but I know a guy who did. He said it's basically for people who don't know how to query or code on any level. I'm not surprised either. I can count the people in my field who want to learn SAS / SQL / R / VBA / Whatever on one hand.