Big Data Analytics Proves Invaluable In Tax Fraud Investigation

Posted: 29 Aug 2013 03:57 PM PDT

The article on ComputerWeekly.com titled Big Data Journalism Exposes Offshore Tax Dodgers reports on the findings of Offshore Leaks, the result of the work of an international group of journalists. The fascinating story of offshore tax evasion by over 100,000 owners and founders of companies and trusts begins in Australia with a hard drive containing 260 GB of corporate files and unfiltered (and unorganized) personal emails. The article explains,

“Processing and publishing the leaked data brought to the US from Australia took over 18 months to bring to fruition, and is still continuing. As the largest ever big data project tackled by journalists, the investigation faced technical problems and errors from the start, took blind alleys, and encountered problems in collaboration, as well as pioneering effective new methods…

The first wave of reporting of Offshore Leaks stories began in the UK’s Guardian in November 2012, followed by a global relaunch in April 2013.

The G8 summit in Lough Erne, Northern Ireland this year will address the issue raised by the stories. David Cameron even requested that offshore company records be published. It was not until Australian company Nuix offered the journalists its text retrieval software that the unstructured data began to give relevant tips. Without such analytics software the project may have gone nowhere.

Chelsea Kerwin, September 03, 2013

Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext

How A ‘Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut

This story appears in the September 2, 2013 issue of Forbes.

EXTRACT

Palantir lives the realities of its customers: the NSA, the FBI and the CIA–an early investor through its In-Q-Tel venture fund–along with an alphabet soup of other U.S. counterterrorism and military agencies. In the last five years Palantir has become the go-to company for mining massive data sets for intelligence and law enforcement applications, with a slick software interface and coders who parachute into clients’ headquarters to customize its programs. Palantir turns messy swamps of information into intuitively visualized maps, histograms and link charts. Give its so-called “forward-deployed engineers” a few days to crawl, tag and integrate every scrap of a customer’s data, and Palantir can elucidate problems as disparate as terrorism, disaster response and human trafficking.

. . . . . .

That mission turned out to be vastly more difficult than any of the founders had imagined. PayPal had started with perfectly structured and organized information for its fraud analysis. Intelligence customers, by contrast, had mismatched collections of e-mails, recordings and spreadsheets.

. . . . . . .

And now Palantir is emerging from the shadow world of spies and special ops to take corporate America by storm. The same tools that can predict ambushes in Iraq are helping pharmaceutical firms analyze drug data. According to a former JPMorgan Chase staffer, they’ve saved the firm hundreds of millions of dollars by addressing issues from cyberfraud to distressed mortgages. A Palantir user at a bank can, in seconds, see connections between a Nigerian Internet protocol address, a proxy server somewhere within the U.S. and payments flowing out from a hijacked home equity line of credit, just as military customers piece together fingerprints on artillery shell fragments, location data, anonymous tips and social media to track down Afghani bombmakers.

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Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Forbes Pimps Palantir”

Oil

This is the best explanation of what carbon energy interests are trying to do that I have read. Because they don't properly acknowledge climate change, they do not see that it is going to soon be obvious to even the meanest intelligence that we cannot go forward with carbon. But the damage… President Obama's failure to effectively act in a compassionate and life-affirming way on this issue is one of the reasons I find him so disappointing.

The Third Carbon Age
MICHAEL T. KLARE – Reader Supported News

Water

I constantly tell you that water is destiny. This is what I mean. If all the dams proposed are built the countries of Asia will collectively destroy their environment in a major way; a self-inflicted wound that may take generations to repair. And this report is mostly about surface water.

This same madness can be seen in Fracking, which deals with sub-surface water. Pure underground aquifers are the national equivalent of an inheritance received from a relative one never knew. Polluting them so that a small number of people and corporations can get even richer than they already are is neither compassionate nor life-affirming. It is evil.

Click through to see the graphic, which is very helpful.

China and India ‘Water Grab' Dams Put Ecology of Himalayas in Danger
JOHN VIDAL – The Observer (U.K.)

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Oil & Water — Craven Idiocy or Enlightened Renewal?”

IMO … Greider is one of the most astute observers of the Fed and the pro-plutocratic antics of the Neo-Liberal Democrats.

Fed Up With Larry Summers

by William Greider

Extract:

Don’t be misled. Those who dig into his old speeches and pronouncements will find rich material to make the case for rejecting him. The question is not about left or right policy decisions. It’s about competence.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: Fed Up With Larry Summers + Immoral Economics RECAP”

Defkalion's Live LENR Demo: Scientifically Impressive Notwithstanding Glitches

At its height today, the Defkalion reactor produced more than three times more heat energy output than the input electricity required to run it, bespeaking some kind of anomalous effect, probably nuclear (the safe variety). They expected it to go as high as 4x, but not having time to properly vacate the argon used for the control, they…

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Movie Subtitle Fansite Raided By Copyright Industry And Police

Copyright Monopoly: The movie subtitle fansite undertexter.se has been raided by the police and copyright industry. This marks an escalation of the war against sharing culture and knowledge, as the site contained nothing but user-submitted translations of movie dialog. We are quickly coming to a two-tier justice system, where the copyright industry is right against single parents by definition, and that’s not taken very well.

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