Palantir wants to ‘defend the West,’ but the West is wary

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.

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.”

The name came from the “seeing-stones” of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”

The other co-founders included Alex Karp — a Stanford Law School classmate of Thiel’s who became chief executive despite having no engineering background — as well as Joe Lonsdale, who espouses a hawkish, pro-innovation agenda focused on preserving US national power.

In 2005, In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm, began investing in Palantir, cementing its link with the US national security universe. Palantir was quickly put to use by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For two decades the company worked across the administrations of both US political parties. According to government tracking site usaspending.gov, Palantir has won more than $2.7 billion in defense contracts since 2008.

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