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‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

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Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#231

Post by david_p »

ambicapter wrote: post #141
dabinat wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but Palantir doesn’t get off that easy. They know full well how their technology is used. Just because a market exists that doesn’t mean you need to fill it. The tech industry could have taken a moral stand like the chemical industry did with execution drugs.

If you watch any entrepreneur-focused channels, the entire premise of Palantir was "what if we just didn't care about what people think is ethically dubious? What if we went into business in all the places that people have traditionally shied away from for moral reasons?" It's part of Thiel's "Monopoly is good/You want to build the 0 to 1, not jump into a crowded market" mantra.

I started a company in that market 10 years ago. We compete with palantir. It’s a competitive market with lots of actors.

On of their strengths is the ability of thiel to raise lots of money, and win huge gov contracts by convincing everyone that what he built is magic. it is not.

palantir is regular enterprise software. morally, they are vilains for sure, but their superpower is being excellent at marketing themselves.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#232

Post by Dracophoenix »

J_McQuade wrote: post #187
db48x wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tools are always neutral. The hammer doesn't become evil merely because you used it to bash someone's brains in. Tools do not make choices; humans do.

This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it. Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?

Morality requires agency and conscious agreement. A machine/device doesn't choose to be made or operated nor can it act against its maker/operator any more than rocks can act against the Earth. Regardless of motive, a moral conclusion can't be reached about the object.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#234

Post by Terr_ »

jcranmer wrote: post #182
bri3d wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is Palantir a loophole? I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corpo…

> How is Palantir a loophole? The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed. I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deni…

> I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer

See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#235

Post by timeon »

commandlinefan wrote: post #91
daheza wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about we treat people humanely? How about we focus on the criminals and dangerous people first instead of getting people that have pending citizenship appointments. How about we don't grab people from hospitals, schools, and places of worship? How about we try to get citizenship easier access for these folks who are clearly living and contributing successfully to our society? How about we don't have masked thugs…

> focus on the criminals and dangerous people first That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.

> That's what they say they are doing?

Hardly with president convicted of sexual assault (among other things).

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#236

Post by [deleted] »

cg5280 wrote: post #48
pixelready wrote: post #12

I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals. T…

> The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place. That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government thi…

[deleted]

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#237

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

ahazred8ta wrote: post #106
thatguy0900 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you can say stuff like that but the reality is they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus so I'm not inclined to take his word about them being ethically neutral. Like I'm not really sure what they could name themselves after that would be more ominous

The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')

palantíri * (sorry, couldn't resist)

that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#238

Post by wan23 »

Altern4tiveAcc wrote: post #185
bdangubic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you go by “morals” every FAANG employee (current and previous) would need to go plumbing school

Fair enough, they had (specially their executives and the engineers working on ad tech) a negative impact in the world as well.

Given the choice, end users choose free or cheap and ad supported over full price in huge majorities. You have to weigh "I don't like ads" against 200 million (!) people on Netflix's ad supported plan and how much enjoyment they get that they might not otherwise. Not to mention things like Google that are ad supported and genuinely useful. In the real world things have pros and cons.

Re: ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid

#240

Post by csmpltn »

periodjet wrote: post #134

Why have we all lost the ability to think in a nuanced way? It’s very disturbing to witness, particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be ma…

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