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ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

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Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#251

Post by rocmcd »

maxerickson wrote: post #25

Amazing the hoops that people will jump through to not enact strong employer penalties.

You would think that if you genuinely wanted to curb illegal immigration, then this would be the way to do it. People come here for money. Take away the money and they will no longer come.

Hell, you would probably have bipartisan support for nationwide crackdowns on employers who are employing anyone here illegally. They are undercutting American employees and dodging taxes. Who wouldn't be for that kind of law enforcement?

Instead we get unaccountable masked men with guns murdering citizens and terrorizing an entire populace. Imagine if an "ICE raid" meant a team of accountants showed up at a business and gave them a hefty fine for employing anyone here illegally. It seems like that would be much more effective, which makes me genuinely wonder if the demonstration of strength through cruelty that we currently have hasn't been the goal all along.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#252

Post by carefulfungi »

gortok wrote: post #242
JohnFen wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://apnews.com/article/ice-arrests-warrants-minneapolis-...

I wasn’t clear. I’m referring to a news link indicating that judges have released folks due to valid arrest warrants but invalid means of arresting folks.

They didn't have a valid warrant. Without a judge's review, they broke down his door and entered, armed, and abducted him.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#253

Post by woooooo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #166
rudhdb773b wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not. I'm not familiar with Venezuela, but here in SE Asia if I want to open a small business say a bar along the beach, I just pay off the local police with a small cut of my profits. Where I grew up in the US, it would either be impossible or takes years and millions of dollars to get all the approvals. That's a real-world difference that gives the middle class more freedom to start a business that is really on…

> I just pay off the local police with a small cut of my profits. Where I grew up in the US, it would either be impossible or takes years and millions of dollars to get all the approvals You’re comparing permitting processes. That’s orthogonal to corruption. You can set up a beach bar in most of America without a permit and without getting cited for months on end, too, and plenty of people do it. (The pot-brownie sel…

Its not orthogonal, they are saying that the corruption is an easier permitting process.

The main point of this thread that I found very poignant was the accessibility of corruption. In the USA, only the rich get to be corrupt.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#254

Post by gortok »

carefulfungi wrote: post #252
gortok wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn’t clear. I’m referring to a news link indicating that judges have released folks due to valid arrest warrants but invalid means of arresting folks.

They didn't have a valid warrant. Without a judge's review, they broke down his door and entered, armed, and abducted him.

I understand, but do you have a news link to where the judge released him?

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#255

Post by carefulfungi »

gortok wrote: post #254
carefulfungi wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't have a valid warrant. Without a judge's review, they broke down his door and entered, armed, and abducted him.

I understand, but do you have a news link to where the judge released him?

https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2026/01/judge-orders-release-...

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#256

Post by mc32 »

CPLX wrote: post #123
mc32 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One big difference is that public companies restructure when things aren’t looking rosy. Government organizations don’t often reorganize and structurally they don’t have much flexibility.

The government restructures endlessly what are you talking about. DHS was founded in 2002, TSA was founded in 2001. CFPB in 2010, Space Force in 2019. Even agencies that have been around “forever” aren’t that old. The EPA was founded in 1970, and OSHA was founded in 1971.

What I'm talking about is orgs like the CDC, FCC, DMV, IRS, etc. They grow more than they re-org and cut the workforce, moreover, they seldom redefine positions to take on more responsibility at the staff level. Obviously they don't have the same outsourcing threat due to some limitations --which is good, but it's also true that public companies can outsource more readily. Goverment workers rarely get fired for under-performance outside of budget-induced cuts.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#257

Post by tgv »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #22
tgv wrote: post #17

Remember: every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well. Techies have a responsibility as well. Remove them from your applications, or replace them with safer alternatives, and don't log (meta-)data just because it might be useful one day.

> every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well I’m confused by this shoehorning. This article is about actual, not potential, abuse. It involves healthcare data the government owns being used in a novel and disturbing way. The only nexus to the private sector is in Palantir, but they aren’t bringing the data, just some analytic tools.

So it's too late, but if the trend continues, the US goverment may well ask Google, Meta, etc. for their data, and get a more detailed list of undesirables. From their data, you can infer ethnicity, age, country of origin, education, political affiliation, etc.

So, before it's too late, we, the people potentially enabling this data abuse, must think about consequences and morals.

Also: today they come for Latinos, tomorrow can be your turn.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#258

Post by TFYS »

QuadmasterXLII wrote: post #70
londons_explore wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because ... ... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.

A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating…

> A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government

I wouldn't be so sure about this. A lot of what markets do is unnecessary overhead needed to make markets work. Maintaining enough competition means having to pay the costs of having multiple organizations doing the same thing. Each must have their own strategy, HR, marketing, etc. A lot of work is unnecessarily repeated. A lot of behavior that is forced by competition, like advertising / patent and copyright systems / hiding research instead of sharing it is very wasteful. Profits going to the owners is also an overhead cost that might not be needed in other types of economic arrangements. All these costs need to be paid at every level of the production chain.

We should also consider the goals of each type of organization. The goal of a business operating in a market is to maximize profit for the owners of the business. It's efficient at that. The goals of a government can be much more varied. They can't really be easily compared.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#259

Post by mindslight »

mrexcess wrote: post #205
Keyframe wrote: post #11

The older one gets, the more one agrees with rms.

Has he been markedly wrong about any of these positions that he's staked out over the years, from closed hardware to mobile security?

The only thing I've found that RMS is wrong about is defining away firmware-stored-in-flash as "hardware", while getting stuck on firmware blobs loaded into coprocessors indicting whole systems. It appears to be a handwaving distinction formed from previous times - when the distinction didn't really matter, a line had to be drawn somewhere, and being able to do things like declare an entire CDROM as "free software" was a cool goal in and of itself. But these days we could use a much more vibrant definition centered around processor domains and security relationships.

For example I see zero freedom difference between my ath10k with its firmware loaded from disk by libre software, and my x520 with firmware stored in onboard flash. Neither undermines the freedom or security of my workstation user domain, and both are unfree if I get the itch to dig into modifying my network cards.

Re: ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt illegal immigrants

#260

Post by fc417fc802 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #22
tgv wrote: post #17

Remember: every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well. Techies have a responsibility as well. Remove them from your applications, or replace them with safer alternatives, and don't log (meta-)data just because it might be useful one day.

> every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well I’m confused by this shoehorning. This article is about actual, not potential, abuse. It involves healthcare data the government owns being used in a novel and disturbing way. The only nexus to the private sector is in Palantir, but they aren’t bringing the data, just some analytic tools.

> This article is about actual, not potential, abuse.

The article is about feeding a giant pile of metadata to a service and getting results. That pile was collected in a mundane manner as a part of everyday actions. People probably didn't think much of it at the time. Even if the potential for abuse occurred to them, clearly the vast majority swept the concern aside and went on about their day.

That's exactly what's happening with the internet giants as well. People embed analytics and bot detectors and fonts and who knows what else from major third party providers with hardly a second thought. Other people then navigate to those websites with little to no awareness of the potential for abuse.

This article is about a concrete example of such potential abuse that went on for many years before blindsiding a great many people when it was abruptly weaponized overnight.

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