Matt Bevan

It's just amazing.

Now, if you were around back then, you'll remember that there was understandable concern that something like this might happen again.

A lot of changes were made to try and make people feel safe from terror attacks.

And a lot of those changes were quite annoying.

The sort of sense I had was that the way we were going with just, you know, ridiculous airport security checks and super intrusive surveillance all the time, it wasn't really making us safer.

This is tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has some complicated opinions about how the world should be run, which we'll get into in the next episode of our series.

But let's just say at this stage, he wasn't a fan of the government trying to intrude into people's lives in the name of trying to stop terrorism.

He was concerned that if there were another attack along the lines of 9-11, the government would try to become even more intrusive.

If the World Trade Center would erode civil liberties as much as it did in 2001, I didn't even want to think what would happen if you had another terrorist attack.

And so you have to prevent it to stop more erosion.

He was more in favour of the liberty side of John O'Neill's ordered liberty seesaw.

Could one do something from a libertarian or civil liberties point of view that would still be tough on terrorism and things like this?

He and his university buddy named Alex Karp started focusing on the data.

The government already had plenty of information that they could use to prevent terror attacks.

They just weren't using the information efficiently.

Teal and Carp founded a company called Palantir, named after Saruman's all-seeing glass ball from Lord of the Rings.

Now, naming your nascent tech company after a tool used by the very bad guy trying to take over Middle Earth is an interesting decision, but we'll, again, get to that a little bit later.

As far as Alex Karp and Peter Thiel were concerned, the company was designed to gather all the data points siloed within individual agencies and make connections.

Palantir's first investor was the CIA.

It's been widely reported, though never officially confirmed, that in 2011 Palantir played a key role in processing information which led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in his secret compound in Pakistan.