This tie will make sense at the end, but first you must understand Palantir's involvement in Project Romas/COIN, and how it was leaked to the media.

2011: Leak of Project Romas/COIN = Operation Mockingbird for Social Media

• CEO of HBGary Federal Aaron Barr claimed to have identified by name the "leadership of Anonymous" through the infiltration of an Anonymous chat group in 2011. Notably, the founder and admin of the group was named "Q".

• The next day, this group publically humiliated Barr by releasing his personal data as well that of HBGary Federal, releasing tens of thousands of company emails.

• These emails revealed a project known as Romas/COIN. The program appears to allow for the large-scale monitoring of social networks by way of such things as natural language processing, semantic analysis, latent semantic indexing, and IT intrusion. At the same time, it also entails the dissemination of some unknown degree of information to a given population through a variety of means – without any hint that the actual source is US intelligence.

• The program was ongoing for at least two years, previously worked on by Northrop Grumman, and was very secretive. How secretive? Watch this video where a reporter calls to ask about the program and is completely shut down (https: // www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhvS0Jn8r9w). The recording was taken down by YouTube, forcing him to put up a video where he reads the transcript.

Why the secrecy surrounding project Romas/COIN?

• Mobile phone software and applications constitute a major component of the program. Apple and Google were active team partners, and AT&T may have been as well. The latter is known to have provided the NSA free reign over customer communications (and was in turn protected by a bill granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits). Google itself is the only company to have received a "Hostile to Privacy" rating from Privacy International. Apple is currently being investigated by Congress after the iPhone was revealed to compile user location data in a way that differs from other mobile phones; the company has claimed this to have been a "bug."

• The program makes use of several providers of "linguistic services." There are sporadic references such things as "semantic analysis," "Latent Semantic Indexing," "specialized linguistics," and OPS, a programming language designed for solving problems using expert systems.

• Alterion and SocialEyez are listed as "businesses to contact." The former specializes in "social media monitoring tools." The latter uses "sophisticated natural language processing methodology" in order to "process tens of millions of multi-lingual conversations daily" while also employing "researchers and media analysts on the ground;" its website also notes that "Millions of people around the globe are now networked as never before - exchanging information and ideas, forming opinions, and speaking their minds about everything from politics to products."

Why should we be concerned?

• In addition to being the driving force behind project Romas/COIN, Aaron Barr was also at the center of a series of conspiracies by which his own company and two others hired out their collective capabilities for use by corporations that sought to destroy their political enemies by clandestine and dishonest means, some of which appear to be illegal. None of the companies involved have been investigated; a proposed Congressional inquiry was denied by the committee chair.

• One of these conspiracies was a plot to attack WikiLeaks on behalf of a law firm, the plan ecompassed tracking and intimidating anyone who had given money to WikiLeaks, writing in an email "the security firms need to get people to understand that if they support the organization we will come after them. Transaction records are easily identifiable.” The emails also show that Barr suggested pressuring journalist Glenn Greenwald, though Palantir, another firm working with HBGary Federal. Palantir quickly accepted that suggestion and added it to the PowerPoint presentation that the group was assembling.

• An upgrade to project Romas/COIN named Odyssey was schedulued for late 2011. The top contender to win the federal contract and thus take over the program is a team of about a dozen companies which were brought together in large part by Aaron Barr. One of those companies was Palantir.

• Palantir was rumored to have helped to kill Osama bin Laden, who died May 2, 2011. This is notable as Project Romas/COIN's area of operation was the Arab world, allowing the intelligence community to monitor the habits, conversations, and activity of millions of individuals at once.

• Around this time Palantir's valuation ballooned, from $735 million in April-May 2011 (44) to (according to unidentified TechCrunch sources) $2.5 billion in August-September (45). Then in 2013 it leapt from $6 billion in September to $9 billion by November-December (13).

• "It is inevitable, then, that such capabilities as form the backbone of Romas/COIN and its replacement Odyssey will be deployed against a growing segment of the world's population. The powerful institutions that wield them will grow all the more powerful as they are provided better and better methods by which to monitor, deceive, and manipulate. The informed electorate upon which liberty depends will be increasingly misinformed. No tactical advantage conferred by the use of these programs can outweigh the damage that will be done to mankind in the process of creating them."

Palantir background

• Funded by the CIA via In-Q-Tel, and is now one of the most valuable private companies in tech (valued at $20 billion). The CEO has no plans on going public, as that would make "running a company like ours very difficult".

• Advisors include Condoleezza Rice, former CIA director George Tenet, and John Poindexter (director of DARPA Information Awareness Office, the symbol for which is an all seeing eye)

• In 2011 the EFF Pioneer Awards were sponsored by Palantir. The conflict of interest between the EFF and Palantir was striking, and online privacy and freedom activists duly took the EFF to task for taking Palantir’s money. The EFF responded by saying that it doesn’t matter whose money they take, and that such arrangements in no way compromise their mission.

• Emails indicate that Eric Schmidt's daughter Sophie once suggested that Cambridge Analytica's parent company work with Palantir. Cambridge Analytica later developed a relationship with a Palantir staffer that produced the idea to use an app to harvest Facebook user data.

• Go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, turning messy swamps of information into intuitively visualed maps, histograms, and link charts. A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least twelve groups within the U.S. government, including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint Improvised-Threat Defeat Organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. In addition to this, last month Palantir won a $876 Million U.S. Army Contract.

• Palantir’s work with state-sponsored spying appears to date back to 2008, when the company demoed its software to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British counterpart to the National Security Agency (NSA). According to classified internal documents quoted in the report, Palantir made quite the impression (“We were very impressed. You need to see it to believe it.”) According to an Intercept's report, by 2010, three members of the "Five Eyes" spy alliance between the US, the UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand were making use of Palantir to help collect and process data from across the globe.

• Palantir developed a product named XKEYSCORE helper, a tool programmed by Palantir (and thoroughly stamped with XKEYSCORE's logo) that allowed analysts to essentially analyze data from the NSA’s XKEYSCORE. According to Snowden documents published by The Guardian in 2013, XKEYSCORE is by the NSA’s own admission its “widest reaching” program, capturing “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” A subsequent report by The Intercept showed that XKEYSCORE’s “collected communications not only include emails, chats, and web-browsing traffic, but also pictures, documents, voice calls, webcam photos, web searches, advertising analytics traffic, social media traffic, botnet traffic, logged keystrokes, computer network exploitation targeting, intercepted username and password pairs, file uploads to online services, Skype sessions, and more.” This would allow people using the surveillance programme to identify social connections and ideological groupings, by examining people's online activities, including monitoring social media accounts, and then presumably pass it to fellow analysts or Five Eyes intelligence partners.

• Develops a product named Prism, which Palantir describes as "a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases". This sparked controversy when the Snowden leaks revealed the PRISM program, which allows the NSA to tap directly into the central servers of 9 big Internet companies: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple. A source told the Post that with PRISM, the NSA can "quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type." To be able to do that, the NSA would need some seriously impressive "big data" tools to analyze the terabytes of messages, videos, images, and metadata streaming through. Palantir denies Prism and PRISM are the same program, however it does not deny creating XKEYSCORE helper, something that would be used alongside XKEYSCORE and the PRISM database.

Alex Karp (CEO of Palantir) background

• Supported Hillary Clinton for president and said in a leaked video from a 2015 staff meeting that "it would be hard to make up someone I find less appealing" than Trump.

• Publicly listed as being on the steering committee of Bilderberg.

• Alex Karp said “I was less radical than my parents but I was somewhat of a fond reader of Marx". He also apparently has an internal video channel called KarpTube where he addresses employees on such topics as greed, integrity and Marxism.

Palantir's ties to Facebook

Facebook was once a neighbor—directly across the street—of Palantir, at 156 University Avenue in Palo Alto. Peter Thiel, who sits on Facebook's board of directors and has mentored Mark Zuckerberg for close to a decade, is a co-founder of Palantir—though that detail is omitted from his bio on the board's website. Sean Parker, Facebook's notorious first president and another earlier investor, created the VC firm Founder's Fund along with Thiel—and yes, it invests in Palantir. As Facebook has spread into the brains of a billion users and completely saturated the United States, it's become one of the NSA's top targets via PRISM: Federal spies have “continued exponential growth in [surveillance] tasking to Facebook," says the Washington Post, and federal intel analysts enjoy "extensive search and surveillance capabilities against the variety of online social networking services.

Furthermore former Cambridge Analytica employee-turned-whistleblower Chris Wylie testified two weeks ago to U.K. lawmakers that Palantir helped Cambridge Analytica by building algorithms using the Facebook data. “We actually had several meetings with Palantir,” Wylie said. “There were senior Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data. That was not an official contract between Palantir and CA, but there were Palantir staff who would come into the office and work on the data. And we would go and meet with Palantir staff at Palantir.” Palantir disputed Wylie’s claims and said although Cambridge Analytica sought to engage on “multiple” occasions, Palantir always shot down the offer. One employee didn’t though. “We learned today that an employee, in 2013-2014, engaged in an entirely personal capacity with people associated with Cambridge Analytica."

Carol Davidsen, director of data integration and media analytics for the Obama campaign said said she built a database of every American voter by using the same Facebook tool that Cambridge Analytica exploited to amass information on 50 million users. Facebook allowed them to access the personal data of its users in 2011 because the social media giant was “on our side. They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side. Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing,” she said on Twitter. “We ingested the entire U.S. social graph,” Davidsen told the Washington Post. “We would ask permission to basically scrape your profile, and also scrape your friends, basically anything that was available to scrape. We scraped it all.”

Facebook appeared to show a pro-Clinton bias throughout the 2016 election, with moderators deleting or banning innocuous content which criticized Clinton, including a whole community page that mocked her, and the personal profiles of users with pro-Trump opinions. When Wikileaks released emails exposing the Democratic National Committee’s sabotage of Clinton’s primary rival Bernie Sanders, the site blocked users from sharing links to the leak. When Wikileaks complained, Facebook said the suppression of those links was an “accident."