Palantir Technologies is a private American software company that specializes in big data analytics. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, it was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp.

Palantir's technology was developed in warzones like Fallujah, where it was used to anticipate roadside bombs and attacks by insurgents. Now, it's being used on the streets of Los Angeles to root out criminals like something straight out of the movie "Minority Report."

Now, the company has gathered massive amounts of data on the American populace, which it farms out to police departments, who use it to track down criminals before they strike. The company's technology isn't only used to track down common street thugs. It's also used to track and anticipate the crimes of white collar fraudsters like Bernie Madoff.

Little is known about the company, which, unlike most tech startups, has no plans to go public. In 2013, CEO Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, explained that "running a company like ours would be very difficult" if it was exposed to the scrutiny that comes with being a public company.

In other words, if the public became aware of what Palantir is doing, the backlash might dwarf the data privacy scandals that have roiled Silicon Valley in recent years.

Here's more from a Guardian report about the company:

Military-grade surveillance technology has now migrated from Fallujah to the suburban neighbourhoods of LA. Predictive policing is being used on illegal drivers and petty criminals through a redeployment of techniques and algorithms used by the US army dealing with insurgents in Iraq and with civilian casualty patterns.

In Box: When the US is described as a "war zone" between police and young black males, it is rarely mentioned that tactics developed by the US military in a real war zone are actually being deployed.

One could argue that sophisticated pre-crime algorithms are not necessary when being black and male is seen as reason enough for the police to swoop. What predictive policing has done is militarise American cities, creating a heightened culture of suspicion and fear in areas where tensions are highest and policing is already most difficult. Officers being led to certain neighbourhoods solely because of an algorithm is enough to cause tension; enough to ignite a powder keg and push a delicate policing situation over the edge.

Ana Muniz is an activist and researcher who works with the Inglewood-based Youth Justice Coalition. "Any time that a society’s military and domestic police become more similar, the lines blur," she told LA Weekly. "The military is supposed to defend the territory from external enemies, that’s not the mission of the police - they’re not supposed to look at the population as an external enemy."

As the paper explains, the company offers a glimpse of the dystopian, totalitarian future that is gradually becoming a reality in China. Its capabilities to run 'special ops' using big-data tools shows how it has more power than Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon combined.

Palantir is immensely secretive. It wields as much real-world power as Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft and Apple, but unlike them, Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.