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The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

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Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#21

Post by mandevil »

mulmen wrote: post #2

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

Maybe I'm the weird one, but who would wear a t-shirt from your previous company to work at your current company? That just seems to send all the wrong signals.

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#22

Post by tastygreenapple »

qazpot wrote: post #13
mulmen wrote: post #2

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

I am assuming ICE is "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement". I am not from USA but why every comment here is implying ICE to be some evil thing.

One political faction needs ICE to be evil for their narrative and world view to make sense. You're seeing propaganda.

Consider that child seperation is a consequence of the massive amounts of human trafficking happening on the Mexico and US border. Criminals buy kids and fake a relationship with the kid to get more favorable treatment from law enforcement. The reality is that these kids are abused in the worst ways and sepration is critical for law enforcement to talk to the kid and make sure that the story checks out.

It's a bit of a horror story, but a 10 year old girl crossing the border was found to have 20 different semen samples inside her: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/texas-medical-professional-mig...

this is why seperation happens.

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#23

Post by [deleted] »

CydeWeys wrote: post #12
mulmen wrote: post #2

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

I interviewed with Palantir maybe seven years ago (didn't get the job) and definitely wasn't aware at the time that they were doing this kind of work, if they even were back then. And had I known they were doing CBP stuff, I may have been OK with it under Obama even. It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I reall…

[deleted]

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#24

Post by pjc50 »

qazpot wrote: post #13
mulmen wrote: post #2

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

I am assuming ICE is "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement". I am not from USA but why every comment here is implying ICE to be some evil thing.

ICE's recent policy of separating children from their families and then holding them in inadequate conditions with insufficient medical care is starting to produce tiny coffins: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-migrant-child-border-de...

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#25

Post by _bxg1 »

prepend wrote: post #3
mulmen wrote: post #2

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

Palantir is a software company right and sells tools to ICE? Does someone wearing an Excel shirt make you uncomfortable because ICE uses MSOffice? What about OSS projects like R and Python that also enable ICE to analyze data to find people. Is the expectation that Palantir should not sell software to ICE?

The expectation is that companies like Palantir should not exist at all. Their core business is surveilling innocent people en masse.

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#26

Post by kd3 »

It's not just ICE but the entire government that is a problem. I personally stopped accepting any work from any government a few years ago. Once you realize what government is, there's no going back.

"The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psychopath]. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." - Albert J. Nock in “Our Enemy, The State”

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#27

Post by _bxg1 »

_bxg1 wrote: post #16

The company is literally named after the magic orb that Sauron uses to surveil Middle-Earth. I don't know what you expected.

To be clear: I also think that what Palantir is doing is deplorable. I just think that if you apply there, it's pretty obvious what you're signing up for.

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#28

Post by bubblethink »

mulmen wrote: post #2

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

>but what exactly did they think they were signing up for?

As long as there is sufficient plausible deniability, people will sign up for anything. In the tech domain, this goes back to at least WW2 with IBM selling punch card machines to Germany.

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#29

Post by pjc50 »

kd3 wrote: post #26

It's not just ICE but the entire government that is a problem. I personally stopped accepting any work from any government a few years ago. Once you realize what government is, there's no going back. "The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psycho…

We should not allow the observation that some states collapse into lawlessness to turn into a blind "government is bad" attitude that ends with people being held hostage by government-sized private companies. The state can be lawless, but escaping lawlessness is impossible without the efforts of a state.

Re: The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

#30

Post by duqd_ »

kd3 wrote: post #26

It's not just ICE but the entire government that is a problem. I personally stopped accepting any work from any government a few years ago. Once you realize what government is, there's no going back. "The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psycho…

It makes me sad that so many people are unwilling to engage with this position. Anarchism is unreasonably vilified imo.
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