Palantir Government

One of the great challenges of the modern intelligence community is that of Multi-Level security. Multi-Level security refers to a security environment where users with wide ranging access permissions are simultaneously working with data with wide ranging access controls. The paradox of secure collaboration is that the greater the security control, the greater the possibility for analytical collaboration.

This is not meant to be technical description of Palantir Security, but rather a conceptual description so that the analyst can understand how the Palantir Security model directly addresses the collaborative analytical experience.  For a technical discussion of the Palantir Security model, consult our white video on the ‘Access Control Model’.  Note: all data and security markings are entirely notional.

So given that Palantir supports this extremely rich notion of Multi-Level security why is that important? As it turns out, this is important for several reasons:

ICD 501:
In January of this year, the ODNI signed Intelligence Community Directive Number 501. This directive outlines the required roles and responsibilities within the broader intelligence community including those related to collaboration and data security. In order to meet the requirements it is necessary to develop a secure, collaborative multi-level security environment as demonstrated in these videos. In addition, the directive specifically requires the notion of information Discovery (sec D.3, E) which is discussed in detail in the videos. Discovery in this context refers to “the act of obtaining knowledge of the existence, but not necessarily the content, of information collected or analysis produced by any IC element”. Palantir is the only Intelligence Platform available that supports both multi-level security and data discovery as described in ICD 501. For a broader discussion of Palantir and ICD 501 compliance download a pdf here.

Privacy & Civil Liberties:
For years it has been assumed that in order to have security, there must be a trade-off with Privacy & Civil Liberties. One of the most important aspects of true Multi-Level security is that it reduces or completely eliminates the need for this trade-off. Because every aspect of a record is individually secured, it is possible to still perform analysis on a record but not reveal any identifying information about the record or where it came from. Additionally, because of the powerful audit trail associated with all information stored in Palantir, it is possible to reconstruct everything about a record including who created it, where it came from, when it was created and who modified it. For a more in-depth discussion of Privacy, Civil Liberties & Palantir please visit our page on the topic.

Other Sensitive Records:
As it turns out, there are many types of records that can also benefit from a Multi-Level Security approach. Many of our personal records have sensitive elements that we don’t want to share broadly either out of personal preference or out of legal statute. One of the most obvious examples is medical records. Consider the different roles that various healthcare workers have when interacting with a patient’s medical records:

This type of role-based security is only possible if different aspects of a patient’s medical record can be carefully filtered depending on who is viewing the record. This problem is exactly analogous to the filtering of information based on the roles and responsibilities of members of the intelligence community.