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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

#101

Post by CiPHPerCoder »

master-litty wrote: post #55
mandevil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Pride here isn't a good thing.

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

#102

Post by vkou »

creaghpatr wrote: post #86
wpietri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. I think it's reasonable (although perhaps naive) for people to have a sunny view of law enforcement. Especially when, like me, they're white men from middle-class backgrounds; I've never had a bad experience with law enforcement, despite having done some stupendously dumb-ass things. But even though I'm predisposed to view cops favorably, the stuff with ICE is shocking to me. America has a big chunk of histo…

Or, if Mexican heroin killed multiple people you know, you have a not-sunny view of illegal immigrants and unsecured borders. Just because you attribute your own ignorance to the color of your skin, doesn't mean others do.

It's not illegal to seek asylum.

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

#103

Post by gopalv »

tempsy wrote: post #46
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 also don't understand this. Seems like if you were willing to work for Palantir before this made news you'd have understood that surveillance tech to police depts, corporations, etc. is exactly what the company sells/enables. I did have a recruiter reach out a long time ago and remember they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostituti…

> they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostitution rings.

That's sort of the crux of it - ICE wasn't supposed to be bad guys.

In fact, ICE could be heroes - they really could be, when they were breaking up trafficking and rescuing people out of criminal control.

Instead, they are tasked with tearing children away from parents and making orphans by deporting parents away.

I suspect there are people in ICE-HSI, who probably hate being lumped in together with the ICE-ERO.

The point is that the tide of public opinion on ICE would be different if the primary visible effect of them would be pulling women out of shipping containers and sending them to hospitals.

Justice might be blind, but justice without mercy has another name.

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

#104

Post by kd3 »

GhostVII wrote: post #41
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…

What is the alternative to having a government? If the current government was completely defunded, it wouldn't prevent governance entirely - we would just be governed by some private company or organization instead. How long are you expecting a country to survive without a government before some group of armed individuals take control of it again, this time without any form of democracy?

The alternative is of course no government. That is what the word anarchy means, no rulers. Larken Rose has a mini book out with nice illustrations, which discusses how we might live without government. Free download in pdf format: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yd18waixbva1jae/WhatAnarchyIsnt-FR...

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

#105

Post by kd3 »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
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.

Well it's more the fact that government exists by the use of force and coercion, which makes it a violent and basically terrorist organization. And that is so dispite having laws. Laws != morality.

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

#106

Post by naravara »

jakear wrote: post #92
tempsy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also don't understand this. Seems like if you were willing to work for Palantir before this made news you'd have understood that surveillance tech to police depts, corporations, etc. is exactly what the company sells/enables. I did have a recruiter reach out a long time ago and remember they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostituti…

I had a recruiter reach out, and I actually played along with their interview process, but at every step of the way I’d inquire about the company’s ethics. Nailed all the tech questions, but in the end did not get an offer. Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions.

>Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions.

My money is on the latter.

In "Winners Take All" Anand Giridharadas has a really good sentence where he points out how major employers usually try to find entry level hires who possess an ideal degree of intelligence and impressionability. The latter is just as important for them as the former. They want people they can mold to think and behave according to the values of the company.

In my personal experience, this is also why companies and industries that tend to have a lot of "lifers" are also often fairly toxic places to work. The people who came up and through the norms of the organization don't actually learn how to interact with normal people who don't buy into their idiosyncratic nonsense, don't seem to understand the concept of "standards" or "best practices," and often the idea that people might leave if they don't like how things are being done just doesn't cross their minds. So they take liberties with each other they shouldn't and do a poor job of forming consensus, actually caring about morale, or treating each other with professionalism or respect.

When people do leave, the narrative is usually framed as if they were too weak or soft to handle the rigorous and exacting standards of the company/team/manager rather than thinking that maybe thing are being run badly.

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

#107

Post by bigj0n »

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?

ICE isnt a war criminal. They're a law enforcement agency

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

#108

Post by _bxg1 »

1111236112347 wrote: post #100
_bxg1 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The superseding indictment resulted from an investigation by the following agencies: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Postal Inspection Service; and Newton (Missouri) Sheriff’s Department. I'd rather take the chance that those several other law enforcement agencies couldn't have worked it out on their o…

Is this an either/or choice? Does HSI have to not exist in order to prevent reprehensible treatment of migrant families? Conversely, would eliminating HSI prevent such reprehensible treatment of migrant families? Wouldn't the abuses just pop up elsewhere, given the agenda of the current administration?

> Does HSI have to not exist in order to prevent reprehensible treatment of migrant families?

It sure seems that way. And people often forget that we didn't have these agencies at all before 9/11, and we did just fine. Metal detectors and stronger cockpit doors are well and good, but what we have are agencies that were created in a time of extreme fear, and have held on to fear as their guiding ethos.

> Wouldn't the abuses just pop up elsewhere, given the agenda of the current administration?

Maybe, I don't know. But the problem right now is they have an excuse. We're giving people license to commit whatever thuggish, nationalistic fantasies they want, all sanctioned under some vague "rule of law" argument where the letter has far, far outstripped the spirit. And what we end up with are goon squads harassing and imprisoning innocents based on technicalities. I don't think that sort of thing could persist at this scale without the pretense that these agencies provide.

I'll put it this way: I live in southern Texas. I'm who they're allegedly protecting. And if ICE were abolished overnight, I would throw a party.

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

#109

Post by vixen99 »

ghostbrainalpha wrote: post #76
analogist wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's a very interesting gradient that you bring up. Most of us probably have no issue with the baker who sold Hitler his daily loaf of bread. But many of us do have problems with Hugo Boss for designing Nazi uniforms, even though the design work would have been before most of the Nazi war crimes had occurred. Does not resisting to the fullest of your ability constitute enabling evil? Would you take Pablo Escobar's do…

As for the donation, who is going to disagree with the idea of getting money out of bad hands and into good ones. What do you want to do otherwise, burn it? And that's got nothing to do with removing the Escobars of this world.

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

#110

Post by [deleted] »

burger_moon wrote: post #32

It's kinda interesting how people are just now realizing that all the big tech companies are government contractors and not this imaginary utopia of 'making the world a better place' they were sold on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all US gov't contractors. It's hilariously ironic seeing the political views of the employees suddenly clashing with their employers views of making money as if it's a new thing.

[deleted]
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