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Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

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Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#101

Post by mindcrime »

zarathustraa wrote: post #96
mindcrime wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or would you say "as much as I am saddened, I cannot approve such massive invasion of privacy". Yes, I would take that stance every time, and twice on Sunday.

Funny, you seem to be working on systems very similar to Palantir (twitter handle on HN profile): https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs/status/1086757478312960002 What safeguards do you have in place to make sure that personally identifiable information of customers that companies using your tech have is not aggregated and pulled together for nefarious use? For example very targeted lead sourcing or targeted advertisement?…

At the end of the day, the only aspect of what we do that is really anything like Palantir is that we build a search index, using Lucene. That's it, an inverted text index. There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard, all our stuff is Open Source, meaning anybody could rebuild it without the safeguard, and we'd be none the wiser.

The differences between us and Palantir then:

1. We don't pitch our software to intelligence agencies, law enforcement, etc., or encourage it's use for these kinds of ends. But we can't specifically block those uses, or we'd be in violation of the OSD.

2. We've been very public with our unwillingness to embrace working with intelligence agencies and the like. See, for example: https://www.wraltechwire.com/2014/04/30/why-a-triangle-tech-...

3. Everything we do is Open Source, meaning that at least the public can take a look inside and see what's going on... modulo any changes a given end user organization makes and keeps private.

4. Our technology is positioned primarily for internal knowledge management / collaboration use inside organizations. But, again, we have no means, legal or technical, to stop somebody from using it for other purposes. And even if we did, they could just download Lucene, ManifoldCF, blah, blah, etc., and build up their own Nefarious Indexing System.

But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.

There is nothing in this regard that we "don't see". Taking your argument to it's logical conclusion, even a worker mining sand somewhere, to use to fabricate silicon chips, which can be used to power computers, which can be used to run privacy violating software, is "guilty". I don't think I need to point out the absurdity of that position. Furthermore, if we really just cared about "get all the money at any cost" we would have immediately jumped at a chance to talk to In-Q-Tel and the possibility of juicy, rich contracts supplying the CIA and their brethren with technology.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#102

Post by elbasti »

_iyig wrote: post #99
elbasti wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe a [citation needed] is required for the claim that US immigration policy is "internationally conventional". There is of course enormous variance in how countries handle immigration, but the ethical and conventional policy could be summarized as: 1. Border enforcement. Ie, try to prevent people from entering illegally 2. Tolerance for those who are illegally present (2) Means that a person who emigrated ille…

Mexico is deporting illegal migrants at the highest rate since 2006, and has deployed the military on their southern border: https://www.teledoce.com/telemundo/internacionales/mexico-au... The E.U. tightened their border control policies after a wave of terrorist attacks and upsurge in far-right political activity. We ran the experiment, and it turns out that's what happens when you let in millions of people with lit…

1) I think if you re-read my comment you'll notice that the issue with the US policy isn't loose borders, it's unethical treatment of people who make it _past_ the border.

2) Mexico's deportations are just as unethical as the US ones.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#103

Post by _iyig »

anigbrowl wrote: post #94
_iyig wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry to hear about your personal experience; I've been in a similar situation myself, related to voice assistant technology. However, I don't think either of our experiences necessarily imply that Palantir is evil. For example: Typewriters can be turned to evil. IBM showed this to the world with their WWII-era Nazi collaboration. That doesn't mean the world should abandon typewriters, or that no self-respecting…

Typewriters can be turned to evil. IBM showed this to the world with their WWII-era Nazi collaboration. That doesn't mean the world should abandon typewriters, or that no self-respecting engineer should work on typewriters, or that they would be necessarily used for evil by the law-enforcement arm of a democratic society. IBM's relationship with the Third Reich was not based on the mere supply of typewriters; such a…

>IBM's relationship with the Third Reich was not based on the mere supply of typewriters; such a suggestion reduces your credibility on this topic to zero.

"Punchcards can be turned to evil."

The specific type of dual-use technology is irrelevant to my point.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#104

Post by sfotm »

metalliqaz wrote: post #40
strooper wrote: post #22

> "Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on thousands of undocumented families. Activists argue raids of this scale would be impossible without software like Palantir." Once and for all, it is the policy makers, not the tech industry, who are responsible for these operations. Tech enables people doing t…

I used to think the same. I now think that this reasoning is faulty. Cars can be used for good or evil. For the most part we leave it up to the users to do the right thing, however we don't just leave it up to the users. If a modern car manufacturer were to make a vehicle with no safety features whatsoever, we would rightly call them out as a bad actor. Seat belts, air bags, bumpers, crumple zones, defoggers, windshi…

At the same time, a lot of those safety features are enforced by the governments of the people they're manufactured for. Depending on the country you buy a vehicle in, it may have more or fewer security features.

Of course, for cars, safety is a marketable feature so it behooves them to make them somewhat safe. In this instance, it seems like these precautions are against the user's interests, which complicates things.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#106

Post by zarathustraa »

mindcrime wrote: post #101
zarathustraa wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, you seem to be working on systems very similar to Palantir (twitter handle on HN profile): https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs/status/1086757478312960002 What safeguards do you have in place to make sure that personally identifiable information of customers that companies using your tech have is not aggregated and pulled together for nefarious use? For example very targeted lead sourcing or targeted advertisement?…

At the end of the day, the only aspect of what we do that is really anything like Palantir is that we build a search index, using Lucene. That's it, an inverted text index. There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard, all our stuff is Open Source, meaning anybody could rebuild it without the s…

> There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard

Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing, you obviously don't see anything wrong with mining and linking databases of PII information, as long as it's done by "the good guys".

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#107

Post by _iyig »

akiselev wrote: post #100
_iyig wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are essential to the economy because American employers can pay below-market wages for back-breaking labor. I'd prefer to make such practices illegal, rather than continually subjecting undocumented immigrants to awful working conditions with no healthcare or legal recourse in cases of abuse. If a concerted effort was made to improve the lives of such workers, I think you'd be surprised how quickly Americans wou…

I think you'd be surprised how fast the companies hiring all those workers would go bankrupt, leaving the United States without an agricultural industry (which is as critical to national security as the rule of law). Americans are, on the whole, unwilling to pay the prices required to provide people with a living wage and proper labor protections.

>Americans are, on the whole, unwilling to pay the prices required to provide people with a living wage and proper labor protections.

I would frame it as, "Americans are, on the whole, unwilling to pay higher prices for ethically-sourced food when lower prices can be had elsewhere." The solution is to eliminate the cheaper, unethical alternative.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#108

Post by zymhan »

lisper wrote: post #80
rsweeney21 wrote: post #59

I'm mixed on this. I hired a former CIA analyst a few years ago. Part of his job at the CIA was to contribute to the daily briefings provided to president Obama. I asked him how he felt about the ethics of spying on American citizens. He said I wouldn't believe the number of threats that were prevented on a daily basis because of the tools and data they have access to. He said they don't share the information about w…

> it also seemed like something big brother would say to get me to give up freedoms Or to keep up morale at the agency. The one indisputable fact is that actual attacks are very rare. So there are only two possibilities: 1. Law enforcement is exceptionally effective at stopping them, or 2. There are very few attempted attacks to begin with. Here's a data point to help you decide which of these is more likely: https:/…

You should've just stopped after number 2. I trust the intelligence community as little as the next techno-privacy-nut but obviously no one can come to any decision on a complex question with ONE data point.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#109

Post by zymhan »

sswezey wrote: post #20
_iyig wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What leads well-off Americans, whose safety and comfort is guaranteed by the constant efforts of law enforcement, to conclude that legal efforts to make law enforcement more efficient would make the world a worse place?

Ethics. The amount and scope of information collected by things like Palantir Gotham is beyond invasive. The fact that a police officer can type in your name and know where you were driving is disconcerting. It is about as Big Brother as you can get and not the kind of world I would like to live in. This question is a slippery slope, where people become more and more accustomed to less privacy. If you think this is j…

This exact issue was pointed out many times with automated license plate scanning came into existence. Is it really Palantir's fault for making software to aggregate the data? In my view it is our fault as citizens for allowing the government to collect such data in the first place.

Any other company with enough developers and data scientists can do what Palantir does. It's the massive amount of information their software uses that is the concern. But that data is collected by our government, and so we have legal recourse to it, either under current law or by passing new privacy laws.

Re: Palantir’s User Manual for Cops

#110

Post by mindcrime »

zarathustraa wrote: post #106
mindcrime wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the end of the day, the only aspect of what we do that is really anything like Palantir is that we build a search index, using Lucene. That's it, an inverted text index. There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard, all our stuff is Open Source, meaning anybody could rebuild it without the s…

> There really is no meaningful way to know that the data being put in is PII, or to regulate how the orgs that use it, do so. And even if we did put in any such safeguard Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing, you obviously don't see anything wrong with mining and linking databases of PII information, as long as it's done by "the good guys".

Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing

We don't. The line you quoted above is from my LinkedIn profile where it's describing my responsibilities as founder of the company. So, of course, part of what I do is prospecting and identifying leads. All companies do that, I don't think anything we do falls into the "nefarious" range. We aren't using retargeting or buying user information from data mining companies, etc. Our prospecting basically starts and stops with Twitter and LinkedIn... Not exactly spook stuff.

And while I can respect that some people take things to such extremes that they can even find mundane things like advertising unethical; I'm pretty comfortable with my own sense of ethics and our attempt to do the right things. In either case, attempting to draw any parallel between us and Palantir is an exercise in absurdity. Notice that there's no HN top-page stories titled "Fogbeam Lab's Secret User Manual For Cops", etc. :-)

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