8 ms·

We’re on our way there too in the US: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2

We’re on our way there too in the US: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

leggomylibro 9y ago
Companies which name themselves after dystopic objects or ideals with a 'nod and wink' always creep the living hell out of me. There's never a good answer when they inevitably ask, "well what did you think was going to happen?" http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri
- dekhn 9y ago
  the palantiri weren't dystopic objects. they were positive items used for communication until some of them were captured. I think the name of the company is highly apt.
  - leggomylibro 9y ago
    Fair enough, I'm not very steeped in the intricacies of Lord of the Rings. I got the feeling that it was the nature of their power and omniscience that corrupted most individuals who used them, sort of like the Ring, but that could be completely wrong.
    - dekhn 9y ago
      That's completely wrong. The Palantiri were created by the Noldor (one of the powerful old races of elves) and used without corruption, and then given to the Numenoreans as a gift; they were used for a long time without corruption. They were so powerful that even Sauron could not make arbitrary images appear. But the weak-minded were easily influenced by him through it; not through the nature of the stones. The ring was created by Sauron and embedded most of his life-force, and nobody alive at the time of the LotR had enough strength to resist his will.
      - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
        The exception being Tom Bombadil, but he is a strange creature.
        dekhn 9y ago
        oh, yeah, sorry, I left that out, but that's a subtle issue, because it's not clear whether he is actually a creature, or an embodiment of nature.
        YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        That must be why he was left out of the movies. /s
        dekhn 9y ago
        There's a lot of writing about the omission that I think explains Jackson's thinking (and it's clear he thought about this). Personally I think Tom is one of the most important moments of the book, but not as part of the plot; rather, it's fascinating to somebody who considers the LoTR as an archetypal myth, because Tom's identity is intentionally kept mysterious, even when his powers are not.
        pmontra 9y ago
        You'll probably enjoy this essay "Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil" https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
        SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
        Ok, that was awesome. I don't buy it at all (if Sauron was indeed a threat to Tom, or if Tom could be bound by the art of the Valar, I feel as though the ring would effect him as well), but it was a really fun read. A fun thought invoked by this, and given Tolkien's intent to create a creation myth for our Earth, is somewhere out there Tom still sits in his forest, waiting, for when the might of the Valar fades. Feels almost Lovecraftian.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
aphextron 9y ago
>We’re on our way there too in the US: Fortunately we have something called Habeas Corpus
- Nokinside 9y ago
  Habeas Corpus has been suspended several times in US history. Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and FDR suspended habeas corpus. Habeas corpus after 9/11 is not what it used to be. ACLU has been fighting several cases of clear violations.
  - refurb 9y ago
    Yes, but the key difference is we have separation of gov't power and institutions to actually challenge some of these things. When the gov't oversteps it's bounds and they get their hand slapped by the courts, that's the system working. Our gov't is made up of fallible humans, thus we're never going to get to the point where our rights aren't under threat. Compare that to China, where your best hope is you know someone in power who can try and put in a good word for you. I couldn't imagine living in a system like that where the juggernaut of gov't power is effectively unstoppable.
    - Nokinside 9y ago
      Military Commissions Act seems to have passed the scrutiny of both legal and political part of the system. The legal battle has shifted permanently. It's now over details in particular cases, not over the generic principle. The notion of enemy is now in the US criminal law. The President of the United States has now the power to designate either US citizens for foreign citizens as enemy. The way it's defined includes not just combatants, but also "persons who are engaged in conflict against the USA" in general level. Expressing solidarity is enough.
      - adventured 9y ago
        What you're talking about - the erosions in the US system - is an extraordinary distance from where China is at already. You can't talk about Winnie the Pooh in China, or mispronounce the "ping" part of Jinping in the media. Those aren't jokes, that's indicative of China's rapid regression backwards. Over the last five years they've curtailed the few freedoms around business and expression that had been gained. Their economic & business agenda has entirely shifted as have the rules. Dictatorships have historically tended to only go one direction, and China is already a very, very low-rights nation.
srcmap 9y ago
If someone is taking fly training of commercial jet without wanting to learn how to land the plane, I absolutely want the government to find out why. Same for someone who want to purchase large quality of fertilizer for no real needs.
- Cacti 9y ago
  Do you really think there are 120,000 people in that province that are all making bulk purchases of unneeded fertilizer? There is just another form of extrajudicial population control. They are using this as a way to justify arbitrarily rounding up people who have long wanted to be free of Chinese rule.
- mertd 9y ago
  Where is the line? Do you want to sit in an interrogation room for a few hours before you rent a U-Haul?
- refurb 9y ago
  I'm not going to lie to you, there is no way that could happen. When you look at successful police operations that have prevented terrorism, a lot of it comes down to luck. Someone had an informant who heard someone say something about a bomb. There just simply aren't enough police in the US to follow-up on every suspicious activity. Particularly now when even mundane activities can be regarded as suspicious.
- drb91 9y ago
  This is crazy. The government is not a wall between you and what scares you; that is what politicians want you to think. The wall is never high enough; it is never deep enough; there are never enough cameras; we need better people deciding what is OK to do on camera and what is not OK. This is all very fine to want, but it's an entirely different conception of government than the one described in the constitution. It's a government much closer to the one in Russia, or China, or Turkey, or North Korea. While it may be used to, in part, fight crime, the line item that justifies the surveillance state is the ability to invest in a guarantee of power. Trying to turn the US into this state is just going to lead to abuse of power, abuse of people without voices, and a much more wasteful budget: infrastructure spending by investment in paranoia, with a return of more power by fear. Literally government by terrorism.
anthonyleecook 9y ago
I know there are a lot of clamoring here about ‘oh we are becoming this too and that too’. And it’s a natural reaction: we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people, so we try to stigmatize our own government. But the truth of the matter is US government is nowhere near the heavy handed ness of China, and we can deal with China to some degree. We can hold China to its actions. After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China, I feel like it’s time to take a stand. It’s time to stop supporting such a bad regime. Time to voice my concerns about China to my government, and vote with my wallet. No more Chinese products if I can. No more trips to Shanghai. I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.
- davesque 9y ago
  I would have agreed with you before November 2016. Now, I'm being completely honest in saying I'm not so sure.
  - refurb 9y ago
    Really? If I recall, HN was blowing up at all the surveillance and privacy concerns under Obama. Is it really worse under Trump?
    - hrktb 9y ago
      From a non US POV, under Obama people seemed disappointed and betrayed by how a man that they saw as on their side was not doing the right things in their eyes. Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
    - adventured 9y ago
      No. Nothing has fundamentally changed. That's merely partisan wishful dreaming, it makes people feel better to think their side isn't nearly so bad on eg privacy. The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.
threatofrain 9y ago
Predictive policing is old, and has been done in consultation with universities before. There are papers on predicting crime vs criminals, predicting by time and address, predicting by age, etc., including discussion on whether this leads to uneven enforcement on minorities. It would be surprising to expect law enforcement to go towards less statistical and software usage. What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.
- jsnider3 9y ago
  Formal preemptive detentive by generic factors is what is described in the article.
- forapurpose 9y ago
  > Predictive policing is old ... Agreed, but technology changes everything (otherwise, what are we all doing?). Transporting goods by boat is thousands of years old (or probably more), but modern shipping has a completely different impact than millennia of wooden wind- and human-powered boats. Surveillance is old; modern data collection and analysis is a whole different animal.

We’re on our way there too in the US: https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predict...

leggomylibro 9y ago

Companies which name themselves after dystopic objects or ideals with a 'nod and wink' always creep the living hell out of me. There's never a good answer when they inevitably ask, "well what did you think was going to happen?" http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri http://lotr.wikia.com/wiki/Palant%C3%ADri

dekhn 9y ago
the palantiri weren't dystopic objects. they were positive items used for communication until some of them were captured. I think the name of the company is highly apt.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Fair enough, I'm not very steeped in the intricacies of Lord of the Rings. I got the feeling that it was the nature of their power and omniscience that corrupted most individuals who used them, sort of like the Ring, but that could be completely wrong.
  - dekhn 9y ago
    That's completely wrong. The Palantiri were created by the Noldor (one of the powerful old races of elves) and used without corruption, and then given to the Numenoreans as a gift; they were used for a long time without corruption. They were so powerful that even Sauron could not make arbitrary images appear. But the weak-minded were easily influenced by him through it; not through the nature of the stones. The ring was created by Sauron and embedded most of his life-force, and nobody alive at the time of the LotR had enough strength to resist his will.
    - SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
      The exception being Tom Bombadil, but he is a strange creature.
      - dekhn 9y ago
        oh, yeah, sorry, I left that out, but that's a subtle issue, because it's not clear whether he is actually a creature, or an embodiment of nature.
        YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        That must be why he was left out of the movies. /s
        dekhn 9y ago
        There's a lot of writing about the omission that I think explains Jackson's thinking (and it's clear he thought about this). Personally I think Tom is one of the most important moments of the book, but not as part of the plot; rather, it's fascinating to somebody who considers the LoTR as an archetypal myth, because Tom's identity is intentionally kept mysterious, even when his powers are not.
      - pmontra 9y ago
        You'll probably enjoy this essay "Oldest and Fatherless: The Terrible Secret of Tom Bombadil" https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html https://km-515.livejournal.com/1042.html
        SketchySeaBeast 9y ago
        Ok, that was awesome. I don't buy it at all (if Sauron was indeed a threat to Tom, or if Tom could be bound by the art of the Valar, I feel as though the ring would effect him as well), but it was a really fun read. A fun thought invoked by this, and given Tolkien's intent to create a creation myth for our Earth, is somewhere out there Tom still sits in his forest, waiting, for when the might of the Valar fades. Feels almost Lovecraftian.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

aphextron 9y ago

>We’re on our way there too in the US: Fortunately we have something called Habeas Corpus

Nokinside 9y ago
Habeas Corpus has been suspended several times in US history. Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant and FDR suspended habeas corpus. Habeas corpus after 9/11 is not what it used to be. ACLU has been fighting several cases of clear violations.
- refurb 9y ago
  Yes, but the key difference is we have separation of gov't power and institutions to actually challenge some of these things. When the gov't oversteps it's bounds and they get their hand slapped by the courts, that's the system working. Our gov't is made up of fallible humans, thus we're never going to get to the point where our rights aren't under threat. Compare that to China, where your best hope is you know someone in power who can try and put in a good word for you. I couldn't imagine living in a system like that where the juggernaut of gov't power is effectively unstoppable.
  - Nokinside 9y ago
    Military Commissions Act seems to have passed the scrutiny of both legal and political part of the system. The legal battle has shifted permanently. It's now over details in particular cases, not over the generic principle. The notion of enemy is now in the US criminal law. The President of the United States has now the power to designate either US citizens for foreign citizens as enemy. The way it's defined includes not just combatants, but also "persons who are engaged in conflict against the USA" in general level. Expressing solidarity is enough.
    - adventured 9y ago
      What you're talking about - the erosions in the US system - is an extraordinary distance from where China is at already. You can't talk about Winnie the Pooh in China, or mispronounce the "ping" part of Jinping in the media. Those aren't jokes, that's indicative of China's rapid regression backwards. Over the last five years they've curtailed the few freedoms around business and expression that had been gained. Their economic & business agenda has entirely shifted as have the rules. Dictatorships have historically tended to only go one direction, and China is already a very, very low-rights nation.

srcmap 9y ago

If someone is taking fly training of commercial jet without wanting to learn how to land the plane, I absolutely want the government to find out why. Same for someone who want to purchase large quality of fertilizer for no real needs.

Cacti 9y ago
Do you really think there are 120,000 people in that province that are all making bulk purchases of unneeded fertilizer? There is just another form of extrajudicial population control. They are using this as a way to justify arbitrarily rounding up people who have long wanted to be free of Chinese rule.
mertd 9y ago
Where is the line? Do you want to sit in an interrogation room for a few hours before you rent a U-Haul?
refurb 9y ago
I'm not going to lie to you, there is no way that could happen. When you look at successful police operations that have prevented terrorism, a lot of it comes down to luck. Someone had an informant who heard someone say something about a bomb. There just simply aren't enough police in the US to follow-up on every suspicious activity. Particularly now when even mundane activities can be regarded as suspicious.
drb91 9y ago
This is crazy. The government is not a wall between you and what scares you; that is what politicians want you to think. The wall is never high enough; it is never deep enough; there are never enough cameras; we need better people deciding what is OK to do on camera and what is not OK. This is all very fine to want, but it's an entirely different conception of government than the one described in the constitution. It's a government much closer to the one in Russia, or China, or Turkey, or North Korea. While it may be used to, in part, fight crime, the line item that justifies the surveillance state is the ability to invest in a guarantee of power. Trying to turn the US into this state is just going to lead to abuse of power, abuse of people without voices, and a much more wasteful budget: infrastructure spending by investment in paranoia, with a return of more power by fear. Literally government by terrorism.

anthonyleecook 9y ago

I know there are a lot of clamoring here about ‘oh we are becoming this too and that too’. And it’s a natural reaction: we feel like we cannot change anything about China and how it governs its people, so we try to stigmatize our own government. But the truth of the matter is US government is nowhere near the heavy handed ness of China, and we can deal with China to some degree. We can hold China to its actions. After reading about the uigher concentration camps in China, I feel like it’s time to take a stand. It’s time to stop supporting such a bad regime. Time to voice my concerns about China to my government, and vote with my wallet. No more Chinese products if I can. No more trips to Shanghai. I don’t want to help the government terrorize my friends in China anymore.

davesque 9y ago
I would have agreed with you before November 2016. Now, I'm being completely honest in saying I'm not so sure.
- refurb 9y ago
  Really? If I recall, HN was blowing up at all the surveillance and privacy concerns under Obama. Is it really worse under Trump?
  - hrktb 9y ago
    From a non US POV, under Obama people seemed disappointed and betrayed by how a man that they saw as on their side was not doing the right things in their eyes. Under Trump it feels like those same people mostly gave up.
  - adventured 9y ago
    No. Nothing has fundamentally changed. That's merely partisan wishful dreaming, it makes people feel better to think their side isn't nearly so bad on eg privacy. The machine that has been consistently moving these things along for 40-50 years now, transcends the parties. The parties have their marching orders, they largely obey. Politicians come and go. Feinstein for one example, if she gets replaced (which she will eventually, she's 84 years old), the anti-privacy pushers will find a replacement vessel.

threatofrain 9y ago

Predictive policing is old, and has been done in consultation with universities before. There are papers on predicting crime vs criminals, predicting by time and address, predicting by age, etc., including discussion on whether this leads to uneven enforcement on minorities. It would be surprising to expect law enforcement to go towards less statistical and software usage. What would be new would be formal preemptive detention by generic factors. Then again there was news covered by the Guardian on a police black site in Chicago that held thousands of largely black detainees without lawyers.

jsnider3 9y ago
Formal preemptive detentive by generic factors is what is described in the article.
forapurpose 9y ago
> Predictive policing is old ... Agreed, but technology changes everything (otherwise, what are we all doing?). Transporting goods by boat is thousands of years old (or probably more), but modern shipping has a completely different impact than millennia of wooden wind- and human-powered boats. Surveillance is old; modern data collection and analysis is a whole different animal.