131–140 of 164 posts
> "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…
> "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…
> "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…
Organizationally responsible. Ethically, if you provide means to do X and can reasonably predict that someone (e.g. government) will apply X to do something unethical, then you are at least partially responsible for the final unethical result.
> "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…
Seat belts, air bags,
bumpers, crumple zones,
defoggers, windshield
wipers, and on and on. We
have laws that require a
basic level of safety for
these potentially dangerous
machines.
Anyone over the age of 17 can ride one. They have no seat belts, windshields or bumpers, and they carry high rates of fatalities relative to the accidents that involve them, when compared to all other vehicles on public roads.
You are free to choose them over ordinary automobiles at your option in most countries.
Many vehicles are street legal, but not sold by commercial dealers, and still find their way onto public roads. People find ways around the implicit suggestions pushed upon any given market place. The market doesn’t always offer the best choices, but flexibility is a good thing.
Anyway, this is really about over-funded, near miltary yet still “civilian” law enforcement operations cutting across every jurisdiction to do whatever a handful of unelected people think ought to happen and carry the leverage to push their whims anywhere they want, simply because there’s no realistic counter to their privatized intent.
Think tanks sit around and muse about this and that, and then private militaries come out of the woodwork to advise federal employees about... whatever they want.
It’s going to keep happening. And unless you’re a billionaire, you don’t even have a seat at the table.
One piece of data they cannot access is firearm ownership. It is illegal to use a computer to store information about guns in America.
This is genuinely the most amusing joke I've heard today. How do you think background checks for purchases work?
> There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.
> That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.
Would this be all that shocking to the general public? Watch any detective show and the fictional tools there are at least as capable as this real life tool.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still, if someone crafts a knife and someone uses it to hurt another I'll blame the user, not the crafter.
You can't have it both ways. Police can easily hold someone as guilty of a crime for being in the same car as someone committing a crime. If you can be charged for that then a creator can be held complicit for any actions done using their software as intended.
multiple high speed chases around where I live have resulted from police lighting a car up, and the driver failing to stop. Passengers in the car were "released on scene", because there was a recognition that they did not commit the failure to stop (and other associated offenses), nor could they safely extricate themselves from proximity.
What motivates extremely talented tech workers to devote their limited working years to making the world a worse place to live in?
$, like someone else has said, but I also would guess that many of the engineers do not have a clear idea of the overarching functionality of the application. I'm sure internal communication about the product is extremely positive, with phrases like "improved law enforcement accuracy by XX%, decreased customer costs and time by YY," so some may truly believe they are doing something that everyone would agree is good.