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Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

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

#231

Post by RedTennisRacket »

pm90 wrote: post #218
RedTennisRacket wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is unclear to me what you are saying here. It is well-known fact (amongst the intelligence community) that our software has been used to save tens of thousands of lifes, prevent hundreds (thousands?) of terrorist attacks, saved billions of dollar in fraud etc. In terms of most of the kind of projects governments do in an attempt to prevent {crime,fraud,terrorism,...}, on a scale for how much bang you get for your…

> Of course the exact boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not should be fiercely debated. What makes most people uneasy, and especially those of us who work in tech, is that many police departments and 3 letter agencies have routinely abused the trust that people put in them. If you want the citizenry to have trust and faith in law enforcement, they have to demonstrate a desire to not break constitutional ri…

I think it's important to distinguish between individual abuse and systemic abuse.

Every one of those agencies has had, in their history, at least some cases of individual abuse (e.g. one particular individual abusing their power). This is unavoidable (because these agencies employ humans, and humans are assholes sometimes) but as long as the situation is appropriately handled at the organizational level (the responsible party is reprimanded in an appropriate way, e.g. let go, tried, ... and practices and protocols are put into place to deal with and prevent these kind of situations) this is OK, because the agency operating is still a net win for humanity.

Most people who are paranoid about these kind of things are so because the media loves to pick up these stories and hype them up and spread fear -- but I don't think it's that much of a problem.

The thing that's really a worry (and that media usually does not report on) is when abuse happens in a systemic fashion, e.g. agencies bending the interpretation of the law to extend their reach. Incidentally, this is exactly what palantirs software is designed to help with, because it can actually enforce these rules.

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

#232

Post by jessaustin »

pm90 wrote: post #217
nunya213 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thiel is an exercise in contradiction. "In his view, the best way to avoid such scenarios in the future would be to provide the government the most cutting-edge technology possible and build in policing systems to make sure investigators use it lawfully." Prevent the police state by building the police state.

Is it really? I think what he's trying to say is that we should have tools powerful enough to let the Government find/track people efficiently and correctly as long as there is a lawful reason for doing so . Its similar to the weak crypto arguments where Govt. agencies argue they should be able to break crypto protocols via a backdoor when there is a lawful reason to do so. That being said: the PATRIOT act and NSA's…

Perhaps what he's trying to say is, "I like money and power."

"The logic" in this case is a proposition about how beings behave. That is, "We can build the largest prison system in history, give law enforcement unlimited surveillance powers and not expect massive injustices." That is simply wrong. Human beings are not like that.

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

#233

Post by teaneedz »

RedTennisRacket wrote: post #214
xpaqui wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy. This is disingenuous at best this is a tool for surveillance and its misuse in public life is more obvious than the advantages it might bring. People will naturally distrust a government…

It is unclear to me what you are saying here. It is well-known fact (amongst the intelligence community) that our software has been used to save tens of thousands of lifes, prevent hundreds (thousands?) of terrorist attacks, saved billions of dollar in fraud etc. In terms of most of the kind of projects governments do in an attempt to prevent {crime,fraud,terrorism,...}, on a scale for how much bang you get for your…

No, most aware people do not agree with your anti-privacy view.

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

#234

Post by jessaustin »

Latty wrote: post #205
currysausage wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something along the lines of "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil"? ;) https://tanguy.ortolo.eu/blog/article46/json-license

When I was at IBM the story about IBM legal asking for permission to use JSLint for evil was a classic. The original post appears to be dead, but https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5138866 discusses it.

Wow 2002 was so long ago. We had no idea.

What am I saying? Most of us still have no idea.

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

#235

Post by return1 »

TheCoelacanth wrote: post #229
return1 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

there is no rule or authority in anarchism. ancaps advocate a voluntary society.

Anarchocapitalism does not allow someone to opt out of the concept of property. That is not a voluntary society. Capital owners are the authorities in anarchocapitalism. A truly anarchistic society would have no private property.

of course it does. you can choose to create a commune, nobody is going to stop you unless you try to create it on the property they are homesteading in.

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

#236

Post by archerface »

zo1 wrote: post #226
thestephen wrote: post #159

> The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic offenders [...] The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as poss…

For all we know, keeping a closer eye on previous criminals deters them from repeating their crimes. This strikes me as a very benign way of preventing a crime from happening in the first place. Rather than letting it happen, creating a victim and perpetrator, and then having to punish the latter yet again. At the very least, this should give them the impression that policing is much higher than it actually is. Sound…

There is a lot of problems with this strategy when introduced into the real world; the chaotic vortex that it is.

The data can be wrong. This could be easily fixed if law enforcement agencies had to actually verify that the data was correct, but in practice this seems to rarely occur.

When people are told by a group that they are a thing, repeatedly, they eventually accept that they are that thing. If the cops keep harassing you for being a gangbanger when you have never been one your whole, you just happen to be associated with a few individuals who are, you eventually just move towards that group. Why not? The powers that be already think you are one and they treat you like one, which causes other people to treat you like one, so why not just be one?

You also need to consider the idea of enforcing crime that hasn't happened yet. That defeats the whole point of law enforcement. It is meant as a reactionary force, not an offensive force. Policing someone who has the potential for crime assumes that they will do it again, which makes it so your essentially treating them as guilty for something they haven't done yet. From my perspective, that seems to defeat the purpose of our legal system.

Anyway, I think I will end my rant here...

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

#237

Post by selimthegrim »

athenot wrote: post #127
2close4comfort wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New Orleans PD...there was an article about it here recently. That is PT/Palantir's vision of the future. It is going to be pretty damn hard to stop once it gets going hopefully Facebook being on the front page of MSN for a couple of days will we a reckoning because the things the average person does not realise would REALLY upset them.

On a positive note, New Orleans decided to not renew their contract with Palantir. I am not sure whether this is the result of that article or not.

The mayor is leaving office.

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

#238

Post by RedTennisRacket »

otakucode wrote: post #227
RedTennisRacket wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FOIAs are not made to companies, they are made to government entities. But yes, of course you can make FOIA requests to government entities we work with (the law guarantees you this privilege), and about the work we do with them -- reporters do this all the time. In some of the more liberal countries the things we do with the government are even part of public record and you can find contracts and services we provide…

When I send a FOIA request to [insert law enforcement agency here] and ask them to provide me with the source code and data used to classify me as a criminal so that I can determine whether the chain of reasoning holds up, and the law enforcement agency then needs to turn to Palantir to request that source code and data, what response will they get?

I think there are a couple of misconceptions about FOIAs, our software and the law in general here...

- FOIAs cannot be used to obtain specific information about persons, this kind of information is protected. In the EU under the GDPR however, you can get some of this information (about yourself only) -- but I think law enforcement agencies are probably exempt from this (not sure, but would make sense.)

- Our software does not make decisions on who is or is not a criminal in an automated fashion (or indeed any fashion). In fact, law enforcement can not make such a decision at all, ever -- only a judge in a court can deem you a criminal. Law enforcement can merely decide that you are a suspect. (And again, this is also not something our software (or any software anywhere) decides in an automated fashion.) So there isn't really a 'chain of reasoning' here

- When you actually ARE accused of a crime (this would happen in a court, and only if there is substantial evidence against you), you will be told what the crime is and why you are suspected of the crime. Thus the 'chain of reasoning' will be presented to you, and be available for verification by anyone participating in the court case (including, depending on country, e.g. a jury)

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

#239

Post by mercer »

nunya213 wrote: post #202
opportune wrote: post #42

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 is an exercise in contradiction. "In his view, the best way to avoid such scenarios in the future would be to provide the government the most cutting-edge technology possible and build in policing systems to make sure investigators use it lawfully." Prevent the police state by building the police state.

Honestly I'd really like Thiel or someone else to explain this. He strikes me as too smart to be that dumb.

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

#240

Post by ideophobia »

cezart wrote: post #195
ideophobia wrote: post #82

I used to be intelligence analyst that utilized Palantir on a daily basis. Ask me anything.

What kind of databases were used in your case for the analysis? Was it only the databases you provided them? Or are there also some generic sources Palantir provides by default? Or do they even cross-reference data from different clients?

We used a variety of 3rd party records databases (think Lexis Nexus, TLO, etc.), government/police databases (NIPR, SIPR, HSIN, NCIC, LEO.gov, etc), internal databases, and state public records systems (think DMV). We only had databases which we owned or had access to. Palantir did not provide any actual data for my department. They did have pre-built connectors for certain data sources, and pre-built attribute models for tagging data, which I assumed were developed for previous customers. But the initial install of Palantir was empty, and only populated with our data sources. To my knowledge Palantir does not provide any data. I actually recall walking into a room and finding 3-4 Palantir engineers doing nothing but migrating data from our old intelligence software into the new Palantir system, mostly by hand.

I can say with 100% certainty that they did not cross-reference our data with other customers, because the software not sending any data back to Palantir was a primary stipulation of our purchase. I was always under the impression that no data was shared across customers, just code, connectors, and best practices. Our installation of Palantir was 100% local, none of the infrastructure sat in a vendor cloud environment or on Palantirs home servers.

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