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The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

133 points by Balgair 7y ago

mulmen 7y ago
Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.
- prepend 7y ago
  Palantir is a software company right and sells tools to ICE? Does someone wearing an Excel shirt make you uncomfortable because ICE uses MSOffice? What about OSS projects like R and Python that also enable ICE to analyze data to find people. Is the expectation that Palantir should not sell software to ICE?
  - matchagaucho 7y ago
    The difference is in Pro Services. MS does not send employees from Redmond to help ICE use Excel. Palantir does bundle software and services. Their software is so complex, it is typically Palantir employees building the models and analytics.
    - prepend 7y ago
      MS has professional services and they do send people to ICE to help use Excel. They also have an extensive partner network. Any large software company sells consulting services. I don’t know about Python, but RStudio sells professional services to help with use of R.
      - the-dude 7y ago
        > and they do send people to ICE to help use Excel. source
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    I think the expectation is that Palantir should make lots of money selling software to other people, and then a portion of their profits and employee's salaries is required by law to go to funding ICE anyway. That seems to be what everyone else is okay with.
  - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
    Most enterprise software sales aren’t as low touch as an Excel license, and Palantir is very much on the high touch side of the spectrum. When Palantir sells software to a large government agency, that means squads of Palantir employees go to the government agency and help them run it, and that consulting effort is a huge component of what the customer is paying for. Having said that, some people do think Microsoft should refuse to sell to ICE too.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - analogist 7y ago
    So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer?
    - navigatesol 7y ago
      >So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer? No, can you explain it? It sounds like a way to justify to yourself that "those people are bad", but you're "just doing your job". Are you principled about who you do business with, or not?
    - nailer 7y ago
      I might be really uneducated here - I'm not American. All I know about ICE is that they're immigration and customs enforcement - they're basically the US's border force. The quality of the conditions they keep migrants in is poor, and has been for years. OK. Why is that worthy of a boycott? Your democratically elected governments create the laws, and determine the funding for things like beds and toys etc. Boycotts in some cases may make those conditions worse instead of better. There will always need to be a border force. Wouldn't it be better to focus on improving conditions, increasing funding, and stopping people from crossing the border in the first place?
      - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        ICE isn't the border force. All border security operations, stopping people from crossing and customs inspections and such, are done by a different agency called CBP.
        nailer 7y ago
        OK. Why not change the law, if you want to make undocumented migration legal?
        SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Most people trying to boycott ICE don't think undocumented migration should be legal. They just don't think ICE is a good agency. (Again, ICE is not the only agency responsible for undocumented migration, so undocumented migration isn't automatically legal if they can't do their job.)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    The expectation is that companies like Palantir should not exist at all. Their core business is surveilling innocent people en masse.
    - prepend 7y ago
      That is not their core business. Their core business is data analysis. If I remember from some tech book, they were spun out from the fraud department in PayPal detecting fraudulent transactions and then selling services to FBI. I became familiar with them through their disease prevention activities trying to evaluate bug transmissions and food borne diseases. Certainly, you can analyze innocent people, but it’s not like they are a face recognition camera company or something. I’m not employed by Palantir and not a fan or anything, but am surprised at how mischaracterized they seem to be.
      - notJim 7y ago
        > Their core business is data analysis. This is like saying Raytheon's core business is antennas. Yes, Palantir does data analysis, specifically for ICE, the military and the police.
        prepend 7y ago
        Palantir is private so hard to know revenue breakdown. But hard to believe that over 50% of their revenue (what I would consider core) comes from ICE, military and police. I found this article [0] from 2018 that said half of its $1B in revenue comes from government and the other half from corporate. So if every penny of government work comes from ICE and ICE-likes maybe that’s core. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-16/palantir-posted-nearly-1-billion-in-2018-sales-executive-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-16/palantir-...
        tzakrajs 7y ago
        What if the other corporations they serve are subcontracted by LEO, ICE and CBP? Palantir is deeply in cahoots with CBP/ICE and Peter Thiel (isn't even a US Citizen so I can't even call him a traitor, but) is an enemy of the American people. Fuck ICE, Fuck Palantir, Fuck Peter Thiel
  - rtkwe 7y ago
    Is it not easy to see that there's a moral space between creating a tool that can be used for something you dislike (basically all software falls into this category) and working specifically for a company making software that will explicitly be used for something you dislike?
- michaelt 7y ago
  A great many expansions to the power of the state have been justified with the argument "this is to fight terror and child abuse" Perhaps they signed up naively imagining they were working on a tool that would be used for that and nothing else?
  - creaghpatr 7y ago
    It's definitely a weird company to work for if you don't believe in enforcing laws, or only partial enforcement of laws; especially border laws.
    - inflatableDodo 7y ago
      Well, the owner presumably doesn't think that most laws currently on the books should be enforced, unless I have missed something regarding right wing libertarianism.
    - fzeroracer 7y ago
      Or maybe the fact that ICE has been overabusing their authority to also detain US citizens for weeks at a time despite providing evidence of their citizenship has got people wondering if they're the baddies. In addition to, you know, the horrible treatment of asylum seekers incl. things such as not providing flu vaccines.
      - immaway 7y ago
        Detainees are given provided food, shelter and medical treatment. Overcrowding can happen at time when you have a 1000 people at a time cross in a day at a single point. There are no cloud facilities. What is your alternative?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  I interviewed with Palantir maybe seven years ago (didn't get the job) and definitely wasn't aware at the time that they were doing this kind of work, if they even were back then. And had I known they were doing CBP stuff, I may have been OK with it under Obama even. It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I really started opposing it.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1111236112347 7y ago
    The article is about work with HSI, not CBP. The scope of work that HSI does is much broader, here's a quote from wikipedia about it: HSI special agents investigate violations of more than 400 U.S. laws that threaten the national security of the United States such as counter-proliferation and export violations, human rights violations/war crimes, human smuggling, art theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling and trafficking, arms trafficking, document and benefit fraud, the manufacturing and sale of counterfeit immigration and identity documents, transnational gangs, financial crimes including money laundering and bulk cash smuggling, trade-based money laundering (including trade finance and Kimberley Process investigations), computer crime, including child exploitation, intellectual property rights/trade fraud, import/export enforcement, trafficking of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and other merchandise, mass-marketing fraud, and international Cultural Property and Antiquities crimes.
  - vinniejames 7y ago
    Albert Einstein said the same thing about the Bomb, after we dropped it
  - sremani 7y ago
    >> concentration-campy Willful lack of proportion to score political karma points.
  - basseq 7y ago
    Counter-anecdote: I interviewed with Palatir 6.5 years ago (also didn't get the job) and was absolutely made aware that a core part of their business was in law enforcement at both the Federal and State level.
- qazpot 7y ago
  I am assuming ICE is "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement". I am not from USA but why every comment here is implying ICE to be some evil thing.
  - throwawaytoday5 7y ago
    ICE is a recent phenomenon whose creation was only due to 9/11 attacks. Prior everything they did was handled by other organizations more effectively.
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    Because they do stuff like this https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/border-patrol-agent-detains-women-speaking-spanish-montana-gas-station-n876096 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/border-patrol-agent-deta...
    - m0zg 7y ago
      Fresh off the Resolute desk: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-ends-family-separation https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-...
      - openasocket 7y ago
        They could also let asylum seekers go, and allow them to live in the United States pending a hearing. That's what we've been doing until this administration. These aren't random people off the street, these are people with valid claims of asylum who have passed the credible fear interview administered by CBP. Almost all of them will stay in contact with the courts and go to all their appointments. The editorial also neglects to mention that our facilities are greatly over capacity, that this change will make that much much worse, and that thanks to the backlog of immigration cases these families would have to be in these facilities for 5 years or more. To say nothing of the abuses and poor conditions. And, once again, these families seeking asylum have not committed any crime, they have done nothing illegal.
        7y ago
- sp332 7y ago
  The ICE thing has gotten dramatically worse recently. Accepting a certain level of abuse of power in other LE agencies doesn't necessarily mean they're OK with, say, actively pushing back against a DoJ settlement so they can hold children in detention indefinitely, etc.
  - wpietri 7y ago
    Exactly. I think it's reasonable (although perhaps naive) for people to have a sunny view of law enforcement. Especially when, like me, they're white men from middle-class backgrounds; I've never had a bad experience with law enforcement, despite having done some stupendously dumb-ass things. But even though I'm predisposed to view cops favorably, the stuff with ICE is shocking to me. America has a big chunk of history [1] where ethnic cleansing was common and ignored or even supported by police [2]. It's hard for me not to see ICE's aggressive dehumanization of non-white migrants as a resurgence of that. So I'm not surprised that even at Palantir people are objecting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... [2] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-American/dp/0743294483 https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
    - creaghpatr 7y ago
      Or, if Mexican heroin killed multiple people you know, you have a not-sunny view of illegal immigrants and unsecured borders. Just because you attribute your own ignorance to the color of your skin, doesn't mean others do.
      - vkou 7y ago
        It's not illegal to seek asylum.
        creaghpatr 7y ago
        Likewise, it's not illegal to enforce the law, as created by Congress.
- mandevil 7y ago
  Maybe I'm the weird one, but who would wear a t-shirt from your previous company to work at your current company? That just seems to send all the wrong signals.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    I do this all the time and nobody cares.
  - tjr225 7y ago
    Doesn't seem that weird to me. Since landing in tech I haven't had to buy a single t-shirt- I just wear whatever they hand out.
  - AftHurrahWinch 7y ago
    (stops wearing my JPL t-shirt to work)
  - master-litty 7y ago
    I find it socially acceptable. It's quite normal to jump from one tech company to another, and wearing a t-shirt from a previous employer is an artifact of that lifestyle. My hot take: I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride.
    - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
      > I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride. Pride here isn't a good thing.
      - master-litty 7y ago
        To each their own. Pride in my decisions and my hard work is an important part of my self esteem.
  - 7y ago
- bubblethink 7y ago
  >but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? As long as there is sufficient plausible deniability, people will sign up for anything. In the tech domain, this goes back to at least WW2 with IBM selling punch card machines to Germany.
- tempsy 7y ago
  I also don't understand this. Seems like if you were willing to work for Palantir before this made news you'd have understood that surveillance tech to police depts, corporations, etc. is exactly what the company sells/enables. I did have a recruiter reach out a long time ago and remember they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostitution rings.
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago
    I wonder if Palantir could help the FBI get a bead on Ghislaine Maxwell. Hahah, just kidding, Palantir is for chasing down the hoi polloi, not the madams and child abducters who service the country's elite (who after all probably give Palantir a lot of its contracts).
  - leggomylibro 7y ago
    And I once had a recruiter from Axon talk about how body cameras could potentially help to hold officers accountable. But it's good to always ask this question of any prospective employer: "who are [y]our customers?" The customers are the ones who pay the company, and unless you're applying to work for a monopoly, they're the ones who ultimately call the shots.
  - jakear 7y ago
    I had a recruiter reach out, and I actually played along with their interview process, but at every step of the way I’d inquire about the company’s ethics. Nailed all the tech questions, but in the end did not get an offer. Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions.
    - naravara 7y ago
      >Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions. My money is on the latter. In "Winners Take All" Anand Giridharadas has a really good sentence where he points out how major employers usually try to find entry level hires who possess an ideal degree of intelligence and impressionability. The latter is just as important for them as the former. They want people they can mold to think and behave according to the values of the company. In my personal experience, this is also why companies and industries that tend to have a lot of "lifers" are also often fairly toxic places to work. The people who came up and through the norms of the organization don't actually learn how to interact with normal people who don't buy into their idiosyncratic nonsense, don't seem to understand the concept of "standards" or "best practices," and often the idea that people might leave if they don't like how things are being done just doesn't cross their minds. So they take liberties with each other they shouldn't and do a poor job of forming consensus, actually caring about morale, or treating each other with professionalism or respect. When people do leave, the narrative is usually framed as if they were too weak or soft to handle the rigorous and exacting standards of the company/team/manager rather than thinking that maybe thing are being run badly.
- cat199 7y ago
  > Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission nope - just WaPo's use of selective editorial bias to paint problems endemic to both parties & us society in general to partisan ends.
  - CompanionCuuube 7y ago
    On one hand, I am grateful for this comment. But on the other hand, I know that it is a low effort comment that you are likely able to use on many a WaPo article.
- microtherion 7y ago
  > what exactly did they think they were signing up for? It appears they're having an "Are we the Baddies?" moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
- kj98uo 7y ago
  I thought you work remotely based on your past comments??
- mcintyre1994 7y ago
  I’ve brought up my discomfort with Palantir to a recruiter a while ago and they said I’d be working with businesses trying to get set up with Palantir analytics systems. I asked if the role was distinct from one that might work with LEO and of course it’s not, so who knows how true that really is - I’m skeptical.
- astine 7y ago
  There's a difference between supporting law enforcement generally and supporting specific law enforcement efforts. I personally want my local law enforcement to be fast and effective because I want them to keep me safe from crime, but I don't want them to violate my or other people's rights in the process of keeping me safe from crime. So, in that vein, I might not object to police gaining a specific new tool but I would object if I found out that the police were misusing it somehow. The employees objecting to Palantir's work with ICE are probably not objecting to cooperation with border enforcement on the principle that border enforcement is immoral generally, but that recent activities by border enforcement are immoral. If it weren't for the internment camps at the border, we probably wouldn't be hearing about this. There's a broader discussion about the 4th ammendment and Palantir's effect there, but I don't think that this particular protest is about that.
- alkibiades 7y ago
  seeing a t shirt makes you uncomfortable?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- forgottenpass 7y ago
  >but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? The last 15 years of big "tech" have been a giant collective rationalization that building mass surveillance is innocuous. They think they're singing up to enable palatable use cases of collecting and analyzing that data, and nothing bad will ever happen. Just the same as anyone singing up to work at google/facebook/etc...
_bxg1 7y ago
The company is literally named after the magic orb that Sauron uses to surveil Middle-Earth. I don't know what you expected.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  To be clear: I also think that what Palantir is doing is deplorable. I just think that if you apply there, it's pretty obvious what you're signing up for.
- prepend 7y ago
  It’s not the Palantir that are bad, but Sauron and Saruman. They were created by elves for useful purposes. Possibly the Palantir saved middle earth when Aragorn used it to scry events leading up to the final battles.
  - AndrewBissell 7y ago
    I guess this explains the "Defend the Shire" shirts I see Palantir employees wear sometimes. Always thought the idea they're on the side of the pastoral, mind-their-own-business Hobbits was one of the most absurd misconceptions of their purpose of any company in Silicon Valley, and that's really saying something.
    - prepend 7y ago
      That’s pretty funny, I’ve never heard of that shirt. I just remembered the Palantir as the coolest thing ever when I was 8 and read about it. Years later learning someone named that company that made sense to me before I had any idea what they did. Was actually kind of let down because I was expecting some sort of AI/ knowledge company.
    - alistairSH 7y ago
      Oh. Wow. That is insane. Photo for reference: https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2016/01/11/103295500-Untitled-2.530x298.jpg?v=1452536513 https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/edit...
kd3 7y ago
It's not just ICE but the entire government that is a problem. I personally stopped accepting any work from any government a few years ago. Once you realize what government is, there's no going back. "The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psychopath]. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." - Albert J. Nock in “Our Enemy, The State”
- pjc50 7y ago
  We should not allow the observation that some states collapse into lawlessness to turn into a blind "government is bad" attitude that ends with people being held hostage by government-sized private companies. The state can be lawless, but escaping lawlessness is impossible without the efforts of a state.
  - kd3 7y ago
    Well it's more the fact that government exists by the use of force and coercion, which makes it a violent and basically terrorist organization. And that is so dispite having laws. Laws != morality.
- duqd_ 7y ago
  It makes me sad that so many people are unwilling to engage with this position. Anarchism is unreasonably vilified imo.
  - frenchyatwork 7y ago
    A big problem with anarchy is that it's really complicated and is usually either misunderstood by the proponent or the listeners. Anarchy is about levelling the playing field and reducing the power that the most powerful structures have in our society. The problem of removing power structures in institutions, is that they will naturally get replaced by other ones, and the replacements are often as authoritarian as the originals. In the US, it's popular to think that you can somehow replace elected government (where power is somewhat dependant on votes, and somewhat dependent on advertising budgets/capital) with business (where power is dependent entirely on capital), and that somehow this is more "anarchist". This is a naive idea.
burger_moon 7y ago
It's kinda interesting how people are just now realizing that all the big tech companies are government contractors and not this imaginary utopia of 'making the world a better place' they were sold on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all US gov't contractors. It's hilariously ironic seeing the political views of the employees suddenly clashing with their employers views of making money as if it's a new thing.
- burtonator 7y ago
  This isn't a new debate though... My grandfather started a company which was a smaller player in the military contracting space. It was somewhat large and his argument was that he was always 'helping democracy' but he was willfully blind IMO. It's always going to be a bit fuzzy but it's another thing entirely when the organization you're selling to is just flat out evil.
- riku_iki 7y ago
  Google and Amazon get very marginal portion of their revenue from government, and reputation risks for main revenue sources likely discourage them in participation in shady activities with government.
- jbob2000 7y ago
  Every tech company I've ever worked for has done a project, in some way, with the government. I worked for a small healthcare startup of 5 developers, we had government contracts. I worked for a medium sized dropbox-like startup, we had government contracts. Unless you're some dinky, meaningless, retail company, you will do business with the government at some point. That's not a bad thing, it means your company is actually doing something important.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
olliej 7y ago
Uhh, but unlike other tech companies palantir’s core business model is violating the privacy of individuals to support the governments of many countries. Protesting your employer doing what it has always said it did is a bit rich.
cybersnowflake 7y ago
Palantir: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help punish people, manipulate, and violate their privacy through big data? Engineer: sure! Just as long as I'm not enforcing a national border that's where I draw the line!
- gervase 7y ago
  If you replace "punish" with "control" I think that's an easily-extensible template, because isn't that ultimately tied to the personal ethics of the employee? <Some Company>: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help manipulate and control people by violating their privacy through big data? Engineer: sure! Just as long as it doesn't violate this very specific aspect of my personal ethics! That could easily describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
caymanjim 7y ago
Palantir's entire business is providing data mining and surveillance software to government agencies. ICE is probably the least-morally-reprehensible thing they support. They are deeply involved with DHS, CIA, NSA, all manner of classified agencies. If any of their employees have a problem with ICE, they never belonged there in the first place.
- 1111236112347 7y ago
  > Palantir's entire business is providing data mining and surveillance software to government agencies. Palantir has a number of commercial customers, here's a few examples: https://www.palantir.com/palantir-foundry/impact/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-foundry/impact/
  - nabnob 7y ago
    >Its two main products are Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis, more geeky winks from a company whose Tolkien namesake is a type of magical sphere used by the evil lord Sauron to surveil, trick, and threaten his enemies across Middle Earth. While Palantir Metropolis is pegged to quantitative analysis for Wall Street banks and hedge funds, Gotham (formerly Palantir Government) is designed for the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security customers. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/ https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...
wang_li 7y ago
>It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I really started opposing it. Why would anyone prefer the shittier conditions under Obama than the better conditions under Trump?
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > Why would anyone prefer the shittier conditions under Obama than the better conditions under Trump? Because there are no reasonable standards under which the comparative description in your comment is true.
  - thefunniestpt 7y ago
    the funniest thing in the last few years was watching proggies get all foamy about trump over pictures of border hoppers in cages taken during the obama administration keep pretending!
- bovermyer 7y ago
  Wait, what? Maybe I'm misreading this. Are you suggesting that what ICE is doing is good?
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - wang_li 7y ago
    You mean enforcing the laws of the US and controlling the borders of the country? Yes, that is good. They are dealing with a situation largely created by the people illegally crossing the border. It's crazy to think that any country should maintain 4-star luxury housing sufficient to house the global population just in case. The reality is that the US is not being cruel or harming people. And ICE has upgraded the facilities in the years since the "children in cages" photos started popping up during the Obama administration. It is objectively true that the facilities are better and practices are improved. Are they something I want to live in? No. But on the other hand if people don't want to end up in detention, don't cross illegally. It's easy. Not to mention that something like 30% of the "families" crossing the border have been shown by rapid DNA testing to be unrelated. Are we supposed to let any rando who happened to buy a child free access to the country?
tzakrajs 7y ago
I want to join Palantir just to disrupt their business because Peter Thiel is a scum sucker and deserves the absolute worst workforce. Palantir should be liquidated and the proceeds returned to tax payers.
- dang 7y ago
  Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not ragey unsubstantive comments. They just make this place worse, and we're hoping for better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
dingo_bat 7y ago
Why do people hate enforcing the law? Seems illogical. The only thing that keeps America America is the enforcement of law and order within its borders, and the defense of those borders.
ReptileMan 7y ago
This is a big company profile for palantir with the "attackers" getting less than a paragraph. 60 people out of 2500 is not much and the article didn't mention who are they - so probably low level and easily replacable if they decide to quit or be fired. Those types of articles under the umbrella of "some people on twitter are outraged about something" that give impression of society wide consensus when they are a tiny minority or widespread action are distorting the discourse quite a bit. Also - they wanted Palantir to donate profits from ICE contracts, but they didn't donate their salaries. I wouldn't go after Thiel. The guy has a habbit of winning.
htek 7y ago
That seems... odd? They're fine with the domestic spying, pre-crime profiling based on flimsy evidence, but help with rounding up people for the concentration camps and people suddenly get cold feet.
totoasticot 7y ago
I'm maybe wrong, but I would like to share some ideas. Where does this money is coming from ? I mean, does the whole question isn't a level "above" : why does such entity exists in a democratic gouvernement ? Isn't it showing a deep loophole in the system ? Same idea : how is this entity funded ? Isn't it with US-citizens's taxes ? So, aren't all US-citizens involved in this story as well ? Why would Palantir's employees be more involved than all the persons that allowed the money to be there for Palantir to be funded ? I'm seeing more Palantir as a consequence of a system's failure than its premice. Woild love to discuss about that however.
buttholesurfer 7y ago
SJWs are going to be the fall of everything good.

133 points by Balgair 7y ago

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

prepend 7y ago
Palantir is a software company right and sells tools to ICE? Does someone wearing an Excel shirt make you uncomfortable because ICE uses MSOffice? What about OSS projects like R and Python that also enable ICE to analyze data to find people. Is the expectation that Palantir should not sell software to ICE?
- matchagaucho 7y ago
  The difference is in Pro Services. MS does not send employees from Redmond to help ICE use Excel. Palantir does bundle software and services. Their software is so complex, it is typically Palantir employees building the models and analytics.
  - prepend 7y ago
    MS has professional services and they do send people to ICE to help use Excel. They also have an extensive partner network. Any large software company sells consulting services. I don’t know about Python, but RStudio sells professional services to help with use of R.
    - the-dude 7y ago
      > and they do send people to ICE to help use Excel. source
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  I think the expectation is that Palantir should make lots of money selling software to other people, and then a portion of their profits and employee's salaries is required by law to go to funding ICE anyway. That seems to be what everyone else is okay with.
- SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
  Most enterprise software sales aren’t as low touch as an Excel license, and Palantir is very much on the high touch side of the spectrum. When Palantir sells software to a large government agency, that means squads of Palantir employees go to the government agency and help them run it, and that consulting effort is a huge component of what the customer is paying for. Having said that, some people do think Microsoft should refuse to sell to ICE too.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- analogist 7y ago
  So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer?
  - navigatesol 7y ago
    >So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer? No, can you explain it? It sounds like a way to justify to yourself that "those people are bad", but you're "just doing your job". Are you principled about who you do business with, or not?
  - nailer 7y ago
    I might be really uneducated here - I'm not American. All I know about ICE is that they're immigration and customs enforcement - they're basically the US's border force. The quality of the conditions they keep migrants in is poor, and has been for years. OK. Why is that worthy of a boycott? Your democratically elected governments create the laws, and determine the funding for things like beds and toys etc. Boycotts in some cases may make those conditions worse instead of better. There will always need to be a border force. Wouldn't it be better to focus on improving conditions, increasing funding, and stopping people from crossing the border in the first place?
    - SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
      ICE isn't the border force. All border security operations, stopping people from crossing and customs inspections and such, are done by a different agency called CBP.
      - nailer 7y ago
        OK. Why not change the law, if you want to make undocumented migration legal?
        SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
        Most people trying to boycott ICE don't think undocumented migration should be legal. They just don't think ICE is a good agency. (Again, ICE is not the only agency responsible for undocumented migration, so undocumented migration isn't automatically legal if they can't do their job.)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- _bxg1 7y ago
  The expectation is that companies like Palantir should not exist at all. Their core business is surveilling innocent people en masse.
  - prepend 7y ago
    That is not their core business. Their core business is data analysis. If I remember from some tech book, they were spun out from the fraud department in PayPal detecting fraudulent transactions and then selling services to FBI. I became familiar with them through their disease prevention activities trying to evaluate bug transmissions and food borne diseases. Certainly, you can analyze innocent people, but it’s not like they are a face recognition camera company or something. I’m not employed by Palantir and not a fan or anything, but am surprised at how mischaracterized they seem to be.
    - notJim 7y ago
      > Their core business is data analysis. This is like saying Raytheon's core business is antennas. Yes, Palantir does data analysis, specifically for ICE, the military and the police.
      - prepend 7y ago
        Palantir is private so hard to know revenue breakdown. But hard to believe that over 50% of their revenue (what I would consider core) comes from ICE, military and police. I found this article [0] from 2018 that said half of its $1B in revenue comes from government and the other half from corporate. So if every penny of government work comes from ICE and ICE-likes maybe that’s core. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-16/palantir-posted-nearly-1-billion-in-2018-sales-executive-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-16/palantir-...
        tzakrajs 7y ago
        What if the other corporations they serve are subcontracted by LEO, ICE and CBP? Palantir is deeply in cahoots with CBP/ICE and Peter Thiel (isn't even a US Citizen so I can't even call him a traitor, but) is an enemy of the American people. Fuck ICE, Fuck Palantir, Fuck Peter Thiel
- rtkwe 7y ago
  Is it not easy to see that there's a moral space between creating a tool that can be used for something you dislike (basically all software falls into this category) and working specifically for a company making software that will explicitly be used for something you dislike?
michaelt 7y ago
A great many expansions to the power of the state have been justified with the argument "this is to fight terror and child abuse" Perhaps they signed up naively imagining they were working on a tool that would be used for that and nothing else?
- creaghpatr 7y ago
  It's definitely a weird company to work for if you don't believe in enforcing laws, or only partial enforcement of laws; especially border laws.
  - inflatableDodo 7y ago
    Well, the owner presumably doesn't think that most laws currently on the books should be enforced, unless I have missed something regarding right wing libertarianism.
  - fzeroracer 7y ago
    Or maybe the fact that ICE has been overabusing their authority to also detain US citizens for weeks at a time despite providing evidence of their citizenship has got people wondering if they're the baddies. In addition to, you know, the horrible treatment of asylum seekers incl. things such as not providing flu vaccines.
    - immaway 7y ago
      Detainees are given provided food, shelter and medical treatment. Overcrowding can happen at time when you have a 1000 people at a time cross in a day at a single point. There are no cloud facilities. What is your alternative?
CydeWeys 7y ago
I interviewed with Palantir maybe seven years ago (didn't get the job) and definitely wasn't aware at the time that they were doing this kind of work, if they even were back then. And had I known they were doing CBP stuff, I may have been OK with it under Obama even. It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I really started opposing it.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- 1111236112347 7y ago
  The article is about work with HSI, not CBP. The scope of work that HSI does is much broader, here's a quote from wikipedia about it: HSI special agents investigate violations of more than 400 U.S. laws that threaten the national security of the United States such as counter-proliferation and export violations, human rights violations/war crimes, human smuggling, art theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling and trafficking, arms trafficking, document and benefit fraud, the manufacturing and sale of counterfeit immigration and identity documents, transnational gangs, financial crimes including money laundering and bulk cash smuggling, trade-based money laundering (including trade finance and Kimberley Process investigations), computer crime, including child exploitation, intellectual property rights/trade fraud, import/export enforcement, trafficking of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and other merchandise, mass-marketing fraud, and international Cultural Property and Antiquities crimes.
- vinniejames 7y ago
  Albert Einstein said the same thing about the Bomb, after we dropped it
- sremani 7y ago
  >> concentration-campy Willful lack of proportion to score political karma points.
- basseq 7y ago
  Counter-anecdote: I interviewed with Palatir 6.5 years ago (also didn't get the job) and was absolutely made aware that a core part of their business was in law enforcement at both the Federal and State level.
qazpot 7y ago
I am assuming ICE is "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement". I am not from USA but why every comment here is implying ICE to be some evil thing.
- throwawaytoday5 7y ago
  ICE is a recent phenomenon whose creation was only due to 9/11 attacks. Prior everything they did was handled by other organizations more effectively.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Because they do stuff like this https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/border-patrol-agent-detains-women-speaking-spanish-montana-gas-station-n876096 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/border-patrol-agent-deta...
  - m0zg 7y ago
    Fresh off the Resolute desk: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-ends-family-separation https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/trump-...
    - openasocket 7y ago
      They could also let asylum seekers go, and allow them to live in the United States pending a hearing. That's what we've been doing until this administration. These aren't random people off the street, these are people with valid claims of asylum who have passed the credible fear interview administered by CBP. Almost all of them will stay in contact with the courts and go to all their appointments. The editorial also neglects to mention that our facilities are greatly over capacity, that this change will make that much much worse, and that thanks to the backlog of immigration cases these families would have to be in these facilities for 5 years or more. To say nothing of the abuses and poor conditions. And, once again, these families seeking asylum have not committed any crime, they have done nothing illegal.
      - 7y ago
sp332 7y ago
The ICE thing has gotten dramatically worse recently. Accepting a certain level of abuse of power in other LE agencies doesn't necessarily mean they're OK with, say, actively pushing back against a DoJ settlement so they can hold children in detention indefinitely, etc.
- wpietri 7y ago
  Exactly. I think it's reasonable (although perhaps naive) for people to have a sunny view of law enforcement. Especially when, like me, they're white men from middle-class backgrounds; I've never had a bad experience with law enforcement, despite having done some stupendously dumb-ass things. But even though I'm predisposed to view cops favorably, the stuff with ICE is shocking to me. America has a big chunk of history [1] where ethnic cleansing was common and ignored or even supported by police [2]. It's hard for me not to see ICE's aggressive dehumanization of non-white migrants as a resurgence of that. So I'm not surprised that even at Palantir people are objecting. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio... [2] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-American/dp/0743294483 https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
  - creaghpatr 7y ago
    Or, if Mexican heroin killed multiple people you know, you have a not-sunny view of illegal immigrants and unsecured borders. Just because you attribute your own ignorance to the color of your skin, doesn't mean others do.
    - vkou 7y ago
      It's not illegal to seek asylum.
      - creaghpatr 7y ago
        Likewise, it's not illegal to enforce the law, as created by Congress.
mandevil 7y ago
Maybe I'm the weird one, but who would wear a t-shirt from your previous company to work at your current company? That just seems to send all the wrong signals.
- dekhn 7y ago
  I do this all the time and nobody cares.
- tjr225 7y ago
  Doesn't seem that weird to me. Since landing in tech I haven't had to buy a single t-shirt- I just wear whatever they hand out.
- AftHurrahWinch 7y ago
  (stops wearing my JPL t-shirt to work)
- master-litty 7y ago
  I find it socially acceptable. It's quite normal to jump from one tech company to another, and wearing a t-shirt from a previous employer is an artifact of that lifestyle. My hot take: I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride.
  - CiPHPerCoder 7y ago
    > I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride. Pride here isn't a good thing.
    - master-litty 7y ago
      To each their own. Pride in my decisions and my hard work is an important part of my self esteem.
- 7y ago
bubblethink 7y ago
>but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? As long as there is sufficient plausible deniability, people will sign up for anything. In the tech domain, this goes back to at least WW2 with IBM selling punch card machines to Germany.
tempsy 7y ago
I also don't understand this. Seems like if you were willing to work for Palantir before this made news you'd have understood that surveillance tech to police depts, corporations, etc. is exactly what the company sells/enables. I did have a recruiter reach out a long time ago and remember they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostitution rings.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  I wonder if Palantir could help the FBI get a bead on Ghislaine Maxwell. Hahah, just kidding, Palantir is for chasing down the hoi polloi, not the madams and child abducters who service the country's elite (who after all probably give Palantir a lot of its contracts).
- leggomylibro 7y ago
  And I once had a recruiter from Axon talk about how body cameras could potentially help to hold officers accountable. But it's good to always ask this question of any prospective employer: "who are [y]our customers?" The customers are the ones who pay the company, and unless you're applying to work for a monopoly, they're the ones who ultimately call the shots.
- jakear 7y ago
  I had a recruiter reach out, and I actually played along with their interview process, but at every step of the way I’d inquire about the company’s ethics. Nailed all the tech questions, but in the end did not get an offer. Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions. My money is on the latter. In "Winners Take All" Anand Giridharadas has a really good sentence where he points out how major employers usually try to find entry level hires who possess an ideal degree of intelligence and impressionability. The latter is just as important for them as the former. They want people they can mold to think and behave according to the values of the company. In my personal experience, this is also why companies and industries that tend to have a lot of "lifers" are also often fairly toxic places to work. The people who came up and through the norms of the organization don't actually learn how to interact with normal people who don't buy into their idiosyncratic nonsense, don't seem to understand the concept of "standards" or "best practices," and often the idea that people might leave if they don't like how things are being done just doesn't cross their minds. So they take liberties with each other they shouldn't and do a poor job of forming consensus, actually caring about morale, or treating each other with professionalism or respect. When people do leave, the narrative is usually framed as if they were too weak or soft to handle the rigorous and exacting standards of the company/team/manager rather than thinking that maybe thing are being run badly.
cat199 7y ago
> Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission nope - just WaPo's use of selective editorial bias to paint problems endemic to both parties & us society in general to partisan ends.
- CompanionCuuube 7y ago
  On one hand, I am grateful for this comment. But on the other hand, I know that it is a low effort comment that you are likely able to use on many a WaPo article.
microtherion 7y ago
> what exactly did they think they were signing up for? It appears they're having an "Are we the Baddies?" moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
kj98uo 7y ago
I thought you work remotely based on your past comments??
mcintyre1994 7y ago
I’ve brought up my discomfort with Palantir to a recruiter a while ago and they said I’d be working with businesses trying to get set up with Palantir analytics systems. I asked if the role was distinct from one that might work with LEO and of course it’s not, so who knows how true that really is - I’m skeptical.
astine 7y ago
There's a difference between supporting law enforcement generally and supporting specific law enforcement efforts. I personally want my local law enforcement to be fast and effective because I want them to keep me safe from crime, but I don't want them to violate my or other people's rights in the process of keeping me safe from crime. So, in that vein, I might not object to police gaining a specific new tool but I would object if I found out that the police were misusing it somehow. The employees objecting to Palantir's work with ICE are probably not objecting to cooperation with border enforcement on the principle that border enforcement is immoral generally, but that recent activities by border enforcement are immoral. If it weren't for the internment camps at the border, we probably wouldn't be hearing about this. There's a broader discussion about the 4th ammendment and Palantir's effect there, but I don't think that this particular protest is about that.
alkibiades 7y ago
seeing a t shirt makes you uncomfortable?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
forgottenpass 7y ago
>but what exactly did they think they were signing up for? The last 15 years of big "tech" have been a giant collective rationalization that building mass surveillance is innocuous. They think they're singing up to enable palatable use cases of collecting and analyzing that data, and nothing bad will ever happen. Just the same as anyone singing up to work at google/facebook/etc...

_bxg1 7y ago

The company is literally named after the magic orb that Sauron uses to surveil Middle-Earth. I don't know what you expected.

_bxg1 7y ago
To be clear: I also think that what Palantir is doing is deplorable. I just think that if you apply there, it's pretty obvious what you're signing up for.
prepend 7y ago
It’s not the Palantir that are bad, but Sauron and Saruman. They were created by elves for useful purposes. Possibly the Palantir saved middle earth when Aragorn used it to scry events leading up to the final battles.
- AndrewBissell 7y ago
  I guess this explains the "Defend the Shire" shirts I see Palantir employees wear sometimes. Always thought the idea they're on the side of the pastoral, mind-their-own-business Hobbits was one of the most absurd misconceptions of their purpose of any company in Silicon Valley, and that's really saying something.
  - prepend 7y ago
    That’s pretty funny, I’ve never heard of that shirt. I just remembered the Palantir as the coolest thing ever when I was 8 and read about it. Years later learning someone named that company that made sense to me before I had any idea what they did. Was actually kind of let down because I was expecting some sort of AI/ knowledge company.
  - alistairSH 7y ago
    Oh. Wow. That is insane. Photo for reference: https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/editorial/2016/01/11/103295500-Untitled-2.530x298.jpg?v=1452536513 https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/edit...

kd3 7y ago

It's not just ICE but the entire government that is a problem. I personally stopped accepting any work from any government a few years ago. Once you realize what government is, there's no going back. "The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psychopath]. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." - Albert J. Nock in “Our Enemy, The State”

pjc50 7y ago
We should not allow the observation that some states collapse into lawlessness to turn into a blind "government is bad" attitude that ends with people being held hostage by government-sized private companies. The state can be lawless, but escaping lawlessness is impossible without the efforts of a state.
- kd3 7y ago
  Well it's more the fact that government exists by the use of force and coercion, which makes it a violent and basically terrorist organization. And that is so dispite having laws. Laws != morality.
duqd_ 7y ago
It makes me sad that so many people are unwilling to engage with this position. Anarchism is unreasonably vilified imo.
- frenchyatwork 7y ago
  A big problem with anarchy is that it's really complicated and is usually either misunderstood by the proponent or the listeners. Anarchy is about levelling the playing field and reducing the power that the most powerful structures have in our society. The problem of removing power structures in institutions, is that they will naturally get replaced by other ones, and the replacements are often as authoritarian as the originals. In the US, it's popular to think that you can somehow replace elected government (where power is somewhat dependant on votes, and somewhat dependent on advertising budgets/capital) with business (where power is dependent entirely on capital), and that somehow this is more "anarchist". This is a naive idea.

burger_moon 7y ago

It's kinda interesting how people are just now realizing that all the big tech companies are government contractors and not this imaginary utopia of 'making the world a better place' they were sold on. Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all US gov't contractors. It's hilariously ironic seeing the political views of the employees suddenly clashing with their employers views of making money as if it's a new thing.

burtonator 7y ago
This isn't a new debate though... My grandfather started a company which was a smaller player in the military contracting space. It was somewhat large and his argument was that he was always 'helping democracy' but he was willfully blind IMO. It's always going to be a bit fuzzy but it's another thing entirely when the organization you're selling to is just flat out evil.
riku_iki 7y ago
Google and Amazon get very marginal portion of their revenue from government, and reputation risks for main revenue sources likely discourage them in participation in shady activities with government.
jbob2000 7y ago
Every tech company I've ever worked for has done a project, in some way, with the government. I worked for a small healthcare startup of 5 developers, we had government contracts. I worked for a medium sized dropbox-like startup, we had government contracts. Unless you're some dinky, meaningless, retail company, you will do business with the government at some point. That's not a bad thing, it means your company is actually doing something important.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

olliej 7y ago

Uhh, but unlike other tech companies palantir’s core business model is violating the privacy of individuals to support the governments of many countries. Protesting your employer doing what it has always said it did is a bit rich.

cybersnowflake 7y ago

Palantir: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help punish people, manipulate, and violate their privacy through big data? Engineer: sure! Just as long as I'm not enforcing a national border that's where I draw the line!

gervase 7y ago
If you replace "punish" with "control" I think that's an easily-extensible template, because isn't that ultimately tied to the personal ethics of the employee? <Some Company>: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help manipulate and control people by violating their privacy through big data? Engineer: sure! Just as long as it doesn't violate this very specific aspect of my personal ethics! That could easily describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

caymanjim 7y ago

Palantir's entire business is providing data mining and surveillance software to government agencies. ICE is probably the least-morally-reprehensible thing they support. They are deeply involved with DHS, CIA, NSA, all manner of classified agencies. If any of their employees have a problem with ICE, they never belonged there in the first place.

1111236112347 7y ago
> Palantir's entire business is providing data mining and surveillance software to government agencies. Palantir has a number of commercial customers, here's a few examples: https://www.palantir.com/palantir-foundry/impact/ https://www.palantir.com/palantir-foundry/impact/
- nabnob 7y ago
  >Its two main products are Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis, more geeky winks from a company whose Tolkien namesake is a type of magical sphere used by the evil lord Sauron to surveil, trick, and threaten his enemies across Middle Earth. While Palantir Metropolis is pegged to quantitative analysis for Wall Street banks and hedge funds, Gotham (formerly Palantir Government) is designed for the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security customers. https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palantir-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-the-whole-world/ https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

wang_li 7y ago

>It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I really started opposing it. Why would anyone prefer the shittier conditions under Obama than the better conditions under Trump?

dragonwriter 7y ago
> Why would anyone prefer the shittier conditions under Obama than the better conditions under Trump? Because there are no reasonable standards under which the comparative description in your comment is true.
- thefunniestpt 7y ago
  the funniest thing in the last few years was watching proggies get all foamy about trump over pictures of border hoppers in cages taken during the obama administration keep pretending!
bovermyer 7y ago
Wait, what? Maybe I'm misreading this. Are you suggesting that what ICE is doing is good?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- wang_li 7y ago
  You mean enforcing the laws of the US and controlling the borders of the country? Yes, that is good. They are dealing with a situation largely created by the people illegally crossing the border. It's crazy to think that any country should maintain 4-star luxury housing sufficient to house the global population just in case. The reality is that the US is not being cruel or harming people. And ICE has upgraded the facilities in the years since the "children in cages" photos started popping up during the Obama administration. It is objectively true that the facilities are better and practices are improved. Are they something I want to live in? No. But on the other hand if people don't want to end up in detention, don't cross illegally. It's easy. Not to mention that something like 30% of the "families" crossing the border have been shown by rapid DNA testing to be unrelated. Are we supposed to let any rando who happened to buy a child free access to the country?

tzakrajs 7y ago

I want to join Palantir just to disrupt their business because Peter Thiel is a scum sucker and deserves the absolute worst workforce. Palantir should be liquidated and the proceeds returned to tax payers.

dang 7y ago
Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not ragey unsubstantive comments. They just make this place worse, and we're hoping for better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

dingo_bat 7y ago

Why do people hate enforcing the law? Seems illogical. The only thing that keeps America America is the enforcement of law and order within its borders, and the defense of those borders.

ReptileMan 7y ago

This is a big company profile for palantir with the "attackers" getting less than a paragraph. 60 people out of 2500 is not much and the article didn't mention who are they - so probably low level and easily replacable if they decide to quit or be fired. Those types of articles under the umbrella of "some people on twitter are outraged about something" that give impression of society wide consensus when they are a tiny minority or widespread action are distorting the discourse quite a bit. Also - they wanted Palantir to donate profits from ICE contracts, but they didn't donate their salaries. I wouldn't go after Thiel. The guy has a habbit of winning.

htek 7y ago

That seems... odd? They're fine with the domestic spying, pre-crime profiling based on flimsy evidence, but help with rounding up people for the concentration camps and people suddenly get cold feet.

totoasticot 7y ago

I'm maybe wrong, but I would like to share some ideas. Where does this money is coming from ? I mean, does the whole question isn't a level "above" : why does such entity exists in a democratic gouvernement ? Isn't it showing a deep loophole in the system ? Same idea : how is this entity funded ? Isn't it with US-citizens's taxes ? So, aren't all US-citizens involved in this story as well ? Why would Palantir's employees be more involved than all the persons that allowed the money to be there for Palantir to be funded ? I'm seeing more Palantir as a consequence of a system's failure than its premice. Woild love to discuss about that however.

buttholesurfer 7y ago

SJWs are going to be the fall of everything good.