CIA-Backed Artificial Intelligence Firm To Spy on Wall Street Traders
April 27, 2016
(ANTIMEDIA) —
Swiss multinational bank, Credit Suisse, will collaborate with data
analysis firm, Palantir, to launch a trader surveillance program.
According to Bloomberg’s Jeffrey Voegeli,
the joint venture, called Signac, aims to catch rogue Wall Streeters
engaged in illegal trading. It comes in the wake of a number of trading
scandals in recent years that have cost banks billions of dollars.
Palantir was co-founded by Peter Thiel and seed-funded by the CIA.
The company was funded in part by In-Q-Tel Inc., the venture capital
investment arm of the CIA that has a long, symbiotic history with
startups, the NSA, the FBI, and DARPA. In fact, In-Q-Tel specifically funds tech start-ups “to advance ‘priority’ technologies of value”
in the intelligence community. The group has ties to Donald Rumsfeld’s
Total Information Awareness initiative and is believed by some to have worked closely with Google in its earliest years.
Palantir itself has lived in the shadows since its 2004 inception,
working primarily to create a proprietary data mining system used by law
enforcement agencies, finance firms, and security companies to isolate
criminality. For example, Palantir’s software was used to analyze the
troves of millions of documents related to the Bernie Madoff scandal.
Palantir has an extensive relationship with the U.S. government, and includes among its clients
the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force,
Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED-defeat
organization and Allies, the Recovery Accountability and Transparency
Board, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.
Another client is the Los Angeles Police Department. A leaked document from 2013 included a quote from Sergeant Peter Jackson, who said Palantir’s technology is allowing the LAPD to become more efficient.
The new trader surveillance co-venture comes at a time when Credit
Suisse finds itself in dire straits. After adhering to a so-called
Pursuit of Revenue “At All Costs” policy, the company now finds itself
facing $90 billion of distressed debt and rampant illiquidity.
