At the same time, along with Alex Karp, his roommate at Stanford Law School, Thiel set up the data analytics company Palantir. This grew out of an anti-fraud system that Thiel had developed at PayPal, which combined computer software and human analysis, and which Thiel believed could be applied to identify not only financial fraud but also terrorist networks. The first major investor was the CIA’s investment venture arm In-Q-Tel. Palantir is reported to have played a critical role in tracking down Osama bin Laden, and is also used by banks and drug enforcement agencies. Thiel does not see any conflict between his beliefs and providing a programme which, in theory, allows even more accurate excavation of personal information by government agencies. The debate about security and civil liberties, he says, is often framed as involving a trade-off between the two things. ‘My view is that it’s quite the opposite. As a libertarian, I believe that it’s critical to develop technology like this, because the alternative is that you will get very low-tech solutions that are enormously intrusive but have very little value, which is basically what happened after 9/11 in the United States. For example, if you have no way of potentially identifying likely terrorists you may require every single person to take their shoes off every time they get on an airplane. And I think this is the way one needs to think of the entire, somewhat dysfunctional, National Security Agency/industrial complex. It’s more the Keystone Cops than Big Brother.