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> "Palantir software is instrumental to the operations of ICE, which is planning one of the largest-ever targeted immigration enforcement raids this weekend on

• overthemoon 7y ago
  I don't accept this. This is shirking responsibility for what one has brought into the world. Technology has a moral component that can't be ignored in the name of progressive idealism. It's both/and.
  • m-p-3 7y ago
    Still, if someone crafts a knife and someone uses it to hurt another I'll blame the user, not the crafter.
    • overthemoon 7y ago
      The time has passed to blame the knife maker, unfortunately. I'd like to give him a piece of my mind. Kidding aside, I see where you're coming from. I'm not trying to excuse lawmakers or the people who fire the gun, operate the drone, etc. I'm just saying the knife inventor is a part of the chain, he or she is not a neutral party.
    • mulmen 7y ago
      That’s not compelling. Knives have practical and constructive uses outside harming people. Palantir is being used as designed.
    • convolvatron 7y ago
      sure. but I sell you a knife and you come back and ask for a bunch of features that make it easier to hide, and a special curve to make it easier to get underneath the human ribcage, and a wider blade that makes wounds heal more slowly, etc....at some point you have to accept your complicity
    • 49531 7y ago
      There is a difference between crafting a knife and crafting a tool specifically for harmful purposes. The IBM engineers who helped Germany facilitate the holocaust are probably a bit more involved in evil than a knife crafter.
      • jonathankoren 7y ago
        Hell. They forward deployed engineers (just like Palantir!) > Particularly powerful are the newly-released copies of the IBM concentration camp codes. IBM maintained a customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in virtually every concentration camp to sort or process punch cards and track prisoners. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ibm-holocaust_b_1301691
    • ajna91 7y ago
      What if somebody discovers two feuding tribes in the jungle and decides to sell them deadly knives by advertising their killing ability? Note: My comment is responding to the general idea of disclaiming responsibility. I don't know enough about this company to judge.
    • homonculus1 7y ago
      Does the crafter still avoid blame if they were knowingly contracting to craft knives for a gang that has a history of hurting others?
    • cannonedhamster 7y ago
      You can't have it both ways. Police can easily hold someone as guilty of a crime for being in the same car as someone committing a crime. If you can be charged for that then a creator can be held complicit for any actions done using their software as intended.
      • FireBeyond 7y ago
        Within reason. I am no apologist for a lot of police misdeeds and dual standards, but whilst you _can_, often you won't, depending on context: multiple high speed chases around where I live have resulted from police lighting a car up, and the driver failing to stop. Passengers in the car were "released on scene", because there was a recognition that they did not commit the failure to stop (and other associated offenses), nor could they safely extricate themselves from proximity.
    • anigbrowl 7y ago
      A better analogy would be someone with a knife asking Palantir to draw up a list of people that can be stabbed with impunity.
• ajna91 7y ago
  "I am innocent of this man's blood; see you to it."
  • mLuby 7y ago
    Since not everyone will get the reference: according to the Christian Bible's New Testament, this is what Pontius Pilate (the Roman administrator who sentenced Jesus Christ to death) said when he reluctantly allowed the angry mob to decide JC's fate. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate
• 49531 7y ago
  I don't think it makes a lot of sense to say the tech industry isn't responsible. At least as engineers I think there should be some ethical considerations. I think there is a difference between a truly neutral tool being used for harmful purposes, and a tool specifically made for harmful purposes.
• _iyig 7y ago
  I'm an American citizen who is happy to see the law enforced. I don't live in Atherton or Palo Alto. There were two Central American gang-related shootings near my family's home last week; there were two MS-13 murders in the broader area earlier this year. I grew up here, and it didn't used to be like this. I want to see those who come here illegally, or who have been denied refugee status as the result of due process, deported. I don't care what race, nationality, or religion they are. I also want to see families and young kids kept together, and treated humanely. But at the end of the day, we [the U.S.] are a nation of laws, or we are not. I'm proud of Palantir's efforts to help enforce the (democratically-enacted, internationally-conventional) law of the land.
  • cannonedhamster 7y ago
    Much of what they are doing stretches and very likely breaks constitutionality. The fact that they can track you without any probable cause for any amount of time and then store that information means that essentially they no longer have to get warrants, meaning there is no oversight, on anyone they want as long as they claim it's related to a case. That's absolutely wrong. No one wants gang members running around shooting people up. We are very clearly not a nation of laws as laws apply differently depending on the very things you claim not to care about. Sentences are harsher, applications of justice are different depending on what race, nationality, or religion they are or even how much justice they can afford. This isn't an affront against the police, I'm good friends with officers, but at the end of the day as citizens it's our responsibility to hold our police accountable and establish the limits imposed upon them. Our founding fathers lived under a police state that was unaccountable to the people and we are drifting closer to that line. Our character as a nation is not defined by what we do when it's easy, but how we act when the decision are hard.
    • P_I_Staker 7y ago
      > very likely breaks constitutionality... they can track you without any probable cause... they no longer have to get warrants. Does anything in Palantir's database require a warrant? Law enforcement can absolutely follow your car without a warrant, check if you've come up on a license plate reader, call another department and see if they have your phone number, list of associates, ect. Point being, police don't need a warrant to investigate you. I don't know if they even need reasonable suspicion or probable cause. You might be able to claim harassment if they interfere with your life. Otherwise, constitutional protections apply to restricting your freedom (eg. detaining/arresting you), ceasing/searching your property, and monitoring your private life (eg wiretaps, bugs, ect). It seems like what Palantir's doing is making it easier for departments to share information that would normally require lots of digging. I'm not defending the practice at all. I despise this kind of mass surveillance, and am particularly concerned that it's being done in secret. My opinion is that we don't have enough, or practically any, privacy protections in the USA; at least on public property. Might sound like a contradiction, but we spend much of our lives in public, and shouldn't have to hide in our homes to prevent mass surveillance. I don't think the constitution goes far enough to protect us anymore. The founding fathers could not even imagine the world we live in today. Even George Orwell couldn't conceive of the capabilities we have today when he wrote 1984. Yet we've done close to nothing to rein in these capabilities, and all the movement is in the wrong direction.
• metalliqaz 7y ago
  I used to think the same. I now think that this reasoning is faulty. Cars can be used for good or evil. For the most part we leave it up to the users to do the right thing, however we don't just leave it up to the users. If a modern car manufacturer were to make a vehicle with no safety features whatsoever, we would rightly call them out as a bad actor. Seat belts, air bags, bumpers, crumple zones, defoggers, windshield wipers, and on and on. We have laws that require a basic level of safety for these potentially dangerous machines. There is no reason we shouldn't expect tech and software firms to include basic "safety" considerations of their own. Remember all those companies that helped implement censorship and spying systems for authoritarian regimes? Still thing it should up to "the lawmakers"?
  • sfotm 7y ago
    At the same time, a lot of those safety features are enforced by the governments of the people they're manufactured for. Depending on the country you buy a vehicle in, it may have more or fewer security features. Of course, for cars, safety is a marketable feature so it behooves them to make them somewhat safe. In this instance, it seems like these precautions are against the user's interests, which complicates things.
  • ng12 7y ago
    I think this is a good analog for what Palantir does, actually. The thing to note is that Palantir is not in the data collection industry, or even the data storage industry. They are in the data analysis industry. One way or another California cops are going to build or buy tools that allow them to access their data, it might as well be from a company like Palantir which is security-minded.
  • headUpUR_ASS 7y ago
    Seat belts, air bags, bumpers, crumple zones, defoggers, windshield wipers, and on and on. We have laws that require a basic level of safety for these potentially dangerous machines. I’d like to introduce you to a mind-blowing concept vehicle: The Motorcycle. Anyone over the age of 17 can ride one. They have no seat belts, windshields or bumpers, and they carry high rates of fatalities relative to the accidents that involve them, when compared to all other vehicles on public roads. You are free to choose them over ordinary automobiles at your option in most countries. Many vehicles are street legal, but not sold by commercial dealers, and still find their way onto public roads. People find ways around the implicit suggestions pushed upon any given market place. The market doesn’t always offer the best choices, but flexibility is a good thing. Anyway, this is really about over-funded, near miltary yet still “civilian” law enforcement operations cutting across every jurisdiction to do whatever a handful of unelected people think ought to happen and carry the leverage to push their whims anywhere they want, simply because there’s no realistic counter to their privatized intent. Think tanks sit around and muse about this and that, and then private militaries come out of the woodwork to advise federal employees about... whatever they want. It’s going to keep happening. And unless you’re a billionaire, you don’t even have a seat at the table.
• wmf 7y ago
  Let us remember that Peter Thiel founded Palantir to give himself backdoor influence on policy.
  • cannonedhamster 7y ago
    Peter Thiel would make an excellent Bond villain. You can feel empathy for him for being genuinely wronged and at the same time be disgusted by how he's harmed others in the pursuit of his private justice. He should never be underestimated and just when you think you've found a weakness he can expose it as a secret strength. If he weren't using his tremendous skills for so much ill in the world he'd be extremely admirable and hard not to cite as a role model.
• arnvald 7y ago
  Someone in the tech industry decides to build such product for the lawmakers. These people in the tech industry know how this software is being used and they continue supporting it. Yes, lawmakers are responsible for it, too. But let's not justify the "we just built and sold a weapon, we didn't fire it" mentality.
• navigatesol 7y ago
  >Once and for all, it is the policy makers, not the tech industry This is what people working on horrible things say to themselves to justify collecting a (giant) paycheck. Many parties are at fault, whether they write the laws or the software.
  • cannonedhamster 7y ago
    This is the tech equivalent of saying they were just following orders.
• anigbrowl 7y ago
  Once and for all, it is the policy makers, not the tech industry, who are responsible for these operations. Prefacing your opinion with 'once and for all' is not much better than saying 'mine is the only valid opinion' and doesn't make for a good discussion. Policy makers certainly create the demand for such commercial services, but it is a choice to supply that demand or not, and those who find such demands morally questionable have the capability to frustrate them by refusing to participate or obstructing the supply. Individuals can of course abdicate the moral decision-making if it makes them uncomfortable, but acting without regard to the good or ill of the outcome is an implicit endorsement of it. If people later decide that certain outcomes are a moral ill, indifferent participants may find themselves considered culpable.
• zjaffee 7y ago
  I'm sorry but your response is not based at all in historical fact. A huge part of forcing a governments hand to do the right thing is having corporations and other businesses not work with them (one example is the fall of apartheid in south africa, among other things). Bottom up direct action is the only real way to fight injustice, law makers move far too slowly to effectively be a barrier to all injustice. Additionally, building a weapon is not simply building a tool (note that I'm not saying weapons aren't ever necessary), and it's foolish to suggest otherwise.
• avmich 7y ago
  Remember that in Nuremberg trials a prevailing opinion was that merely obeying illegal orders can be criminal. Similarly if the technology being built can be reasonably used for great harms - and one building it is supposed to differentiate between 'knife' and 'Death Star'-level of potential threat - building the technology by itself may become the responsibility.
• jonathankoren 7y ago
  While yes the final decision lies with someone else, I am very uncomfortable with this idea that the creators of these tools are completely blameless. Tools are abused all the time, but not every tool is as destructive and likely to be abused. The use and abuse should be considered, and mitigation undertaken as part of any basic engineering ethics standard. Tools aren’t natural, and certainly not these tools. They were made very intentionally. To use an extreme example, you don’t get to make the proverbial genetically targeted bioweapon, and the throw up your hands when it’s used and say, “Hey I’m blameless. I just made the thing.” Well, the outcome of its use, and it’s appeal to bad actors is obvious, it wouldn’t have existed if you didn’t build it. But let’s look at Palantir in particular. It’s not just software, it also a consultancy via its “forward deployed engineers”. This means that it’s not just a value neutral tool, but actively aiding customers to do whatever.
• jvagner 7y ago
  Sounds reasonable, but when I look around...
• praptak 7y ago
  > it is the policy makers, not the tech industry, who are responsible for these operations. Organizationally responsible. Ethically, if you provide means to do X and can reasonably predict that someone (e.g. government) will apply X to do something unethical, then you are at least partially responsible for the final unethical result.
• telltruth 7y ago
  Seriously want to understand: what exactly is wrong with equipping cops with better tech to catch people who blatantly violate laws? I am not talking about tech that itself violates constitution/laws but rather the tech that works within the boundary of constitution/laws while helping cops do their job better.
  • xenospn 7y ago
    They can use it to skirt the law completely and you’d never even know.