Great Article On Palantir

Must read:

High above the Hudson River in downtown Jersey City, a former U.S. Secret Service agent named Peter Cavicchia III ran special ops for JPMorgan Chase & Co. His insider threat group—most large financial institutions have one—used computer algorithms to monitor the bank’s employees, ostensibly to protect against perfidious traders and other miscreants.

Aided by as many as 120 “forward-deployed engineers” from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc., which JPMorgan engaged in 2009, Cavicchia’s group vacuumed up emails and browser histories, GPS locations from company-issued smartphones, printer and download activity, and transcripts of digitally recorded phone conversations. Palantir’s software aggregated, searched, sorted, and analyzed these records, surfacing keywords and patterns of behavior that Cavicchia’s team had flagged for potential abuse of corporate assets. Palantir’s algorithm, for example, alerted the insider threat team when an employee started badging into work later than usual, a sign of potential disgruntlement. That would trigger further scrutiny and possibly physical surveillance after hours by bank security personnel.

Over time, however, Cavicchia himself went rogue. Former JPMorgan colleagues describe the environment as Wall Street meets Apocalypse Now, with Cavicchia as Colonel Kurtz, ensconced upriver in his office suite eight floors above the rest of the bank’s security team. People in the department were shocked that no one from the bank or Palantir set any real limits. They darkly joked that Cavicchia was listening to their calls, reading their emails, watching them come and go. Some planted fake information in their communications to see if Cavicchia would mention it at meetings, which he did.

It all ended when the bank’s senior executives learned that they, too, were being watched, and what began as a promising marriage of masters of big data and global finance descended into a spying scandal. The misadventure, which has never been reported, also marked an ominous turn for Palantir, one of the most richly valued startups in Silicon Valley. An intelligence platform designed for the global War on Terror was weaponized against ordinary Americans at home.

Intel 101. If your enemy creates an office to run counter-intelligence and expose your operations to spy on them, you get your person running it, and then use it to spy on them. This has Cabal’s fingerprints all over it. And notice the guy who leaked a document about JP Morgan was given a heads-up about the investigation to find him by the head of counter-intelligence, who he had placed in his position. Was he leaking a document to hurt the stock price in a predictable way for Cabal? Was the heads-up a friendly favor, or another Cabal employee trying to protect him? And what valuable intel flows through that payment processor they are both working at now?

And then JP Morgan decides not to file a suspicious activity report which would bring in the lawful authorities to poke around. More Cabal assets in critical positions in the company voting to suppress the reporting and cleaning up the mess? No way to know. Of course the investigators assigned to the case by the government would probably have been compromised too, but those who wanted to file the report wouldn’t have known that.

It is funny to me how many people, even heads of investment houses, seemingly cannot fathom what is happening, what is out there, or how paranoid you need to be to be to operate in this environment. Here JP Morgan established an office to make sure its employees weren’t distributing inside information to outside parties for insider trading. They brought in a former Secret Service agent, he brought in Palantir, and they went to work vacuuming everything.

Notice how one employee being late to work triggered a physical surveillance detail. That is how easy it is deployed. And once physical surveillance shows up, they have no bounds. His every moment was probably being watched and listened to.

I will bet that was contracted too, and the surveillance hired was the same surveillance operators FBI would pull to watch a mid-level criminal suspect who didn’t require the MST, which is the same surveillance Cabal would use to monitor any threat they identified. Surveillance is expensive. If FBI has its own team for all operations, JP Morgan had its own team, local PD had its own, and a PI firm has its own team, each group will have its teams idling a lot, in between big jobs.

But if there is one big company contracting coverage, when FBI mid-level operations are idling, those same operators can be sent over to back up JP Morgan, or local PD, or handle Cabal operations. Conglomeration of surveillance operations allows a smaller, more economically efficient force, and it is good for Cabal, because when they get control of it, they don’t have to worry about competing teams noticing their operators doing their thing and poking around in their business out of curiosity.

My guess is this Secret Service guy got the job because his resume involved working some sort of intelligence or counter-intelligence in Secret Service, probably for the protective detail. That is a great resume enhancer, but who do you think Cabal gets hired into such a powerful, intelligence-oriented position within Secret Service, with access to all that sensitive data which Cabal might want one day? Then who will Cabal try to get hired into the position in JP Morgan that handles counter-intelligence? So in trying to plug leaks, they opened up a huge vulnerability. I will bet Cabal has an entire division devoted to insider trading.

I would never have hired him. I would have sought out somebody I knew, and sent them to Russia to get trained up by a private security company with ex-SVR, and had him run the operations.

Of course there is the possibility that if their operators had been kept out entirely, Cabal would have focused on destroying the company entirely, since it would have been of no use to them. I wonder if JP Morgan had not been infiltrated with Cabal, the institutional investors would have pulled out, the federal regulators would have flooded in, the IRS would have opened investigations, Congress would have found something to hold hearings over, laws would have been passed, the media narrative would have changed and flooded over the people, and the entire company would have been destroyed to drive the non-Cabal capital in it into other, competing, cabal-controlled entities amenable to increasing Cabal’s bottom line.

As Q said, we cannot imagine how big this thing is.

Tell everyone about r/K Theory, because the Cabal is everywhere