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Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

bloomberg.com

51–60 of 277 posts

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#51

> Aided by as many as 120 “forward-deployed engineers” This term popping up again made me curious. To my surprise, that's not just some overloaded nickname (what's cooler than styling yourself with a military or martial arts term, right?), that's what they are actually called: https://www.palantir.com/careers/teams/forward-deployed-soft...

What's the difference between a normal software engineer and a "forward-deployed" software engineer, though? It sounds to me like that's just their military-flavored version of "rockstar developer" or "code ninja".

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#52

I'm much less concerned with Palantir being used internally by corporations to detect information leaks (although in practice this also means it will be used to quash whistleblowers), since that's at least a viable use for their technology. And it's good that Palantir is pivoting towards less invasive applications of their technology such as supply chain tracking. But the article touches on the biggest issue with Pal…

Can you expand on exactly how Palantir is used for parellel construction?

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#53

I'm much less concerned with Palantir being used internally by corporations to detect information leaks (although in practice this also means it will be used to quash whistleblowers), since that's at least a viable use for their technology. And it's good that Palantir is pivoting towards less invasive applications of their technology such as supply chain tracking. But the article touches on the biggest issue with Pal…

Thiel's genuine commitment to freedom is questionable. Also, he's a misogynist and jerk.

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#54

Why does the media seem to be publishing so many "well duh" tier articles about various companies at the moment? "Big data company collects big data", "company known for monetising private data collects private data", "political consulting company profiles voters and tries to affect vote". No shit?

> Why does the media… Here’s a handy formula next time you ask yourself a similar question: Why does the media X? — Because people watch / listen to / read X. Why do people read about companies collecting data? Because it sounds scary, and it blames someone who is not them. Fear + scapegoat + victimisation of people = read read read read. Don’t think of it any more complex than this or you will drown in irrelevant de…

yeah, good point. It makes sense how such clearly irrational articles could come about through those incentives.

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#55
post #43

Culture flows from the top. Peter Thiel apparently views women's suffrage and poor people as "tough for libertarians [like him]". Can we talk about, well, how problematic it is that a company that has information on just about everyone (and all the power this yields) is lead by someone like this? > As Thiel’s wealth has grown, he’s gotten more strident. In a 2009 essay for the Cato Institute, he railed against taxes,…

[flagged]

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#56

I’ve always thought - I don’t care if the NSA is spying on US citizens because their job is national security. The problem is when those tools trickle down. All of a sudden you have a local cop with too much time on their hands spying on you. But if you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to hide, right? Isn’t that how the saying goes?

Their job is national security... within the confines of the constitution. I don't get how an entity egregiously violating the supreme law of the land can ever be dismissed with an "I don't care" by anyone who claims to care about the rule of law.

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#57

I can't wait that EU citizen will hit them hard after May 25th.

As the yearned-for fake privacy walls go up, the only entities that will still have the ability to abuse privacy, will be politically connected corporations and governments.

Germany supposedly has some of the best privacy laws in the world. Their government freely abuses their people with domestic espionage. They'll continue to work with technology businesses to that end as it fits their purposes.

There's a lot of outrage about Facebook. Meanwhile, absolutely nothing has changed, or is going to change, about the NSA spying. Nothing got fixed. More or less the Snowden revelations were entirely meaningless in terms of changing the status quo. The NSA is spying on EU and US citizens just as they were five years ago, just as they will be five years from now. Where's the outrage today about the NSA? Almost everyone gave up, that's why Facebook is the new target, the people couldn't do anything about the government spying.

GDPR creates the haves and have nots when it comes to access to abuse privacy. That's all it will change. If you have the political access (which Palantir does and will), you're going to get the security keys to abuse privacy (the alternative is for EU governments to entirely shut down all domestic espionage, that will never happen).

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#58
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this might be a surprise to you, but not everyone knows everything that you do.

I'm not exactly tapping my own research here. Palantir is a big data/spying company, what do you expect from them? Facebook asks you for lots of private data and it's clearly obvious that when you post data on Facebook, Facebook gets that data. So what's the shock that they hold this private data? The only surprising aspect of the current Facebook drama is that they apparently mine your phone for additional data but…

> Palantir is a big data/spying company, what do you expect from them?

How can expect anything of them when I don't even know that company exists, let alone what it does?

> Why are people surprised that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, did political research and affected a voter outreach strategy? None of this requires any real background knowledge, and yet the outcry seems extremely disproportionate to the revelations at hand. It seems like the Snowden reports all over again, where the world was up in arms that an intelligence agency was collecting intelligence.

This is simplifying the discussion a lot. The general assumption about both intelligence and research was probably that they stick to rules and are concerned with their own fields.

I'd guess the average joe would (before snowden at least) think that an intelligence agency is concerned with foreign diplomats and military strategists and a political consultancy does opinion polls.

It's something different if said agencies collect intimate data of random citizens without their consent. At least in public mind, that was something the stasi or similar organisations did - but certainly not their own side.

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#59
This isn’t Palantir, this is the companies who buy Palantir software.

The data from JPMorganChase isn’t visibile to Palantir as an organization, but to the bank.

This headline is weird and as accurate as “Microsoft knows everything about you” because the bank uses SQL Server. Or “the Python developers” because python and pandas is used to link a bunch of data together.

Since this is Bloomberg, I would expect them to know the difference between software and data services. Google gets your data when you use them (except for enterprise), most other products don’t.

Cynically, this seems like oppo PR against Thiel. How could you prove this suspicion?

Re: Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

#60
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the title?

It’s clickbait. It doesn’t state it or give a citation for it anywhere in the actual article.

I don't think it's directly stated in the article. But with a little common sense we can probably safely assume that a company that is designed specifically to analyze huge amounts of data for law enforcement agencies, governments and 3 letter agencies will probably have a lot more data than Facebook.

In fact, we can probably also assume that people's Facebook data has already been inputted in Palantir's system as just another data source.

Sure that's a lot of assumptions and probabilities, but on the other hand: Peter Thiel.

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