An organization like the CIA or FBI can have thousands of different databases, each with its own quirks: financial records, DNA samples, sound samples, video clips, maps, floor plans, human intelligence reports from all over the world. Gluing all that into a coherent whole can take years. Even if that system comes together, it will struggle to handle different types of data—sales records on a spreadsheet, say, plus video surveillance images. What Palantir (pronounced Pal-an-TEER) does, says Avivah Litan, an analyst at Gartner (IT), is “make it really easy to mine these big data sets.” The company’s software pulls off one of the great computer science feats of the era: It combs through all available databases, identifying related pieces of information, and puts everything together in one place.

When our full site launches in January, we’ll have a feature drawing connections between companies such as Palantir with intelligence agencies and private organizations.

Other media outlets added their own analysis of what the latest-known example of social media monitoring in the name of security means. The main takeaway: Expect this sort of practice by government agencies to grow and evolve.

The practice of tracking mass sentiment, dubbed as “memetracking,” is still in its infancy, according to Johan Bollen, a professor at the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University. He told The Atlantic:

“Right now, analysis is very specialized. We’re looking at how people feel about very particular topics. … There’s a lot room for growth in deeper semantic analysis: not just learning what people feel about something, but what people think about things. There are 250 million people on Twitter. … if you could perform even a shallow analysis of people’s opinions about something, their semantic opinions, you can learn a lot from the wisdom of the crowd that could be leveraged.”

Alex Pareene of Salon noted that the CIA news came days after Department of Homeland Security claims that they were not “actively monitoring” social media. He says it’s smart to suspect that several government agencies from the CIA down to the NYPD are monitoring social media. “What I’m interested to learn is how much ostensibly “private” information — like real names and private messages and locations — these agencies are obtaining, and the means by which they’re obtaining it,” Pareene writes.

So basically, this is only the beginning.