But the conference was also an occasion to appreciate the limits of conversation. As I delivered my now well-honed explanation of what Palantir does, and why and how we build technology that can enable better protection of privacy and civil liberties, my interlocutors typically reacted in one of two ways. Some were greatly appreciative of our recognition of and approach to these complex issues, while others were highly skeptical of the authenticity of our commitment and our ability to actually deliver on our promises. Interestingly, both camps often ask some version of the following question: “You have built a very powerful analytic platform and you work with many customers who could do serious damage if they misused it. Why should we trust you when you say you are actively working to protect privacy and civil liberties?”

My response: “You shouldn’t just trust what we say. And we are not asking you to.”

It’s the same response I give to recruits and fellow Palantirians who are similarly committed to protecting PCL. If Palantir were being insincere about its commitment to privacy and civil liberties, we would risk alienating the very people who are most essential to helping us succeed in our mission. Everyone here wants to be proud of what they build, which means that they do not want to see their work misused to violate fundamental liberties. Palantirians, no less than the privacy community, want reassurances about the kind of work we do and the seriousness of our commitment to doing the right thing. A simple profession of our PCL stance isn’t enough. Talk is cheap.

That’s why we continue to take action:

• We’ve invested in a (growing!) Privacy and Civil Liberties Team, which is dedicated to working with customers to help them implement law and policy designed to protect privacy and civil liberties, and to encourage a higher ethical standard in the use of our product.
• We have formed the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties to help us navigate tricky legal and ethical questions and advise us on the future development of the product so that we can address potential privacy and civil liberties issues by “baking in” protective capabilities.
• We provide financial support to privacy and civil liberties advocacy organizations, and we are proud to sponsor events such as the Amsterdam Privacy Conference and the Privacy Law Scholars Conference.
• Additionally, Professor Dan Solove, an internationally recognized privacy scholar, has helped us to design the privacy and civil liberties training program that all new Palantir hires will be attending.

We also try to be as transparent as possible in describing the capabilities of our software. Our Analysis Blog demonstrates the myriad ways in which our technology is being used at deployments around the world. We proactively work to educate policymakers, academics, and advocacy groups about these capabilities and in order to identify the questions that should be asked of us and our customers. Are access controls being used at a granular level to protect information? Are audit logs regularly reviewed for indications of potential misuse? Could a federated system be built instead of centralizing data in a single database? We also seek input on how these capabilities could be improved to better address potential privacy and civil liberties concerns.

These are the actions we have taken and will continue to take to demonstrate the depth of our commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties—to earn the trust of those who are similarly committed, not only within the PCL community but within our own company.

I can testify to the fact that Palantirians reach out to the Privacy and Civil Liberties Team on a daily basis to seek advice, comment on our work, offer to help, or simply ask us to explain particular issues in the privacy and civil liberties world. Every Palantirian is trained to look out for “red flags” at deployments that might indicate activities that are antithetical to our commitment to privacy and civil liberties. We all have a responsibility to “watch the watchers” (and those who enable the watchers), ask the questions that need to be asked, and demand changes when we see something we don’t like. So, like our fellow Palantirians, don’t just trust us. Look at what we do; don’t just listen to what we say. Question us, criticize us, and challenge us.

Polaris Project, Liberty Asia, and La Strada International are recipients of a $3 million dollar Global Impact Award given by Google to support nonprofit organizations that use technology to initiate disruptive solutions in their sector. Together, these organizations are launching the Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network, an initiative seeded by Google Ideas to share data and improve coordination between local hotline efforts. Palantir is pleased to announce our collaboration with Polaris Project, improving the network’s ability to manage and analyze the large amounts of disparate data culled from its human trafficking hotline.

Polaris’ hotline has received 72,000 trafficking-related calls, reported more than 3,000 trafficking cases to law enforcement officials and assisted nearly 8,300 victims of modern-day slavery. The donation of our analytical software platform–with built-in privacy and civil liberties safeguards–as well as our ongoing training and support augments Polaris’ existing efforts to disrupt illicit trafficking networks and provide much-needed assistance to victims.

The video below, produced by Google Ideas, describes the Global Human Trafficking Hotline Network in greater detail.

Check out the demonstration of Palantir Gotham by Philanthropy Engineer Jason Payne at the Google Ideas Event announcing the collaboration:

Polaris Project is just one of the many ways in which Palantir’s Philanthropy Engineering efforts have assisted the fight against illicit networks, human trafficking, and child exploitation.

***

[1] International Labor Organization 2012 Global Estimate of Forced Labor.↩

In 2011, The Center for Public Integrity (CPI) published The Truth Left Behind, a report on the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl. The report was the product of a three-year investigation known as The Pearl Project, which was carried out by students and faculty in Georgetown University’s Journalism program in conjunction with CPI. We donated our software to help Pearl Project investigators build out networks of people and organizations suspected to be involved in the murder. In the CNN video below from 2011, lead investigator Asra Nomani described some of the report’s findings. You can watch videos of some of the analysis on our Analysis Blog.

Pakistani authorities have recently arrested Qari Abdul Hayyee, a former leader of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, in connection with the case. The Wall Street Journal notes that The Pearl Project’s report named “a Lashkar-e-Jhangvi operative known as Adbul Hayee–a different spelling of the name believed to be the same person–as one of the men who guarded Mr. Pearl after his kidnapping.” You can read more about our involvement with The Pearl Project here.

The Pearl Project is just one of several investigative projects to which we have donated our software and analytic support. In 2009, we helped CPI to analyze almost five million home mortgage loans that originated between 2005 and 2007 as part of an investigation into subprime lending practices. CPI was able to show that a small number of lenders were responsible for a disproportionately high number of the riskiest loans. You can read more of their findings in “Who’s Behind the Financial Meltdown?” and you can learn more about the methodology behind the analysis at CPI’s website.

Last year, we worked with CPI’s International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to support their investigation of illicit human tissue trafficking networks. ICIJ broke the story–called “Skin and Bone”–at the Google Ideas Summit on Illicit Networks in July 2012, and in August it won a Sidney Award from the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Their reporting prompted Congress and the Defense Department to begin their own investigations into their tissue supply networks. You can learn more about the methodology behind the analysis at ICIJ’s website.

Most recently, we collaborated with CPI on “Cracking the Codes,” an analysis of Medicare claims data that uncovered more than $11 Billion in Medicare billing errors and possible abuses by US doctors nationwide. This project won first place in the 2012 International Reporters and Editors (IRE) Philip Meyer Awards. You can learn more about the methodology behind the analysis at CPI’s website.

We’re incredibly proud to have been a part of this award-winning work, and to have helped investigative journalists tell stories that have had a real, definite, and positive impact on the world. As the data-driven journalism and computer-assisted reporting movements continue to grow and evolve, we look forward to seeing more cooperation between software engineers and investigative journalists.

Unfortunately, achieving this level of understanding is technically challenging, as the data is typically scattered across public and private databases and stored in a wide range of formats. Furthermore, novel research data is noisy and can be fraught with contradictions. Serious data security and access control concerns only add to this complexity.

The Palantir Gotham data fusion platform helps pharmaceutical companies overcome these R&D challenges by integrating public and private data of nearly any type and empowering secure collaboration both within and beyond the enterprise.

In this three-part series of videos, you will see how the Palantir Gotham platform facilitates rapid, intuitive, and comprehensive exploration across a variety of data sets. We focus on just a handful of ways in which Palantir removes the friction between pharmaceutical researchers and their data, allowing them to (1) discover connections between assays performed by different teams, (2) evaluate evidence for a drug-protein interaction, and (3) capture the investigative process for future use.

For these demonstrations we have integrated data from public sources including ChEMBL, PubMed, KEGG, PDB, and PubChem. From high-level literature reviews to the analysis of specific variations in a genetic sequence, Palantir Gotham increases efficiency in the drug development process and amplifies signal strength for key pipeline decisions.

Part 1: To start, we use Palantir Gotham to collaboratively model biological relationships and assess their certainty in order to better understand the risk associated with targeting a particular pathway.

Part 2: Next, we explore new experimental results that were produced by an external team. We investigate their underlying scientific rationale and apply these insights to my own drug development research.

Part 3: Finally, we investigate structured assay data and quickly drill down on a compound of interest. We use a variety of techniques to make sense of complex experimental results in both structured and unstructured formats.

Drug development is just one of many potential pharmaceutical applications of the Palantir Gotham platform. Our goal is to solve your organization’s most challenging data problems across the pharmaceutical pipeline. To learn more, read about our Pharma solution and contact our health team: helix@palantir.com.

Girl Geeks from around the Bay rang in the new year and broke in Palantir’s new event space with Girl Geek Dinner #32, which focused on philanthropy, technology, and the opportunities presented by both for women worldwide.

Lucy Bernholz, visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, opened the night with her thoughts on the future of philanthropy. She argued that as the quantity and quality of collected data increases, philanthropy will move from being an industry fueled by people’s passion to an industry driven by data. She urged the Girl Geeks in attendance to contribute to this shift by finding ways to share and engage data to drive change in the social sector.

Bernholz’s vision of the future is Chelsea Geyer’s reality. Geyer is a Project Developer at Resolve, which uses software donated by Palantir to understand and analyze the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), the fundamentalist religious group responsible for brutal human rights violations across large parts Africa, and made infamous by the Kony 2012 video. Resolve uses data about past LRA attacks to better understand their movements and try to project who, where, and how the LRA will attack next. By analyzing the data with Palantir’s software, Geyer and Resolve are creating an ever-evolving trail of evidence that could be used if members of the LRA were ever brought to the International Criminal Court.

While there was heavy emphasis on how technology could be used for good throughout the night, Mary Quigley, a Palantir Gotham user, touched on how technology can increasingly be used for bad. At the major financial institution where she works, Quigley is responsible for preventing cyber attacks, including denial-of-service attacks, which would cripple the institution’s network if successful. Her experiences serve as a reminder to our community to continue working to improve the tools that can be used to counter bad actors and their constantly adapting tactics.

To end the night, Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer at USAID, told the Girl Geeks about how much technology has evolved in her lifetime and what that has meant for women worldwide. She also spoke about a problem that technology has so far not been able to solve: equal treatment in the workplace. O’Neill shared her own experiences with this problem. In the past she was overlooked for promotions that her male colleagues received. Just last month, she was brazenly asked to take notes at a dinner reception. O’Neill urged the women in the room to pave a path that their mothers would be proud of, and that their daughters could continue to march along.

It was a powerful end to an evening of compelling talks. The night continued with demonstrations of Palantir’s software, flip-book making, and conversations over cocktails.

Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners, hosted by companies around the Bay, present chances for women in technology to meet, socialize, and learn from each other’s experiences. Palantir hosted its first Girl Geek Dinner in May 2011, which featured Linda Krieg, Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. For information about the next Girl Geek Dinner, visit: http://www.bayareagirlgeekdinners.com

Those things that really interest me tend to be smaller in scope than full development projects. Once I’ve explored a tool or piece of code to solve a problem, I’m pretty much ready to move on to the next challenge. I’m like an explorer who is always searching for something new to learn and to satisfy my innate curiosity.

Server-Side Quality Engineers (SSQEs) at Palantir are explorers for these same reasons. We’re interested in exploring things like distributed systems, Linux servers, and databases. We want to learn how they work so that we can manipulate things around them. For example,

• Knowing how Palantir Gotham deals with data-scale (sharding) and user-scale (mirroring) allows us to configure clusters that resemble customer deployments.
• Knowing how Linux behaves during entropy starvation (and being able to find the cause) allows us to efficiently use our server hardware.
• Knowing how Oracle handles various SQL statements allow us to spot slow database performance.

If my experience resonates with you at all, read on to learn about the role of SSQEs during various stages of the Palantir software development cycle.

Feature Vetting and System Architecture Review

Before each iteration of the Palantir software development cycle, we spend a week with our Software Engineer counterparts to understand what they are building. We want to know what features they will be implementing, how they plan to implement those features, and which customers those features are targeting. Developers should know the answers to questions like “how many users does this feature support simultaneously?”, “does it interact with any existing features?”, “what if the system crashes while this operation is still running?”, “is this operation idempotent if someone runs it twice?”, and so on. We will also talk to our Forward Deployed Engineer counterparts (also known as BD or Business Development) to make sure the use cases we envisioned match real customer use cases. This is also a good time to discuss customer hardware configurations, special data characteristics, and other deployment-unique cases.

When necessary, we ask how a particular piece of system architecture, protocol, or algorithm works to ensure that we understand how to test and manipulate it. We also try to discover non-obvious corner cases early in the cycle. Since the best idea always wins at Palantir, planning week is the ideal time to ask any (and a lot of) questions about a feature or a system. Making changes at this point is MUCH cheaper than later in the cycle.

New Feature Testing

Explorers of old filled their notebooks with detailed drawings of mountains, rivers, plants, and animals. Like those explorers, we write down our new-feature discoveries into our version of those notebooks (test plans) so that others can follow in our testing footsteps. Test plans initially contain information about how a feature works, for whom it was built, and other detailed notes from planning week.

As new feature development progresses, developers hand off their code in discrete milestones. We test each milestone and further refine the test plan. For example, in the test plan, Quality Engineers describe how to set up a feature, propose reasonable data sets, write testing instructions, and record expected results. Developer milestone hand-offs and testing of the milestones continue in this passing-of-the-ball fashion until the end of the new feature period.

System Debugging

During new feature testing, we expect the Palantir Gotham application to be unstable as many developers check in code simultaneously. One of our duties as Quality Engineers is to report any unexpected behaviors as bug reports so that developers can fix them. Quality Engineers at some other companies call their job done at this point. Palantir Quality Engineers take the extra steps to diagnose whether an issue comes from the system (Linux settings, Oracle configurations, network issues, CPU, RAM, IO contention, etc.) or from the product itself. This extra bit of effort increases quality in the bug report, and as the bugs are resolved, in the product.

But how do SSQEs know what to do to debug these things? Well, most SSQEs needed to do this type of debugging in the early days of Linux in order to even use the operating system, so they’ve gained tons of experience doing it. Since hardly anyone else was using Linux back then, the early pioneers frequently found problems that no one else has ever come across. Today, using Linux is easier than ever before. On the negative side, unless you’re naturally really curious, you probably haven’t been exposed to this type of debugging because using Linux is so easy. Explorer tip: If you want to bulk up your Linux knowledge to give yourself an edge during the interview process, read ‘How Linux Works: What Every Superuser Should Know’ by Brian Ward.

Exploring the Server Debug Challenge

If the above sounds interesting or even exciting to you, let’s talk about how you can join the SSQE explorers. We begin the process by giving you an opportunity to explore a real system. This is the Server Debug Challenge. While this challenge is optional, it presents a realistic system debugging scenario that gives you a chance to show off your exploration skills. It’s also a way for you to set yourself apart from the many applications that we receive. If your report details the steps you took to correctly find the problem, we definitely want to talk to you. Whatever the outcome, we’re pretty sure you’ll have fun playing with it.

Winners ($10,000 Scholarship)

Carrie Cai – MIT, MS/PhD Candidate

Carrie is currently working on her MS and PhD in Computer Science at MIT, where she is focusing on user interface design and spoken language systems. After graduating from Stanford with a BA in Human Biology and a MA in Education, she returned to school to pursue Computer Science.

Excerpt from Carrie’s Essay Submission:
“In my view, computer science has a tremendous potential to improve the lives of those facing barriers to education and language acquisition. My dream is to create software that will enable others to more easily communicate and comprehend, through developing language assistive technologies and digital interfaces for learning.”


Anna Kornfeld Simpson – Princeton, 2014
Anna is pursuing a B.S.E in Computer Science at Princeton. She is interested in information security, operating systems, networks, robotics, and getting more women excited about engineering and computer science.  Anna co-founded Princeton’s Women in Science Colloquium in 2010 to connect female students and faculty in math, science and engineering.

Excerpt from Anna’s Essay Submission:
“…when I think about the strength of the truly diverse communities I have been in, I know that those with closed minds are the minority. If I am the only woman in the room, then my friend who joins next year will not be. By reaching out to other women interested in computer science, engineering, and robotics, we can build a community that supports and inspires everyone.”

Runners Up ($7,000 Scholarship)

• Nicola Dell – University of Washington, PhD Candidate
• Aakanksha Sarda – MIT, 2014

Finalists ($2,000 Scholarship)

• Elena Frey – Stanford, 2015
• Kathryne Hawthorne – University of North Carolina, 2013
• Katie Kuksenok — University of Washington, PhD Candidate
• 
Omosola Odetunde – Stanford, 2013
• 
Pratiksha Thaker – MIT, 2014

Semi-Finalists

• Willa Chen — Princeton, 2013
• Elaine Chen — Stanford, 2013
• Bonnie Eisenman — Princeton, 2014
• Darya Filippova — Carnegie Mellon, PhD candidate
• Kirsten Koa — University of California, San Diego, 2014
• Casatrina Lee  — Stanford, 2014
• Jennifer Sleeman — University of Maryland, PhD Candidate
• Kyle Rector — University of Washington, PhD candidate
• Caitlyn Seim — Georgia Tech, 2013
• Amy Tai — Harvard, 2013

For information about next year’s scholarship, check out www.palantir.com/scholarship in the Summer of 2013!

*While this demonstration is based on a typical investigation workflow, the data is simulated and names were randomly generated. Any resemblance to real people or entities is coincidental.

Recognizing this, we convened some of our privacy and civil liberties advisors— a group of academics and advocates who we consult on new product developments that was recently formalized as the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties—to discuss video analytics. Over the course of several blog posts, we will present the issues raised by the group concerning video analytics in general and Palantir Video in particular, as well as how we might be able to use Palantir’s capabilities to support policies governing the use of video data that better protect privacy and civil liberties.[1]

In this post we will explore—at a very basic level—the global growth of video surveillance use, the current law on the use of video surveillance, and the privacy and civil liberties concerns that can accompany the deployment of video surveillance capabilities.

The Growth of Video Surveillance

The use of video surveillance has grown substantially in the last decade. In the United States, more and more major metropolitan areas have created CCTV systems. Authorities typically create these systems by both installing new cameras and tapping into existing surveillance networks operated by transit authorities, schools, and even private companies.[2] In the United Kingdom, which began using CCTV in the 1990s, a 2011 report estimated that there are more than 1.85 million cameras operating in the country—one for every 32 U.K. citizens. This includes not just law enforcement run cameras but also private sector systems.[3] A recent market research report predicted that the global CCTV market will reach around $23.5 billion by the end of 2014, which, the report suggests, represents a compounded annual growth rate of 20.5%.[4]

The rapid growth of CCTV systems is fueled by their perceived utility in supporting effective law enforcement efforts. Law enforcement officials argue that the use of video surveillance can deter crime, improve officer response time, and facilitate the after-the-fact investigation of crimes.[5] They frequently cite anecdotal evidence of particular crimes that have been prevented or solved with the help of CCTV.[6] Studies of CCTV effectiveness are sometimes less enthusiastic, generally finding “a modest but significant desirable effect on crime”[7] or at best suggesting that the impact of CCTV has been “variable.”[8]

The Current State of Law Governing Video Surveillance

When trained on public spaces, CCTV surveillance systems are minimally constrained in their use. Indeed, one privacy expert concludes, “Meaningful legal strictures on government use of public surveillance cameras in Great Britain, Canada, and the United States are nonexistent.”[9] In the United States, the question of the legality of public surveillance was effectively settled in United States vs. Knotts, in which the Supreme Court considered the legality of tracking a car’s movements with an electronic beeper. In its Opinion, the Court concluded that “a person traveling… on public thoroughfares has no reasonable expectation of privacy in his movements from one place to another.”[10] The private sector use of surveillance cameras in public spaces is similarly unconstrained, with the only real restriction coming from so-called “peeping Tom” statutes that criminalize filming or recording of certain activities where a person has some expectation of privacy.[11] The International Association of Chiefs of Police has developed guidelines for the use of CCTV for public safety and community policing, and some jurisdictions have adopted these or similar guidelines.[12] While useful, these guidelines are not legally binding.

The recent Supreme Court decision in United States v. Jones may indicate a potential avenue for judicial constraint of ubiquitous CCTV monitoring. Some commentators have suggested that a reading of the various opinions in that case suggests a majority of support for the “mosaic theory” of privacy. The theory argues that while the surveillance of individual acts taking place in public may not be constitutionally protected, “the collective sum of the different acts over time amount to a search” and therefore such surveillance should be subject to the Fourth Amendment.[13] As CCTV becomes more and more prevalent, one could envision a scenario in which the use of cameras to track an individual over an extended period of time is analyzed under the mosaic theory. However, any judicial adoption of this theory will have to await the next relevant case, which could be years in coming.

Video Surveillance and Threats to Privacy and Civil Liberties

The use of video surveillance systems by government agencies in a public space raises a number of privacy and civil liberties concerns such as:

• Generally speaking, surveillance can have a negative societal effect by inducing individuals to conform to societal norms and pushing individual choices towards the “bland and the mainstream.”[14]
• Even when in a public space, there is a “state of privacy” that flows from a degree of anonymity.[15] In other words, people behave differently when they are among strangers than they might when they are with people who recognize them. CCTV monitoring, combined with video analytics that facilitate identification, could diminish an individual’s sense of anonymity thereby inhibiting his or her freedom of action in a public space.
• CCTV surveillance is generally indiscriminate. It is “often akin to a dragnet search, which can ensnare a significant amount of data beyond that which was originally sought.”[16]
• Given this indiscriminate nature, there will be a temptation for substantial mission creep in which cameras deployed for one reason (e.g., to prevent and solve crime) become tasked with other missions that may be substantially different from this original intent. Such function creep is often not subject to the same public scrutiny as the initial camera installation. This is not a new phenomenon in surveillance. As observed by the Church Committee four decades ago, “We have seen a consistent pattern in which programs initiated with limited goals, such as preventing criminal violence or identifying foreign spies, were expanded to what witnesses characterized as ‘vacuum cleaners,’ sweeping in information about lawful activities of American citizens.”[17]
• As with any surveillance tool, CCTV can be abused by bad actors within an organization. Individuals with access to CCTV data may use the tools at their disposal to steal information, stalk an ex-spouse, or otherwise abuse their power. Any surveillance system must be designed with an awareness of this risk, however uncommon these abuses may be in actual practice.

With these issues in mind, we turned to our advisors for help. How do video analytics contribute to these P/CL concerns? Are there other concerns raised by the development and deployment of sophisticated data analytics? How could we design Palantir Video to help mitigate these concerns?

We learned a great deal from our discussion and will share some of that with you in our next few posts.

***

[1] Not all members of the Palantir Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties attended this discussion. Participants are free to discuss the meeting publicly if they choose, provided that they do not disclose any proprietary or otherwise confidential information (no information was so designated in this discussion). In order to encourage an open and frank exchange, Palantir will not publicly attribute any comments to individuals or organizations participating in the meetings. ↩

[2] Alex Johnson, “Smile! More and more, you’re on camera,” MSNBC, June 25, 2008. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25355673#.UH285Ib6p8F. ↩

[3] “Big Brother is DEFINITELY watching you,” Daily Mail, March 3, 2011. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1362493/One-CCTV-camera-32-people-Big-Brother-Britain.html. Others estimate the number of cameras to be as high as 4.2 million. See, John Woodhouse, CCTV and its effectiveness in tackling crime, House of Commons Library, July 1, 2010. http://www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN05624.pdf. ↩

[4] Nicholas Bombourg, “Global CCTV Market Forecast to 2014,” PRNewswire, March 13, 2012. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/global-cctv-market-forecast-to-2014-142456805.html. ↩

[5] Department of Homeland Security, CCTV Developing Privacy Best Practices, December 17/18, 2007. http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/privacy/privacy_rpt_cctv_2007.pdf. ↩

[6] See e.g., Allison Klein, “Police Go Live Monitoring D.C. Crime Cameras,” Washington Post, February 11, 2008. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/10/AR2008021002726_pf.html.↩

[7] Welsh, Brandon C. and David P. Farrington, Effects of Closed Circuit Television Surveillance on Crime, Campbell SystematicReviews, 2008.↩

[8] Martin Gill and Angela Spriggs, Assessing the impact of CCTV, Home Office Report, February 2005. ↩

[9] Christopher Slobogin, Privacy at Risk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007) 89. ↩

[10] United States v. Knotts, 460 U.S. 276, 281 (1983).↩

[11] Slobogin 89.↩

[12] https://www.theiacp.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=L8L%2BrgmpfWQ%3D&tabid=423. See also, NYPD Domain Awareness System Public Security Privacy Guidelines (http://publicintelligence.net/nypd-domain-awareness-system-public-security-privacy-guidelines/), UK CCTV Code of Practice (http://www.ico.gov.uk/~/media/documents/library/data_protection/detailed_specialist_guides/ico_cctvfinal_2301.pdf).↩

[13] Orin Kerr, “What’s the Status of the Mosaic Theory After Jones?” The Volokh Conspiracy, January 23, 2012. http://www.volokh.com/2012/01/23/whats-the-status-of-the-mosaic-theory-after-jones/.↩

[14] Julie Cohen, Examined Lives: Informational Privacy and the Subject as Object, 52 Stanford L. Rev. 1373, 1426 (2000).↩

[15] Allan Westin, Privacy and Freedom, (New York: Atheneum, 1967) 31.↩

[16] Dan Solove, Nothing to Hide, (New Haven: Yale UP, 2011) 179.↩

[17] Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with respect to Intelligence Activities, “Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans,” U.S. Senate, April 26, 1976, pp 3 – 4.↩

If you’re grappling with the decision between pursuing a graduate degree or working in industry, or wondering how much gender balance in the workplace can affect work day-to-day, check out the video to hear the panelists’ thoughts and opinions.

Panelists include:

• Dana Kleinerman, Tech Writer
  Dana graduated from Cornell University with a Bachelor’s degree in Math, a Master’s in Computer Science, and went on to complete a Post Baccalaureate program at The University of Pennsylvania studying advanced sciences. As a technical writer at Palantir, Dana has found a way to combine her background in Computer Science with her passion for writing.

• Danielle Kramer, Software Engineer
  Danielle earned her degree in computer science and cognitive science at Carnegie Mellon University, where she researched machine learning and served as a teaching assistant for Great Theoretical Ideas of Computer Science and Principles of Programming. She is a software engineering lead on Palantir’s Infrastructure team, which is responsible for storing, searching, scaling, and sharing the data that powers Palantir Gotham.
• Ashling Loh-Doyle, Designer
  Ashling graduated from Stanford University in 2010 with degrees in Economics and Studio Art, and found it impossible to resist the world of tech. She spent her first two years at Palantir as a graphic and product designer, and is currently building the company’s Identity team, which is responsible for internal and external communication.  
• Yael Schraeger, Product Navigator
  Yael earned her Bachelors of Science at Stanford in Symbolic Systems (with a minor in dance!), and completed her PhD at UC San Diego. She is a product management lead at Palantir, where she works with Engineering and Business Development to decide the direction of the company’s software product.

Are you a woman currently pursing a degree in a technical field? Know someone who is? Encourage her to check out Palantir’s Scholarship for Women in Tech.