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Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens

bloomberg.com

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

#271

Post by billhendricksjr »

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.

Contradiction? You’re too kind, he’s a straight up hypocrite. He used “privacy” to kill Gawker, in part because he didn’t like their coverage of his ventures.

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

#272

Post by mercer »

ng12 wrote: post #219
randcraw wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that corporations closely monitor only their own employees while Palantir closely monitors EVERYBODY. Corporations take an interest in tracking people only to stratify them into groups suited to specific ad strategies. The worst their errors will do is pepper your browser and email with bad ads. Not so with Palantir when their tracking data can misguide police departments, credit agencies, and even…

Palantir doesn't really _do_ anything. They don't collect the data, just save time/man-hours spent processing it. If that's your stance, Oracle/IBM are just as evil because they also sell to police departments to enable analysis. Facebook on the other hand is actively collecting the data. Without Facebook that database does not exist. In my mind that makes them far worse.

I think it's not a fringe opinion that Oracle/IBM are just as evil. I don't have a strong opinion on this issue at this point, but just saying.

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

#273

Post by nunya213 »

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…

For someone as deeply entrenched in Tech as Thiel you would think the "in practice" part would be quite clear to him.

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

#274

Post by Anderkent »

stef25 wrote: post #266
creaghpatr wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Medicare fraud is estimated to be around $60B per year or 10% of the whole budget. So if Palantir can decrease that rate by 1 or 2% then it's tough to call that overkill http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/medicare-funds-totaling-60-bi... >Going even further back, in 1998, a Senate investigation into Medicare fraud found $6 million in payments to a “business” whose fake address would have been smack in the middle of the M…

These things could be fixed by simple address verification. Amazing they have to wait for something like Palantir.

This is like someone saying web search could be solved by a simple database lookup.

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

#276

Post by specialist »

fishcakes wrote: post #260
specialist wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I determine everything Palantir knows about me, and all the ways they've used and shared that data?

That is like asking everything Oracle or Postgresql knows about you. It doesn't make sense. Palantir is software deployed for specific customers. The customers then use Palantir against their data and publicly available data.

Thank you for the clarification. I had always assumed Palantir, like their competitors (Seisent, ChoicePoint, etc), did both services and software.

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

#277

Post by xpaqui »

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…

> our software has been used to save tens of thousands of lifes, prevent hundreds of terrorist attacks... This is exactly what I mean by advantages vs disadvantages these look like stapled platitudes from the marketing team. It looks like you are conflating war zones scenarios with civil society a bit like promoting an M1 Abram for New York police, due to the effectiveness in Iraq. If you aren't then I'm baffled by how many terrorist attacks we've thwarted, and incredulous. There haven't been thousands of terrorist attacks in civil society before the software was created.

> Or stripped of their investigative or enforcing power? So it's either all the power or none of the power? This is a logical fallacy you are creating a duality for something that does not exist. The police is not the same as your software like you implied. I'm against the government spying on their citizens even with good intentions. See the black mirror episode since it demonstrates where problem lies, it's not in good intentions, it's in the control.

Does this software help the government to spy on their citizens? Yes. Should the citizens have a say in if they want this software to be used for their data? Yes, why don't they have say? Can we live without this software? Yes, like we've done so far. Is this software helpful in a police state? I would say it's the most valuable software for a police state.

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