15 ms·

Can you expand on exactly how Palantir is used for parellel construction?

taneq 9y ago
They dig up data telling the police where to look. The police then look in just the right place and "legitimately find" the evidence that they would never have stumbled on and couldn't have legally known was there.
opportune 9y ago
Law enforcement uses dragnet warrantless surveillance to gather data (such as who is calling whom, who is in physical proximity with whom). That data is loaded into Palantir's software. Law enforcement uses that data to acquire admissible evidence of the perpetrators' crimes. This is the crucial step, because although the original evidence couldn't be admissible in court due to its collection without a warrant, it can be used to acquire more evidence. If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. Now that evidence can be used in court, even though the only way law enforcement were able to acquire it was through unconstitutional practices. The thing about Palantir is that it needs big data to work. Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people - they might have something like that for something like suspected criminal gangs, but that wouldn't be enough data to make Palantir's software worthwhile. So acquiring the data necessary to use Palantir's software requires mass data collection. Some of their mass data collection techniques may not require a warrant, such as using license plate captures, but some does, such as who you're calling. So does Palantir perform warrantless surveillance themselves? To my knowledge, no. But when they sell their software to law enforcement agencies, they must know that the only way their customer could get bang for their buck is through mass surveillance. In my opinion, the person willingly and knowingly selling tools for oppressive purposes holds a lot of blame for the actual oppression that occurs as a result.
- chii 9y ago
  > If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. why is that a bad thing? If the crime is victimless (such as any drug usage "crime"), then the issue isn't with the police, but with the state defining what "crime" is, and that definition doesn't align with the people's definition.
  - blitmap 9y ago
    There was no probable cause for you to be under surveillance prior to the "random" stop.
    - xpaqui 9y ago
      Some people just get more randomly selected than others, a lot more.
  - ameister14 9y ago
    Any interaction with the police is a potentially violent interaction with the State. Even if that were not the case, limiting infringement on your rights as much as possible is a good thing, and the government has limitations placed on it for this reason. Stopping people for 'random' checks may violate those limitations.
  - ta76567656 9y ago
    Selective enforcement. Practice surveillance of the population. Select political opponent, as desired. Consult surveillance data. By random chance, sometimes you will find something. Parallel construct a case. Proceed to blackmail/extort/convict. Maintain political power. Repeat.
- RedTennisRacket 9y ago
  You raise several good points, but a few clarifications here: - In our software that we deploy to police departments, generally the origin of any piece of information is tracked, as well as when it was entered and by who. The intention with this is to prevent this (and other) kinds of abuse. Malicious users can still abuse the system and do a parallel construction e.g. outside of our system or maybe in a way that the two actions (finding non-admissible data and finding admissible data) seem unrelated, but at that point they would be spending quite a bit of time and criminal energy on this. I don't think this would happen commonly for a variety of practical reasons (but ultimately there's no way to completely prevent it). Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy. If you fundamentally think the government is evil, palantir would probably not be the workplace for you. But once you see all of the bad things LE can prevent thanks to our software, it becomes pretty easy to believe in, even if individual bad actors exist (and always will), like racist cops, cops that abuse their power, etc. - If the organization is acquiring warrantless surveillance, then this generally means that there is the legislative base for them to acquire the data in the first place. What this looks like varies from country to country, some countries are much stricter with the regulations than others. So for instance in some countries it is not allowed to get information from a suspects public facebook profile, whereas in other countries this is considered A-OK. Especially in europe these things have recently become much more strict with GDPR (and similar rules that apply to government entities). You'd think that be a downside to palantir (less data = less value?) but actually it's a big business opportunity, because our software is the only thing available that is even remotely close in this space to having enough access control 'finesse' that it can enable organizations to be compliant to this law. So this is an area (and competitive advantage) we are investing a lot into -- and typically organizations go from 'completely non-compliant' when we arrive there (e.g. never even deleting data like license plates that are supposed to be deleted after 3 months etc, audit-logging any searches investigators do, limiting search scope, ...) to being fairly or even fully compliant. Now my personal opinion is that everyone should be able to enjoy great privacy and control over their PII just like citizens of the EU do, so if you live e.g. in the US other another country where the law is lax, you should consider taking political action to change the situation. Of course we never endorse or support any workflows that are in any way unconstitutional, and we have terminated relationships before with very big government agencies when we had doubt about whether our tools would be used for unlawful purposes. - The "big data" thing is a bit of a misunderstanding I think -- we have "big data" tools too, but usually these are not of interest to local law enforcement. If you check out our youtube channel you will find some (atrociously old!) videos of the tool that's popular in LLE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 for instance). This tool is in fact often used with just hand-entered information -- analysts create objects (e.g. persons, links between them) in their investigation. So the data really isn't that big and mostly hand-curated, and the tool works fine without mass data collection (better than with, perhaps). Most of what local law enforcement does with 'big data' tools is to generate reports like crime statistics. "Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people" -- actually, they really do! Any police department of any size that has existed for a while will have a database with millions of convictions, suspects, court-cases etc in them. Usually on some crufty mainframe or in some crufty old SQL database that contains a lot of terribly inconsistent data (dead links, data duplication, etc.) Also sometimes some of this data is shared between countries, states etc. You can find some videos on youtube of our CEO talking about the challenges of data integration and such. Ultimately of course there is a general statistical trend (belief?) that 'more data is better', because if there is more and more complete data, you have a bigger chance of finding that connection between e.g. a terrorist and some billionaire who might be funding said terrorists, etc. At least up until a point (at which the data probably becomes just too noisy/hard to deal with, because every individual piece of information carries very little meaning. At least the NSA seems to subscribe to this belief according to their public statements, and I'd think if anyone knows about this stuff, it's them) and assuming you have the necessary CPU power and talent (data scientists) to actually do something useful with this data. Local law enforcement orgs like police generally lack the latter. In police departments, most users are only sophisticated enough to run searches for things like names, SSN, number plates etc, really. - We generally know a lot about how our software is used at most of our installations, and almost always actively take steps to prevent abuse (auditing etc). Most government organizations will not let us see things like what their analysts exactly searched for (because that is obviously sensitive information) but we do a lot of work to help organizations prevent abuse and insider threats at a higher level. As mentioned above, we have taken action in the past in situations where we suspected abuse. It's on a case-by-case basis, of course -- imagine if there is e.g. one analyst abusing the system, then that analyst getting fired/reprimanded would probably be sufficient action (obviously this is not in our responsibility), but if we suspect systematic abuse or we see signs of repeated abuse without repercussions, then we might pull out completely.
dpwm 9y ago
Let's say I'm law enforcement and I have some information obtained in a way which wouldn't stand up even in the most farcical of courtrooms. What I can do is use surveillance tools to find a way to effectively entrap you, to gather evidence. Think of it like a tip-off that you're not allowed to have. Palantir specialises in providing tools to analyze and aggregate big data. If law enforcement has an interest in it, it's probably for dragnet-style surveillance. The problem is that the 4th amendment means there must be reasonable suspicion before the investigation can begin. Most dragnet-style surveillance is incompatible with the 4th amendment. So law enforcement has to construct a reason for investigating the case that they should never have been investigating.
- chatmasta 9y ago
  If the data was sourced from public information that the target willingly posted online, does law enforcement even need to use parallel construction? Couldn’t they use the palantir data to obtain a warrant for more thorough searches? I too have a problem with business models that invade our privacy. But I think it’s a bit disingenuous to conflate “private information” with information that you voluntarily posted on the internet. Whatever happened to educating people that what they post on the internet is permanent? Dragnets over public data are a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of user education and understanding of what data they generate and share.
  - DataWorker 9y ago
    No, not really. We don’t expect all of our actions to be monitored and collected 24/7 throughout the course of our lives when going about our business offline and then used to entrap us. We should have a similar standard when it comes to our civil rights in the digital realm.
  - dpwm 9y ago
    I wasn't even thinking about public data. There's a lot of data that law enforcement already collects. What about license plate data, data from IMSI catchers, and leaked data. Add in the publicly available online data and you can supposedly build up quite a profile about them. What if somebody is arrested and happens to have a very convenient data set on a lot of people, such as data used for marketing purposes. Is it okay if those people are stopped and searched on the basis that somebody else held data about them and the police have supposed that 10% of the clients are suspected of criminality? Normally there is supposed to be evidence that the crime took place before an investigation can begin. If law enforcement starts with the evidence and then look for the crime that fits it, that's something different.
2close4comfort 9y ago
New Orleans PD...there was an article about it here recently. That is PT/Palantir's vision of the future. It is going to be pretty damn hard to stop once it gets going hopefully Facebook being on the front page of MSN for a couple of days will we a reckoning because the things the average person does not realise would REALLY upset them.
- athenot 9y ago
  On a positive note, New Orleans decided to not renew their contract with Palantir. I am not sure whether this is the result of that article or not.
  - selimthegrim 9y ago
    The mayor is leaving office.
notacoward 9y ago
I see other responses explaining how surveillance data, itself inadmissible in court, can lead people to evidence that is admissible. That's great, but it still makes it seem like only criminals are at risk. Far from it. It's important to remember that this same parallel construction can be used to strengthen false allegations or convictions, allegations or convictions under an unjust or unreasonable law (e.g. marijuana prohibitions), or discriminatory application of a proper law. Got a political opponent? Use Palantir to discover some little pecadillo, then engage the police/court machinery either to get an actual conviction or - almost as good - a whole bunch of negative PR. It's not just criminals. This kind of thing endangers everyone.

They dig up data telling the police where to look. The police then look in just the right place and "legitimately find" the evidence that they would never have stumbled on and couldn't have legally known was there.

opportune 9y ago

Law enforcement uses dragnet warrantless surveillance to gather data (such as who is calling whom, who is in physical proximity with whom). That data is loaded into Palantir's software. Law enforcement uses that data to acquire admissible evidence of the perpetrators' crimes. This is the crucial step, because although the original evidence couldn't be admissible in court due to its collection without a warrant, it can be used to acquire more evidence. If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. Now that evidence can be used in court, even though the only way law enforcement were able to acquire it was through unconstitutional practices. The thing about Palantir is that it needs big data to work. Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people - they might have something like that for something like suspected criminal gangs, but that wouldn't be enough data to make Palantir's software worthwhile. So acquiring the data necessary to use Palantir's software requires mass data collection. Some of their mass data collection techniques may not require a warrant, such as using license plate captures, but some does, such as who you're calling. So does Palantir perform warrantless surveillance themselves? To my knowledge, no. But when they sell their software to law enforcement agencies, they must know that the only way their customer could get bang for their buck is through mass surveillance. In my opinion, the person willingly and knowingly selling tools for oppressive purposes holds a lot of blame for the actual oppression that occurs as a result.

chii 9y ago
> If the warrantless surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. why is that a bad thing? If the crime is victimless (such as any drug usage "crime"), then the issue isn't with the police, but with the state defining what "crime" is, and that definition doesn't align with the people's definition.
- blitmap 9y ago
  There was no probable cause for you to be under surveillance prior to the "random" stop.
  - xpaqui 9y ago
    Some people just get more randomly selected than others, a lot more.
- ameister14 9y ago
  Any interaction with the police is a potentially violent interaction with the State. Even if that were not the case, limiting infringement on your rights as much as possible is a good thing, and the government has limitations placed on it for this reason. Stopping people for 'random' checks may violate those limitations.
- ta76567656 9y ago
  Selective enforcement. Practice surveillance of the population. Select political opponent, as desired. Consult surveillance data. By random chance, sometimes you will find something. Parallel construct a case. Proceed to blackmail/extort/convict. Maintain political power. Repeat.
RedTennisRacket 9y ago
You raise several good points, but a few clarifications here: - In our software that we deploy to police departments, generally the origin of any piece of information is tracked, as well as when it was entered and by who. The intention with this is to prevent this (and other) kinds of abuse. Malicious users can still abuse the system and do a parallel construction e.g. outside of our system or maybe in a way that the two actions (finding non-admissible data and finding admissible data) seem unrelated, but at that point they would be spending quite a bit of time and criminal energy on this. I don't think this would happen commonly for a variety of practical reasons (but ultimately there's no way to completely prevent it). Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy. If you fundamentally think the government is evil, palantir would probably not be the workplace for you. But once you see all of the bad things LE can prevent thanks to our software, it becomes pretty easy to believe in, even if individual bad actors exist (and always will), like racist cops, cops that abuse their power, etc. - If the organization is acquiring warrantless surveillance, then this generally means that there is the legislative base for them to acquire the data in the first place. What this looks like varies from country to country, some countries are much stricter with the regulations than others. So for instance in some countries it is not allowed to get information from a suspects public facebook profile, whereas in other countries this is considered A-OK. Especially in europe these things have recently become much more strict with GDPR (and similar rules that apply to government entities). You'd think that be a downside to palantir (less data = less value?) but actually it's a big business opportunity, because our software is the only thing available that is even remotely close in this space to having enough access control 'finesse' that it can enable organizations to be compliant to this law. So this is an area (and competitive advantage) we are investing a lot into -- and typically organizations go from 'completely non-compliant' when we arrive there (e.g. never even deleting data like license plates that are supposed to be deleted after 3 months etc, audit-logging any searches investigators do, limiting search scope, ...) to being fairly or even fully compliant. Now my personal opinion is that everyone should be able to enjoy great privacy and control over their PII just like citizens of the EU do, so if you live e.g. in the US other another country where the law is lax, you should consider taking political action to change the situation. Of course we never endorse or support any workflows that are in any way unconstitutional, and we have terminated relationships before with very big government agencies when we had doubt about whether our tools would be used for unlawful purposes. - The "big data" thing is a bit of a misunderstanding I think -- we have "big data" tools too, but usually these are not of interest to local law enforcement. If you check out our youtube channel you will find some (atrociously old!) videos of the tool that's popular in LLE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4 for instance). This tool is in fact often used with just hand-entered information -- analysts create objects (e.g. persons, links between them) in their investigation. So the data really isn't that big and mostly hand-curated, and the tool works fine without mass data collection (better than with, perhaps). Most of what local law enforcement does with 'big data' tools is to generate reports like crime statistics. "Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people" -- actually, they really do! Any police department of any size that has existed for a while will have a database with millions of convictions, suspects, court-cases etc in them. Usually on some crufty mainframe or in some crufty old SQL database that contains a lot of terribly inconsistent data (dead links, data duplication, etc.) Also sometimes some of this data is shared between countries, states etc. You can find some videos on youtube of our CEO talking about the challenges of data integration and such. Ultimately of course there is a general statistical trend (belief?) that 'more data is better', because if there is more and more complete data, you have a bigger chance of finding that connection between e.g. a terrorist and some billionaire who might be funding said terrorists, etc. At least up until a point (at which the data probably becomes just too noisy/hard to deal with, because every individual piece of information carries very little meaning. At least the NSA seems to subscribe to this belief according to their public statements, and I'd think if anyone knows about this stuff, it's them) and assuming you have the necessary CPU power and talent (data scientists) to actually do something useful with this data. Local law enforcement orgs like police generally lack the latter. In police departments, most users are only sophisticated enough to run searches for things like names, SSN, number plates etc, really. - We generally know a lot about how our software is used at most of our installations, and almost always actively take steps to prevent abuse (auditing etc). Most government organizations will not let us see things like what their analysts exactly searched for (because that is obviously sensitive information) but we do a lot of work to help organizations prevent abuse and insider threats at a higher level. As mentioned above, we have taken action in the past in situations where we suspected abuse. It's on a case-by-case basis, of course -- imagine if there is e.g. one analyst abusing the system, then that analyst getting fired/reprimanded would probably be sufficient action (obviously this is not in our responsibility), but if we suspect systematic abuse or we see signs of repeated abuse without repercussions, then we might pull out completely.

dpwm 9y ago

Let's say I'm law enforcement and I have some information obtained in a way which wouldn't stand up even in the most farcical of courtrooms. What I can do is use surveillance tools to find a way to effectively entrap you, to gather evidence. Think of it like a tip-off that you're not allowed to have. Palantir specialises in providing tools to analyze and aggregate big data. If law enforcement has an interest in it, it's probably for dragnet-style surveillance. The problem is that the 4th amendment means there must be reasonable suspicion before the investigation can begin. Most dragnet-style surveillance is incompatible with the 4th amendment. So law enforcement has to construct a reason for investigating the case that they should never have been investigating.

chatmasta 9y ago
If the data was sourced from public information that the target willingly posted online, does law enforcement even need to use parallel construction? Couldn’t they use the palantir data to obtain a warrant for more thorough searches? I too have a problem with business models that invade our privacy. But I think it’s a bit disingenuous to conflate “private information” with information that you voluntarily posted on the internet. Whatever happened to educating people that what they post on the internet is permanent? Dragnets over public data are a symptom of the real problem, which is lack of user education and understanding of what data they generate and share.
- DataWorker 9y ago
  No, not really. We don’t expect all of our actions to be monitored and collected 24/7 throughout the course of our lives when going about our business offline and then used to entrap us. We should have a similar standard when it comes to our civil rights in the digital realm.
- dpwm 9y ago
  I wasn't even thinking about public data. There's a lot of data that law enforcement already collects. What about license plate data, data from IMSI catchers, and leaked data. Add in the publicly available online data and you can supposedly build up quite a profile about them. What if somebody is arrested and happens to have a very convenient data set on a lot of people, such as data used for marketing purposes. Is it okay if those people are stopped and searched on the basis that somebody else held data about them and the police have supposed that 10% of the clients are suspected of criminality? Normally there is supposed to be evidence that the crime took place before an investigation can begin. If law enforcement starts with the evidence and then look for the crime that fits it, that's something different.

2close4comfort 9y ago

New Orleans PD...there was an article about it here recently. That is PT/Palantir's vision of the future. It is going to be pretty damn hard to stop once it gets going hopefully Facebook being on the front page of MSN for a couple of days will we a reckoning because the things the average person does not realise would REALLY upset them.

athenot 9y ago
On a positive note, New Orleans decided to not renew their contract with Palantir. I am not sure whether this is the result of that article or not.
- selimthegrim 9y ago
  The mayor is leaving office.

notacoward 9y ago

I see other responses explaining how surveillance data, itself inadmissible in court, can lead people to evidence that is admissible. That's great, but it still makes it seem like only criminals are at risk. Far from it. It's important to remember that this same parallel construction can be used to strengthen false allegations or convictions, allegations or convictions under an unjust or unreasonable law (e.g. marijuana prohibitions), or discriminatory application of a proper law. Got a political opponent? Use Palantir to discover some little pecadillo, then engage the police/court machinery either to get an actual conviction or - almost as good - a whole bunch of negative PR. It's not just criminals. This kind of thing endangers everyone.