WASHINGTON: France’s move Tuesday to drop Palantir from its intelligence services is the latest sign of European unease with the American data-mining firm — a company that has grown from a CIA-backed startup into one of the most powerful technology players of the Trump era.
- ‘Lord of the Rings’ -
Palantir was born in 2003 from former founders of PayPal — known as the PayPal Mafia — in the wake of the September 11 attacks.
It pitched software that could sift through vast intelligence datasets to flag threats — an idea adapted from PayPal’s fraud-detection systems.
Peter Thiel, the arch-conservative PayPal co-founder, believed better data-sharing between agencies might have prevented 9/11, and built the company around a mission of “defending the West.”
