10 ms·

Palantir’s God’s-Eye View of Afghanistan

93 points by bathtub365 6y ago

hshshs2 6y ago
this type of surveillance and hair trigger execution within another country is absurd, the US goes way too far. Imagine if another country had this role here? of course we’d be terrorists
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Whenever such surveillance and 429'ing is mentioned in the context of China-Uighur affairs, it's an outrage. But when it's the West in Afghanistan, it's page 37 news.
  - hshshs2 6y ago
    Exactly, off the top of my head I’m aware of the fact that the US has accidentally bombed a hospital and a wedding party... but it’s background news. Bring it up to the average american and they might feel uncomfortable or explain it away... but tell them you think soldiers are murderers and many will immediately get upset. We’re a brainwashed population, i’m aware of it myself and still experience these biases.
    - stuckindider 6y ago
      The media is the propaganda division of the congressional military industrial complex.
    - s1artibartfast 6y ago
      Ill bite, calling average soldiers murdersers is equivalent to calling american taxpayers or voters murderers. I think there is some hypocracy in doing so while simultaneously paying for the bombs voteing and for the people who give the order. The buck stops with the american people, and only they have the power to stop it.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
Robotbeat 6y ago
It’s not without some irony that a company named after a questionable magic ball from Lord of the Rings helps process data from what can most concisely be described as an Eye of Sauron over villages in Afghanistan.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Some? It's about as subtle as a Bond villain.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  Ironic, or just taking the crystal ball concept literal?
  - Robotbeat 6y ago
    Nominative determinism is such a funny thing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
    - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
      This is not nominative determinism. Per your link, nominative determinism is the theory that influence occurs after the name is coined. Palantir was very intentional in picking the name before they even started, because it aligned with what they were trying to produce. Additionally, nominative determinism is typically reserved for human names, not business entities. I'd argue this is more a case of an aptronym, mentioned in the second paragraph of the wiki entry you referenced. "Nominative determinism differs from the related concept aptronym, and its synonyms aptonym, namephreak, and Perfect Fit Last Name (captured by the Latin phrase nomen est omen 'the name is a sign'), in that it focuses on causality. Aptronym merely means the name is fitting, without saying anything about why it has come to fit."
      - Robotbeat 6y ago
        You’re right. Aptronym.
eplanit 6y ago
Tl;dr: The military hired a software company to help process surveillance data from a war zone. Is everyone is still afraid of Palantir?
- hprotagonist 6y ago
  Afraid? hardly. Fairly disgusted? for years now.
  - samstave 6y ago
    Exactly. I fucking dislike palantir, its a douchebag of a company
    - Shivetya 6y ago
      Why? For something they or their top level staff did or for the work they perform? If its for the work they perform they are just one of many. I do admit to not following them as a company. My concern is the government using this technology or similar within our borders without incredible oversight and regulation
      - La1n 6y ago
        >If its for the work they perform they are just one of many. Sure, but that counts for almost anything you can use to like or dislike something or someone, so it's not really useful to bring up.
      - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
        So because other entities perform a similar subset of work means we can't be disgusted with Palantir?
    - eternalsculptor 6y ago
      It is regrettable that Hacker News has devolved into the sort of knee jerk outrage that you find on websites like Reddit.
chmod775 6y ago
And yet another article in which the definition of terrorist appears to be "an enemy Muslim". We'll soon need a new word for actual terrorists.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  At least they're described as "enemies" instead of "terrorists" which seems to have become an outlaw status that takes them outside the protection of the Geneva convention (for warfare, prisoners of war, etc).
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  QAnon?
- Veen 6y ago
  How else would you describe a person whose job is to plant explosive devices in the street. 80 percent of the people killed by IEDs in the last decade were civillians (over 130,000). https://reliefweb.int/report/world/decade-global-ied-harm-reviewed https://reliefweb.int/report/world/decade-global-ied-harm-re...
  - La1n 6y ago
    90% of drone strikes kill unintended people, are drone operators terrorists? https://www.amnesty.org.uk/thank-you-us-deadly-drones https://www.amnesty.org.uk/thank-you-us-deadly-drones
    - Veen 6y ago
      My cat likes acorns. Is she a squirrel?
      - chmod775 6y ago
        No. Which is the whole point GP was trying to make. Your cat isn't a squirrel, drone operators aren't terrorists, and neither are the Taliban fighters who plant IEDs targeting combatants. I believe the idiom you were actually looking for was "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." At least that might've supported your argument.
tra3 6y ago
Interesting read. How high tech is used in the middle east to track and identify terrorists and how this tech is becoming more widespread domestically. Some choice quotes below. Must be super boring: > Kevin spent hours a day, seven days a week watching all kinds of people go about their lives, with the goal of separating out the insurgents from the civilians. Terrifying: > These are actions that allow for that individual to be moved out of civilian status and into insurgent status—to be targeted and killed legally according to army rules of engagement. > Because we know what you did, we think we know what you are going to do next. Powerpoint. Also terrifying. > The 429 package, which allows an insurgent to be killed in an air strike, must meet the legal requirements. The full-motion video gets snapshotted as evidence. While this is going on, the PGSS operator quickly generates a PowerPoint containing all the data, which goes to the S2. The S2 quickly reviews that, then sends the information to the battle captain. > If there’s not air support available, then the person of interest remains marked for death in the system. “The moment there is a target of opportunity to take him out, I call it in. I don’t have to go back through the approving process,” Kevin says. “The 429 package stands. That’s why it’s called a Target of Opportunity. When you have the opportunity, you strike the target.” You kill the man.
- nickelcitymario 6y ago
  The reference to Powerpoint caught me off guard too, if only because of how informal that is. "Should we kill him?" "I dunno, where's the slide deck? Are the slides convincing?" ...that just seems like an absolutely terrible way to decide between life and death. I know that on the one hand we're just talking about a file format, and the data has to exchange hands somehow. But it bothers me that the same tool I use to convince my bosses to, say, pay for a monthly subscription, is also being used by someone else to convince their bosses to approve killing human beings. Perhaps the reason this bugs me is it breaks the illusion of expertise and sophistication. It proves, once again, that people are just people, no matter what job functions they happen to have. (Also: It raises certain questions. Like: Is a person more or less likely to be killed if their powerpoint deck is ugly? Does typography impact these decisions?)
  - suprfsat 6y ago
lrvick 6y ago
Such power may be used largely for good today with minimal false positives, but "the greater good" thinking is what drives most villains in fiction. Governments using private companies to decide who deserves to die based on ML algorithms without judge or jury is morally reprehensible. Full stop. They live in another country so they don't deserve the same rights we superior americans do, right? This behavior only gets to continue to happen because of "we require secrecy to do our work" excuses which are code for "we know the public that indirectly funds us would not approve" I grew up going on jobs stalking people with my private investigator father who mostly worked fraud cases for insurance companies. Public places, license plates, collecting evidence of an injured person walking just fine... then prosecutors can use that evidence in court where it belongs. I am not saying this tech should not exist, or can't be used to serve justice in the right context. I am saying those with that kind of power must have maximum transparency and a high level of accountability. I think the NSA does important work too, but power in secrecy is a breeding ground for "the greater good" thinking. It is so easy to overstep and do things like tap lines to Google datacenters to spy on private citizens with no evidence it has ever stopped a single terrorist attack. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, who took power? The one with the most access to signals intelligence. Now that country is a surveillance state dictatorship disguised as a democracy. The US keeps trending this way too recently. Who will be the Snowden of Palintir to give it the public scrutiny required to make sure their powers stay in reasonable bounds? If a Palantir employee is reading this, maybe it could be you.
- peruvian 6y ago
  > They live in another country so they don't deserve the same rights we superior americans do, right? It goes beyond that. People don't care Palantir tried to do predictive policing via ML in the US because the suspected criminals were poor POC.
  - cwwc 6y ago
    This may be true - but while at the SEC I used Palantir extensively on finance people (usually WASPS in the upper echelons). Was it used in a different way? Yes, likely. But still - it isn't limited to policing and war.
pepicon 6y ago
Too bad that the article doesn't dive into what kind of transparency (if any) the Military allows entities to analyze such decisions to kill people. Anyone know any source?
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  Why would they allow transparency on such a topic? The only thing it will do is allow these villagers to evade the system and go on with their lives, as well as engender backlash at home because of how flimsy the process is.
covidthrowaway 6y ago
Posting from a throwaway: I’ve been doing work in the realm of Covid for basically the last year. Part of that privilege is access to HHS Protect, as managed by Palantir. Just to soothe some unknowns, Covid surveillance is nothing like the kind of military surveillance described in this article. There is no personally identifiable data and certainly no effort to trace individuals with Covid. The actual data inside HHS protect is not much more specific than what is publicly available. Covid tests/cases/deaths by county, locations of long term care facilities, pharmacies, hospitals. Data on supplies, hospitalizations, staffing. Demographic data comes straight from Census data, also still aggregated. In addressing Covid, I often wish we had better data. Google and Apple’s earlier plan to anonymously contact trace is far more “creepy” than anything the federal government currently has. As you’ll notice, that tech got basically no traction. Contact tracing has largely been a failure in the US, but that’s a whole other story. Do you really think that Covid would have hit the US as intensely as it did if we had military level surveillance? I don’t. Many points of inaction are due to unclear or insufficient data. On the other hand, the raw data available to Google, Apple, Facebook and others is insane to me. Your phone is your tracking device. These companies have it as a unique identifier and most definitely track a large number of users in an individually identifiable way. The carriers do this as well. I absolutely agree that we need refrain allowing this technology to be used in domestic policing, but in terms of war I see it a net positive. Data drives insight which drives action. Palantir just happened to build one of the best platforms to do this. (You may disagree with any of the above, that is fine)
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I more or less agree. I worked on the prior generation of projects like this. The use case at the time was tracking particular vehicles and dismounts in urban environments. We all knew the bad guys and tin pot dictators would love something like what we had. But we also knew that the guys manning the checkpoints really liked being able to know in advance which direction it was prudent to have the business end of the tank pointing in case that car of questionable provenance makes a run for it. The cat's out of the bag. Now it's up to us what we do with it (and what we tolerate the government doing with it).
- maxerickson 6y ago
taywrobel 6y ago
Having worked at Palantir in the past, I’d like to again take the opportunity to let everyone know what it is they actually do, because they really aren’t this all-seeing boogeyman of tech that everyone enjoys making them out to be (such rumors do bolster their reputation, however, so they aren’t likely to correct them, and paranoid responses like some here just lend them more credence). They build a federated search engine with a simple UI to make it accessible to a non-technical audience. That’s it. Have a whole lot of data in different databases/data lakes? Palantir will let you search across all of it quickly and simply. They don’t source the data, they even hold the data, they install their servers on premise with where the data is already being stored, and import it. It’s a specialized Google with very robust and configurable access controls that you can buy and run because you’ve collected more data than you know what to do with. Now you may still be legitimately unhappy with them because of who they work with or the implication of making those entities more efficient in processing data, but given that HN is a technical audience I’d really hope that we can get over this trend of thinking Palantir has some magical data summoning abilities.
- tweetle_beetle 6y ago
  With great power comes great responsibility, including moral. The isn't the first time technology can have far reaching positive and negative applications, and it certainly won't be the last. Palantir has made commercial choices that are hard to stomach and they should have to deal with being considered a boogeyman of tech, even it's not the technology's "fault". It may not be "all-seeing" but it appears to be happy to look at any data for any reason. > In 1937 IBM's tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process huge amounts of data. Its clients included the U.S. Government, during its first effort to maintain the employment records for 26 million people pursuant to the Social Security Act, and Hitler's Third Reich, for the tracking of Jews and other persecuted groups, largely through the German subsidiary Dehomag. The social security-related business gave an 81% increase in revenue from 1935 to 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
    The IBM example gets brought up a lot, but the real solution to the Nazis was nation states going to war against them and defeating them . In a counterfactual world where IBM did not sell them the equipment, the Nazis still would have figured out a way to mass murder people. The Japanese and Stalin and Mao did not have access to IBM tech, but they still mass murdered people.
cproctor 6y ago
The blimp operator, Kevin, says, “The idea was, do not let anyone know we exist.” This reminds me of Zuboff's emphasis in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" on keeping surveillance secret, both to minimize backlash and because people act differently when they are aware of being watched, which reduces the value of the surveillance for modeling behavior. This makes me hopeful for critical computing education which aims to make youth aware of the ways their tech watches them.
sjg007 6y ago
What is really interesting about this article is the compartmentalization of function and that this analyst was able to rise above siloization to prevent a killing based on mistaken identity. That's a critically important role and I think an apt description of knowledge work today. And it has implications for machine learning and predictive analytics. Here the wrong guy was targeted based on the purple hat which was a sensor processing error based on early light levels. While integrating all of this data is important and building machine learning models that can pick up specific markers is important, it is clear that you need some type of overall exception processing framework to confirm in this case positive id. We have a similar problem already with law enforcement no knock warrants.
- Jugurtha 6y ago
  One of the most frequent question we ask our clients is "What's the cost of a false [positive/negative]?" and "How do we know a prediction is correct?". We work with them to see the whole system and outcomes of our predictions, down to the human actions. For example, in a project where failing to predict something would result in costs up to $100 million and wasting two months, and catastrophic consequences, but a false positive would result in an engineer waking up to check, it is acceptable to have false positives. Yes, it may be inconvenient, but compared to having nothing and the engineers telling you it's okay to bother them because one of catastrophic consequences is they may lose their life, the system can cry wolf. In other projects, not so much. And in other projects, you're not dealing with consequences of that magnitude.
arized 6y ago
> “The fact that there’s other moves afoot to actually use Palantir in the United States, I think that’s very, very bad, because of the type of 360 [degree] metrics that are collected,” Kevin warns. So, he is happy to spy on another country's citizens, from within their own country, but he draws the line at it being done back home. Hypocrisy.
smokefoot 6y ago
The fact that palantir is still able to cultivate this much press coverage and phony mystique is a testament to their PR budget. Logic also had a story about palantir this quarter. What I found most remarkable about that article is that the UI hasn’t changed in a decade! What looked edgy ten years ago now looks cheesy as hell. I don’t know how the internals have changed over that time, but at that time, palantir was an entity resolver and a search engine. They also sold and continue to sell a ton of consulting services at mid-tier rates. In that sense their biggest competitor is... Booz Allen although they’d never admit it. BAH at least makes a profit.

93 points by bathtub365 6y ago

this type of surveillance and hair trigger execution within another country is absurd, the US goes way too far. Imagine if another country had this role here? of course we’d be terrorists

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Whenever such surveillance and 429'ing is mentioned in the context of China-Uighur affairs, it's an outrage. But when it's the West in Afghanistan, it's page 37 news.
- hshshs2 6y ago
  Exactly, off the top of my head I’m aware of the fact that the US has accidentally bombed a hospital and a wedding party... but it’s background news. Bring it up to the average american and they might feel uncomfortable or explain it away... but tell them you think soldiers are murderers and many will immediately get upset. We’re a brainwashed population, i’m aware of it myself and still experience these biases.
  - stuckindider 6y ago
    The media is the propaganda division of the congressional military industrial complex.
  - s1artibartfast 6y ago
    Ill bite, calling average soldiers murdersers is equivalent to calling american taxpayers or voters murderers. I think there is some hypocracy in doing so while simultaneously paying for the bombs voteing and for the people who give the order. The buck stops with the american people, and only they have the power to stop it.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

Robotbeat 6y ago

It’s not without some irony that a company named after a questionable magic ball from Lord of the Rings helps process data from what can most concisely be described as an Eye of Sauron over villages in Afghanistan.

nerdponx 6y ago
Some? It's about as subtle as a Bond villain.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
Ironic, or just taking the crystal ball concept literal?
- Robotbeat 6y ago
  Nominative determinism is such a funny thing... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
  - ThisIsTheWay 6y ago
    This is not nominative determinism. Per your link, nominative determinism is the theory that influence occurs after the name is coined. Palantir was very intentional in picking the name before they even started, because it aligned with what they were trying to produce. Additionally, nominative determinism is typically reserved for human names, not business entities. I'd argue this is more a case of an aptronym, mentioned in the second paragraph of the wiki entry you referenced. "Nominative determinism differs from the related concept aptronym, and its synonyms aptonym, namephreak, and Perfect Fit Last Name (captured by the Latin phrase nomen est omen 'the name is a sign'), in that it focuses on causality. Aptronym merely means the name is fitting, without saying anything about why it has come to fit."
    - Robotbeat 6y ago
      You’re right. Aptronym.

eplanit 6y ago

Tl;dr: The military hired a software company to help process surveillance data from a war zone. Is everyone is still afraid of Palantir?

hprotagonist 6y ago
Afraid? hardly. Fairly disgusted? for years now.
- samstave 6y ago
  Exactly. I fucking dislike palantir, its a douchebag of a company
  - Shivetya 6y ago
    Why? For something they or their top level staff did or for the work they perform? If its for the work they perform they are just one of many. I do admit to not following them as a company. My concern is the government using this technology or similar within our borders without incredible oversight and regulation
    - La1n 6y ago
      >If its for the work they perform they are just one of many. Sure, but that counts for almost anything you can use to like or dislike something or someone, so it's not really useful to bring up.
    - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
      So because other entities perform a similar subset of work means we can't be disgusted with Palantir?
  - eternalsculptor 6y ago
    It is regrettable that Hacker News has devolved into the sort of knee jerk outrage that you find on websites like Reddit.

chmod775 6y ago

And yet another article in which the definition of terrorist appears to be "an enemy Muslim". We'll soon need a new word for actual terrorists.

Cthulhu_ 6y ago
At least they're described as "enemies" instead of "terrorists" which seems to have become an outlaw status that takes them outside the protection of the Geneva convention (for warfare, prisoners of war, etc).
gameswithgo 6y ago
QAnon?
Veen 6y ago
How else would you describe a person whose job is to plant explosive devices in the street. 80 percent of the people killed by IEDs in the last decade were civillians (over 130,000). https://reliefweb.int/report/world/decade-global-ied-harm-reviewed https://reliefweb.int/report/world/decade-global-ied-harm-re...
- La1n 6y ago
  90% of drone strikes kill unintended people, are drone operators terrorists? https://www.amnesty.org.uk/thank-you-us-deadly-drones https://www.amnesty.org.uk/thank-you-us-deadly-drones
  - Veen 6y ago
    My cat likes acorns. Is she a squirrel?
    - chmod775 6y ago
      No. Which is the whole point GP was trying to make. Your cat isn't a squirrel, drone operators aren't terrorists, and neither are the Taliban fighters who plant IEDs targeting combatants. I believe the idiom you were actually looking for was "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck." At least that might've supported your argument.

tra3 6y ago

Interesting read. How high tech is used in the middle east to track and identify terrorists and how this tech is becoming more widespread domestically. Some choice quotes below. Must be super boring: > Kevin spent hours a day, seven days a week watching all kinds of people go about their lives, with the goal of separating out the insurgents from the civilians. Terrifying: > These are actions that allow for that individual to be moved out of civilian status and into insurgent status—to be targeted and killed legally according to army rules of engagement. > Because we know what you did, we think we know what you are going to do next. Powerpoint. Also terrifying. > The 429 package, which allows an insurgent to be killed in an air strike, must meet the legal requirements. The full-motion video gets snapshotted as evidence. While this is going on, the PGSS operator quickly generates a PowerPoint containing all the data, which goes to the S2. The S2 quickly reviews that, then sends the information to the battle captain. > If there’s not air support available, then the person of interest remains marked for death in the system. “The moment there is a target of opportunity to take him out, I call it in. I don’t have to go back through the approving process,” Kevin says. “The 429 package stands. That’s why it’s called a Target of Opportunity. When you have the opportunity, you strike the target.” You kill the man.

nickelcitymario 6y ago
The reference to Powerpoint caught me off guard too, if only because of how informal that is. "Should we kill him?" "I dunno, where's the slide deck? Are the slides convincing?" ...that just seems like an absolutely terrible way to decide between life and death. I know that on the one hand we're just talking about a file format, and the data has to exchange hands somehow. But it bothers me that the same tool I use to convince my bosses to, say, pay for a monthly subscription, is also being used by someone else to convince their bosses to approve killing human beings. Perhaps the reason this bugs me is it breaks the illusion of expertise and sophistication. It proves, once again, that people are just people, no matter what job functions they happen to have. (Also: It raises certain questions. Like: Is a person more or less likely to be killed if their powerpoint deck is ugly? Does typography impact these decisions?)
- suprfsat 6y ago

lrvick 6y ago

Such power may be used largely for good today with minimal false positives, but "the greater good" thinking is what drives most villains in fiction. Governments using private companies to decide who deserves to die based on ML algorithms without judge or jury is morally reprehensible. Full stop. They live in another country so they don't deserve the same rights we superior americans do, right? This behavior only gets to continue to happen because of "we require secrecy to do our work" excuses which are code for "we know the public that indirectly funds us would not approve" I grew up going on jobs stalking people with my private investigator father who mostly worked fraud cases for insurance companies. Public places, license plates, collecting evidence of an injured person walking just fine... then prosecutors can use that evidence in court where it belongs. I am not saying this tech should not exist, or can't be used to serve justice in the right context. I am saying those with that kind of power must have maximum transparency and a high level of accountability. I think the NSA does important work too, but power in secrecy is a breeding ground for "the greater good" thinking. It is so easy to overstep and do things like tap lines to Google datacenters to spy on private citizens with no evidence it has ever stopped a single terrorist attack. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, who took power? The one with the most access to signals intelligence. Now that country is a surveillance state dictatorship disguised as a democracy. The US keeps trending this way too recently. Who will be the Snowden of Palintir to give it the public scrutiny required to make sure their powers stay in reasonable bounds? If a Palantir employee is reading this, maybe it could be you.

peruvian 6y ago
> They live in another country so they don't deserve the same rights we superior americans do, right? It goes beyond that. People don't care Palantir tried to do predictive policing via ML in the US because the suspected criminals were poor POC.
- cwwc 6y ago
  This may be true - but while at the SEC I used Palantir extensively on finance people (usually WASPS in the upper echelons). Was it used in a different way? Yes, likely. But still - it isn't limited to policing and war.

pepicon 6y ago

Too bad that the article doesn't dive into what kind of transparency (if any) the Military allows entities to analyze such decisions to kill people. Anyone know any source?

x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
Why would they allow transparency on such a topic? The only thing it will do is allow these villagers to evade the system and go on with their lives, as well as engender backlash at home because of how flimsy the process is.

covidthrowaway 6y ago

Posting from a throwaway: I’ve been doing work in the realm of Covid for basically the last year. Part of that privilege is access to HHS Protect, as managed by Palantir. Just to soothe some unknowns, Covid surveillance is nothing like the kind of military surveillance described in this article. There is no personally identifiable data and certainly no effort to trace individuals with Covid. The actual data inside HHS protect is not much more specific than what is publicly available. Covid tests/cases/deaths by county, locations of long term care facilities, pharmacies, hospitals. Data on supplies, hospitalizations, staffing. Demographic data comes straight from Census data, also still aggregated. In addressing Covid, I often wish we had better data. Google and Apple’s earlier plan to anonymously contact trace is far more “creepy” than anything the federal government currently has. As you’ll notice, that tech got basically no traction. Contact tracing has largely been a failure in the US, but that’s a whole other story. Do you really think that Covid would have hit the US as intensely as it did if we had military level surveillance? I don’t. Many points of inaction are due to unclear or insufficient data. On the other hand, the raw data available to Google, Apple, Facebook and others is insane to me. Your phone is your tracking device. These companies have it as a unique identifier and most definitely track a large number of users in an individually identifiable way. The carriers do this as well. I absolutely agree that we need refrain allowing this technology to be used in domestic policing, but in terms of war I see it a net positive. Data drives insight which drives action. Palantir just happened to build one of the best platforms to do this. (You may disagree with any of the above, that is fine)

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I more or less agree. I worked on the prior generation of projects like this. The use case at the time was tracking particular vehicles and dismounts in urban environments. We all knew the bad guys and tin pot dictators would love something like what we had. But we also knew that the guys manning the checkpoints really liked being able to know in advance which direction it was prudent to have the business end of the tank pointing in case that car of questionable provenance makes a run for it. The cat's out of the bag. Now it's up to us what we do with it (and what we tolerate the government doing with it).
maxerickson 6y ago

taywrobel 6y ago

Having worked at Palantir in the past, I’d like to again take the opportunity to let everyone know what it is they actually do, because they really aren’t this all-seeing boogeyman of tech that everyone enjoys making them out to be (such rumors do bolster their reputation, however, so they aren’t likely to correct them, and paranoid responses like some here just lend them more credence). They build a federated search engine with a simple UI to make it accessible to a non-technical audience. That’s it. Have a whole lot of data in different databases/data lakes? Palantir will let you search across all of it quickly and simply. They don’t source the data, they even hold the data, they install their servers on premise with where the data is already being stored, and import it. It’s a specialized Google with very robust and configurable access controls that you can buy and run because you’ve collected more data than you know what to do with. Now you may still be legitimately unhappy with them because of who they work with or the implication of making those entities more efficient in processing data, but given that HN is a technical audience I’d really hope that we can get over this trend of thinking Palantir has some magical data summoning abilities.

tweetle_beetle 6y ago
With great power comes great responsibility, including moral. The isn't the first time technology can have far reaching positive and negative applications, and it certainly won't be the last. Palantir has made commercial choices that are hard to stomach and they should have to deal with being considered a boogeyman of tech, even it's not the technology's "fault". It may not be "all-seeing" but it appears to be happy to look at any data for any reason. > In 1937 IBM's tabulating equipment enabled organizations to process huge amounts of data. Its clients included the U.S. Government, during its first effort to maintain the employment records for 26 million people pursuant to the Social Security Act, and Hitler's Third Reich, for the tracking of Jews and other persecuted groups, largely through the German subsidiary Dehomag. The social security-related business gave an 81% increase in revenue from 1935 to 1939. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM#History
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
  The IBM example gets brought up a lot, but the real solution to the Nazis was nation states going to war against them and defeating them . In a counterfactual world where IBM did not sell them the equipment, the Nazis still would have figured out a way to mass murder people. The Japanese and Stalin and Mao did not have access to IBM tech, but they still mass murdered people.

cproctor 6y ago

The blimp operator, Kevin, says, “The idea was, do not let anyone know we exist.” This reminds me of Zuboff's emphasis in "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" on keeping surveillance secret, both to minimize backlash and because people act differently when they are aware of being watched, which reduces the value of the surveillance for modeling behavior. This makes me hopeful for critical computing education which aims to make youth aware of the ways their tech watches them.

sjg007 6y ago

What is really interesting about this article is the compartmentalization of function and that this analyst was able to rise above siloization to prevent a killing based on mistaken identity. That's a critically important role and I think an apt description of knowledge work today. And it has implications for machine learning and predictive analytics. Here the wrong guy was targeted based on the purple hat which was a sensor processing error based on early light levels. While integrating all of this data is important and building machine learning models that can pick up specific markers is important, it is clear that you need some type of overall exception processing framework to confirm in this case positive id. We have a similar problem already with law enforcement no knock warrants.

Jugurtha 6y ago
One of the most frequent question we ask our clients is "What's the cost of a false [positive/negative]?" and "How do we know a prediction is correct?". We work with them to see the whole system and outcomes of our predictions, down to the human actions. For example, in a project where failing to predict something would result in costs up to $100 million and wasting two months, and catastrophic consequences, but a false positive would result in an engineer waking up to check, it is acceptable to have false positives. Yes, it may be inconvenient, but compared to having nothing and the engineers telling you it's okay to bother them because one of catastrophic consequences is they may lose their life, the system can cry wolf. In other projects, not so much. And in other projects, you're not dealing with consequences of that magnitude.

arized 6y ago

> “The fact that there’s other moves afoot to actually use Palantir in the United States, I think that’s very, very bad, because of the type of 360 [degree] metrics that are collected,” Kevin warns. So, he is happy to spy on another country's citizens, from within their own country, but he draws the line at it being done back home. Hypocrisy.

smokefoot 6y ago

The fact that palantir is still able to cultivate this much press coverage and phony mystique is a testament to their PR budget. Logic also had a story about palantir this quarter. What I found most remarkable about that article is that the UI hasn’t changed in a decade! What looked edgy ten years ago now looks cheesy as hell. I don’t know how the internals have changed over that time, but at that time, palantir was an entity resolver and a search engine. They also sold and continue to sell a ton of consulting services at mid-tier rates. In that sense their biggest competitor is... Booz Allen although they’d never admit it. BAH at least makes a profit.