The Palantir Paradox, Frontline Facial Recognition, and the Turkish (Industrial) Delights in Texas

Some questions for Defense Tech and its military industrial grift

Palantir CEO Alex Karp tells us that he’s lost employees over his steadfast support of Israel. Alright then. Good for those employees then. There’s a lot of that sort of thing going on. No one should work on something that he thinks is morally wrong.

Still, America may yet have need of these sorts of AI companies and that’s sort of the rub.

These are the questions we ought to be asking:

Does it, you know, actually work? How much is marketing? How much is substance? And does it even matter anyway?

This is what I’ve come to call the “Palantir Paradox.” If your enemy thinks you have a better toy than you actually have might he overcommit, overinvest? No one wants to be out-indicated, after all. Maybe, just maybe, it’s not supposed to work.

A recent Time Magazine piece details the role of Palantir in helping the Ukraine military target select the Russian military. We’re told that Palantir is quite keen to precisely target. Never you mind that there are quite a number of monopolists making it cost prohibitive to produce shells and ammunition. More on that in a moment.

And in much the same way, Karp offered his firm’s services to Israel.

Alex Karp (right), Israeli president Isaac Herzog (center), and Peter Thiel (left)

When precisely were they meant to do precision targeting and on whom? Did Israel actually use, you know, the software?

The satellite imagery on Gaza gives us a sense of the devastation, making obvious that the Israelis are lying about their minimal attacks. They’ve gone too hard. Even Donald Trump says so.

So which is it, Palantir? Precision shelling — or carpet bombing?

Herzog provides a clue — by signing an artillery shell “I rely on you.”

Herzog is a liberal (allegedly) Zionist

This is not how the world’s most humane military behaves. Is Palantir a collaborator on these efforts? Or is it part of Biden’s infamous — and failed — bear hug of Bibi? Who knows?!

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While death from above seems rather impersonal facial recognition is decidedly personal—and confrontational.

By now it should be obvious that the sustained campaign against Clearview.AI was waged, in part, by Israeli malefactors who wanted to sell the Israeli facial recognition companies into America in much the same way that they have jammed Israeli technology through the Five Eyes technology stack. If you pay close enough you can even hear Bibi Netanyahu gloat about these operations. In an interview with Peter Robinson you learn that Bibi takes especial pride.

We’re done with Americans getting ripped off by foreigners, thank you not so very much.

We have already talked about the use of facial recognition in Ukraine, especially how much the Ukrainians “are obsessed with Clearview.”

Here’s how the Israelis are deploying it in Gaza, according to the pro-Zionist New York Times.

Mr. Abu Toha is one of hundreds of Palestinians who have been picked out by a previously undisclosed Israeli facial recognition program that was started in Gaza late last year. The expansive and experimental effort is being used to conduct mass surveillance there, collecting and cataloging the faces of Palestinians without their knowledge or consent, according to Israeli intelligence officers, military officials and soldiers.

The technology was initially used in Gaza to search for Israelis who were taken hostage by Hamas during the Oct. 7 cross-border raids, the intelligence officials said. After Israel embarked on a ground offensive in Gaza, it increasingly turned to the program to root out anyone with ties to Hamas or other militant groups. At times, the technology wrongly flagged civilians as wanted Hamas militants, one officer said.

The facial recognition program, which is run by Israel’s military intelligence unit, including the cyber-intelligence division Unit 8200, relies on technology from Corsight, a private Israeli company, four intelligence officers said. It also uses Google Photos, they said. Combined, the technologies enable Israel to pick faces out of crowds and grainy drone footage.

Say wasn’t Google supposed to do something about this sort of thing? Or is that just against plucky startups like Cleaview.AI?

Is Google Cloud still going to chase Microsoft’s OpenAI off the proverbial cliff — or are they going to be more useful?

Maybe it’s time to think seriously about transitioning out Josh Marcuse, who somehow survived his whole team being let go and his close associations with Eric Schmidt. “Eric’s observation was that a huge part of what the military does is it sits and watches,” said Josh Marcuse, the then executive director of the Defense Innovation Board who was on SOCOM trip. The Defense Innovation Board delivered neither and SOCOM has remained easily one of the more penetrated of the commands.

This sort of thing doesn’t work anymore.

In an organization with hundreds of employees, Google Public Sector is inundated with can’t-do lawyers. By some accounts it’s at least ten percent of the firm! Antitrust review can’t come soon enough.

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One thing is for sure — a lot of the decisions made about what the future of America’s security will look like shouldn’t be coming from the people sitting around The Hill and the Valley Forum event on May 1 alongside Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Congressman Jay Obernolte, and Senator Todd Young.

In addition to Alex Karp many of the speakers will be immediately familiar to regular readers of Thoughts and Adventures.

There’s Vinod Khosla, son of Indian intelligence professionals. We discussed him here.

Examining Twitter's Longstanding Espionage Problem

There’s the husband of accused sexual predator (and Netanyahu fan boy) Keith Rabois, Jacob Helberg.

Nothing About Jacob Helberg Makes Any Sense

There’s Roelof Botha, who was a major backer of 23andMe and Chinese-drone manufacturer DJI, and works for the Chinese-backed Sequoia.

Dear Pentagon: Please Blacklist Silicon Valley Tech Companies Until They Get Serious

And, of course, venture capitalist Josh Wolfe of Lux Capital, whose enthusiastic support for the Gaza genocide is almost comical.

Time for the Emiratis to Get Serious

I’ve asked to attend — I thought it would be good to have someone whose family actually serves in the IC and I do have multiple portfolio companies in Ukraine. I suspect I’ll be blacklisted though.

They can’t have actual American deep staters there. They’ll see through the hustle.

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I’m not quite sure what the Turkish is for “Git her done” but I suspect Texas will learn it soon enough now that Bloomberg remarked that Turkey’s military industrial base is coming to the U.S.

In retrospect it seems obvious that America would have a compelling interest in helping Turkish industry get off the ground.

Turkish journalist Ragip Soylu lays it out:

• Pentagon purchased 116,000 rounds of battle-ready ammunition from Turkey’s Arca Defense for delivery this year

• Turkish subcontractor Repkon is building infrastructure in Texas to produce some 30% of all US-made 155mm artillery shells by 2025,

• Turkish supplies of TNT, and nitroguanidine, which is used as a propellant, would be crucial in the production of NATO-standard 155mm caliber ammunition — potentially tripling production — Bloomberg

Other Turkish industrialist friends of mine report similar sorts of deals. Who knows what can be done when NATO’s first and second largest militaries combine forces?

Careful readers will note that the Turks could discipline the Israelis within Texas. And that would be a Turkish delight indeed.