CBP signs Clearview AI deal to use face recognition for 'tactical targeting'

> I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...

There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others.

To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level.

In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated.

I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted?

This is an interesting article [0].

This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/30/palantir-trump-karp-politics...

Regardless of how wrong the 5th circuit decision was in this case, the point was just to highlight that the law doesn't allow the government to circumvent restrictions by going through a third party. Clearly this particular case triggers strong feelings in you, but this is really not at all pertinent to the main point I'm making.

(1) KYC requirements have changed significantly since 1974, so as applied findings in 1974 won't apply to what we're referring to today.

(2) SCOTUS wrote the bank customers (rather than the bankers in the suit) themselves likely didn't have standing in that suite, which meant the decision was based more around whether the banks had their rights violated. I am not arguing that the bank had its rights violated and even conceded some subset of information transmitted might be 4A compliant but rather the wholesale KYC regime (largely now based on post 9/11 acts) isn't KYC compliant and is an insult to the customers rather than to the bank. I am arguing the clients themselves are having their rights violated, and it appears to consider that to the full extent you need a case where the clients had standing unlike what the justices thought to be the case in 1974.

(3) SCOTUS has overturned their own rulings on constitutionality before, without any material change in the relevant portions of the constitution in the interim.

(4) Failing all the above, the founders have also noted our government acts imperfectly, and even noted as a last resort it can be replaced when this becomes unworkably pervasive. The fact a bunch of guys in wigs interpret something some way that says mass government imposed willy-nilly search of your papers is allowed by the 4A, only provides a much stronger binding for the rest of the government to follow it, not create an objective truth.

Prohibiting (or at least restraining) the de jure government but allowing a parallel corporate de facto government to keep growing (in scope, coercion, and influence) is exactly what has happened here. It's naive to think that the de jure government can always continue to "just say no" to the parallel power structure, keeping it under control of the de jure government. Rather, eventually the corporate government gets powerful enough to overrun the traditional mechanics that keep it subservient, no matter how strong those mechanisms may be. Then the corporate government goes to work subverting, devouring, and replacing the traditional government.

If we had wanted to avoid where we are now at - staring down a full-on fascist dystopia - the surveillance industry ("tech") needed to be nipped in the bud 15+ years ago - with a GDPR-equivalent, and strong anti-trust enforcement that prohibited anti-competitive bundling [proprietary] software with [Metcalfe's law] network services. The surveillance industry's power needed to be constrained to remain in line with our assumptions of natural rights and Constitutionally-limited government.

But a lot of people were being paid a lot of money to not think too hard about the implications of what they were building. And so every time the topic came up in our communities, those on the take would shout it down with a litany of rationalizations about why such constraints were not necessary.

I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites.

At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it.

Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context.

It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business.

At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way.

At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events.

I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work.

That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point.

However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns.

Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site.

All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.