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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

#51

Post by cat199 »

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.

Recent, immediate politics bearing on the agency here aside, we like to philosophically separate ourselves from the government in discourse, rather than seeing it as one part of our own, singular, cohesive society.

see also:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet)

etc.

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

#52

Post by dragonwriter »

wang_li wrote: post #49

[flagged]

> Why would anyone prefer the shittier conditions under Obama than the better conditions under Trump?

Because there are no reasonable standards under which the comparative description in your comment is true.

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

#53

Post by openasocket »

cybersnowflake wrote: post #47
sp332 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ICE thing has gotten dramatically worse recently. Accepting a certain level of abuse of power in other LE agencies doesn't necessarily mean they're OK with, say, actively pushing back against a DoJ settlement so they can hold children in detention indefinitely, etc.

[flagged]

> If you're a citizen and you commit certain crimes you are separated from your children

The overwhelming majority of these cases are people coming to the border and requesting asylum. They passed a credible fear interview administered by CBP, and have been granted entry into the US pending their hearing. They have not committed a crime.

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

#55

Post by master-litty »

mandevil wrote: post #21
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.

I find it socially acceptable. It's quite normal to jump from one tech company to another, and wearing a t-shirt from a previous employer is an artifact of that lifestyle.

My hot take: I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride.

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

#56

Post by notJim »

prepend wrote: post #45
_bxg1 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is not their core business. Their core business is data analysis. If I remember from some tech book, they were spun out from the fraud department in PayPal detecting fraudulent transactions and then selling services to FBI. I became familiar with them through their disease prevention activities trying to evaluate bug transmissions and food borne diseases. Certainly, you can analyze innocent people, but it’s not…

> Their core business is data analysis.

This is like saying Raytheon's core business is antennas. Yes, Palantir does data analysis, specifically for ICE, the military and the police.

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

#58

Post by navigatesol »

analogist wrote: post #7
prepend wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer?

>So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer?

No, can you explain it? It sounds like a way to justify to yourself that "those people are bad", but you're "just doing your job". Are you principled about who you do business with, or not?

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

#59

Post by rtkwe »

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?

Is it not easy to see that there's a moral space between creating a tool that can be used for something you dislike (basically all software falls into this category) and working specifically for a company making software that will explicitly be used for something you dislike?

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

#60

Post by frenchyatwork »

duqd_ wrote: post #30
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.

A big problem with anarchy is that it's really complicated and is usually either misunderstood by the proponent or the listeners. Anarchy is about levelling the playing field and reducing the power that the most powerful structures have in our society. The problem of removing power structures in institutions, is that they will naturally get replaced by other ones, and the replacements are often as authoritarian as the originals.

In the US, it's popular to think that you can somehow replace elected government (where power is somewhat dependant on votes, and somewhat dependent on advertising budgets/capital) with business (where power is dependent entirely on capital), and that somehow this is more "anarchist". This is a naive idea.

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