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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

#201

Post by ImPostingOnHN »

ahzhzvH wrote: post #139
elric wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough. I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to…

> Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe... I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad,…

> I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad.

It's bad for both reasons. Palantir is the IBM of our time, using scaled data engineering to handle the tracking and incarceration of ethnic minorities, who are quickly shipped off for worse persecution, including torture, at government-run camps, all without any due process.

> he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis

Anyone can say anything absurd, counterfactual, and unconvincing, regardless of circumstances. For us to consider it true, we'd need some evidence that it is at least more true than the opposite.

> Say thank you," Karp added.

Thanks for the link. Wow, I didn't realize that he was such an insufferable, sociopathic, abusive douchebag as a person. Like a wife-beater who insists his victim thank him for it.

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

#202

Post by JumpCrisscross »

tomaytotomato wrote: post #93
NVHacker wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do know that Palantir is now in the UK and getting access to data through the same "health" channels, don't you ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56590249

UK government departments are slow and hostile to change, so I am skeptical that Palantir being parachuted in, would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it.

> would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it

The U.S. government almost certainly has intimate health data on every Briton as a result of these deals.

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

#203

Post by myrmidon »

ipaddr wrote: post #130
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

A concentration camp is a place where large amounts of Jews were killed. Using it to describe deportation where people aren't killed is offensive to some and full of fake drama to others.

Not so! Concentration camps predate the Nazis by quite a bit, and the term was/is used for all kinds of prison-like setups where inmates are held outside the rule of law.

E.g. US camps holding Japanese immigrants during WW2.

Sure, it might be somewhat hyperbolic (arguable, because ICE/current administration has few qualms dismissing constitutional rights whenever convenient), but the term is definitely not Nazi-exclusive (even the Germans had concentration camps long before Hitler, in Namibia)

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

#204

Post by JumpCrisscross »

xrd wrote: post #147
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How are Palantir so effective? What are you using to conclude their effectiveness? It appears Palantir “brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address” [1]. That’s like VLOOKUP. On effectiveness, Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did with a tenth of the budget. [1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...

Whoa, that's the story! I don't see that referenced in the 404media story, do you have a link/summary for that?

Added.

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

#206

Post by naravara »

petterroea wrote: post #6

Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just becaus…

The acting as if there is a clearly demarcated distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors seems mostly like a 20th or 19th century atavism. The only substantive difference today seems to be that the former actor is more restrained by political input (in functioning democracies at least) and the latter is less so. But in terms of who has authority over how people live their lives and the level of totalizing control over communication and commerce it’s more like overlapping and competing fiefdoms than the “state = coercive power” and “private sector = market power” dichotomy people often try to imply.

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

#207

Post by jacquesm »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #159
api wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the two topics are separable. This is a specific case of the general trend.

> don't think the two topics are separable. This is a specific case of the general trend They are and should be separable. DHS hoovering up government data is orthogonal to private data collection. They could become related. But they aren’t, and muddling a hypothetical problem with a clear, present and actual one is a good way to normalize the latter.

The should be separable, but they are not. Data collected privately absorbed by the government is a serious problem, even anonymized data can be de-anonymized if you can put more than one database next to each other. This allows for far more insights than any single database could give you and this is a real danger.

Keep in mind that DOGE made off with a huge stash of data, which combined with other data, such as voter registration data, twitter messages (public and private) and other such datastores could become an extremely efficient tool in messing with elections. The whole system is predicated on that being hard and so we trust the outcome of elections but with todays tools in the hands of the large US companies currently in cahoots with the Trump administration this is childs play.

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

#208

Post by blurbleblurble »

danesparza wrote: post #83
petterroea wrote: post #6

Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just becaus…

And then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"

The ironic thing is that palantir has been operationalizating data gathered by the NSA and reselling as "ai targeting" to another country's military. But yes usually the loophole goes the other way.

Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.

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

#209

Post by JumpCrisscross »

hakrgrl wrote: post #187
sailfast wrote: post #163

Impeach. Remove. Laws and protections do not just apply for citizens. They apply anyone in the United States.

They apply to people who are here illegally? Every county on earth has a border and doesn't allow people to cross unregulated.

> They apply to people who are here illegally?

Yes. That’s how we lawfully deport them. You can’t run out and start serial killing illegal immigrants and then claim you aren’t a murderer.

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

#210

Post by pavlov »

petterroea wrote: post #6

Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just becaus…

The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.
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