6 ms·

Ex Palantir here: Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. The tools don't collect data. It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this

Ex Palantir here: Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. The tools don't collect data. It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. When I was at Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution. I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.

gosub100 2y ago
You weren't abused. You were just talked to in a way that caused an elevated emotional response. That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. An I am a gun rights advocate yet am against Palantir's product usage on US citizens. Good food for thought.
- weakfish 2y ago
  “You weren’t murdered, you were just interacted with in a way that caused cardiac arrest”
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    Typical cop press brief
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc. But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead. You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it. In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    > The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      That's because the bill of rights enumerates some of the rights people have against the government rather than the other way around. But that doesn't really get you out of it Suppose you have a private mass surveillance system, where people "voluntarily" (i.e. because the market is consolidated and every company is doing it) give up their data to a private company that keeps a big database. Then the company "voluntarily" informs on citizens to the government (because the company wants to be on the government's good side), or imposes penalties for crimethink all on its own. Is that okay then? Should we be satisfied with it because it's not the government? Nope. Still a big problem. The reason isn't that it's the government, it's that it's a bad trade off. Suppose you're the "good guys" and trying to catch terrorists. There are 330 million people and 50 terrorists. If you have a mass surveillance system with only a 0.1% false positive rate, the system is totally useless. You have 330,000 false positives and investigating all those dead ends would be a huge waste of resources that would be better spent using traditional investigative methods on traditional leads. Now suppose you're the bad guys trying to catch resistance fighters, with the same mass surveillance system. 0.1% false positive rate? Okay, round up the 330,000 people and execute them all without trial. Way cheaper than having to sift through them. Very effective system when you don't have to care about that guilt or innocence stuff. And that's what makes the system so dangerous. It's only useful in proportion to how little you care about innocent people, and the extent to which an entity does is a thing that can change over time, so it's massively dangerous to leave a system like that sitting around without vigorous efforts to dismantle it.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    I think I agree with your message, even if I don't, I appreciate you addressing the topic. But what it made me realize is this: there is no Palantir that civilians can purchase that will "aggregate data" of the police that the public can meddle through. That is the core difference, and explains why I feel the way I do. Thank you.
sweeter 2y ago
I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit. Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose. I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of: working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.
jakelazaroff 2y ago
> It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. Sure, if PostgreSQL were specifically selling their tools to organizations known to commit those sort of abuses.
- chaps 2y ago
  This is exactly what Oracle does.
  - AlotOfReading 2y ago
    Oracle and Larry Ellison specifically are routinely called the devil incarnate though, so they're not exactly getting a break here.
int_19h 2y ago
Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.
- p_j_w 2y ago
  >Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. The name of the company itself is another dead giveaway.
  - chii 2y ago
    Palantir (in tolkien lore) isn't evil itself - it's only used for evil in the hands of those who wield it.
- hindsightbias 2y ago
  Mass scale surveillance wasn't practical or affordable until Linux HPC and OSS. The whole community is enabling.
  - nxobject 2y ago
    Well, ring me up when "Linux HPC" and "OSS" becomes a majority-government contractor, and I'll switch to rack Mac Pros.
- matthewaveryusa 2y ago
  Your premise is that absent of Palantir there would be no tooling. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be Peter Thiel & co because they're already doing all the other data surveillance.
  - sangnoir 2y ago
    You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it? 1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make
bigiain 2y ago
"We just make and sell bone saws, it's not us that murder journalists by dismembering them while they're still alive. I mean, sure, our only customers are Saudi military and intelligence forces, but how could we possibly predict they'd misuse the tools we make?"
- immibis 2y ago
  bone saws can't cut flesh fyi
  - aprilthird2021 2y ago
    We don't know because we're not in the government to be best buds with Crown Prince Bonesaw
  - zoky 2y ago
    Which is why we’ve partnered with CleaverCo, to synergistically deliver high-performance vertically integrated scalable dismemberment solutions for the enterprise and beyond.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    The idea that a saw with a finely serrated edge couldn't cut a steak in half might be a little too far out there for me.
    - cratermoon 2y ago
      Have you ever seen a cast saw in action? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx1AiQdMQro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx1AiQdMQro
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        Some bone saws may have that sort of action, but not all of them do.
NikolaNovak 2y ago
I appreciate your comment, and it takes courage to post an unpopular opinion, but I'm not convinced about the analogy - Is Palantir used for myriad varied and lovely other cases? Or is it less like Postgres and more like napalm and ICBMs in that sure, it takes a human being to use it for its very much intended purpose?
mbesto 2y ago
> Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same. For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS). > Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution. ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.
- liontwist 2y ago
  What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.
  - et-al 2y ago
    > do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
    - liontwist 2y ago
      You’re telling me bad guy labels (bad image for you), not impact. You're personifying on organization. For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.
      - et-al 2y ago
        > For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people. And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.
starluz 2y ago
[dead]
heavyset_go 2y ago
This is like saying guns are just a tool and not weapons designed to kill people.
- DFHippie 2y ago
  Homer: "Marge, a gun is just a tool! Like a harpoon, or a butcher knife or ... an alligator."
whatshisface 2y ago
In the Soviet Union, the NKVD had to employ prisoner laborers known as "Zeks" to design and engineer their surveillance equipment. They were motivated to betray others by the thread of a transfer to mines in Siberia that were effectively death camps. This story is told in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the prison for engineers being the metaphorical first circle of hell. In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.
hibikir 2y ago
The tools don't collect data, but without the tool, the data is almost useless, as it takes a lot of effort to get anywhere. If I had to choose to be surveilled 24/7, but my data stuck, unlabeled in there, or 20% of my actions randomly sampled, but fed to a tool that can interpret it, I choose the first, hands down

gosub100 2y ago

You weren't abused. You were just talked to in a way that caused an elevated emotional response. That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. An I am a gun rights advocate yet am against Palantir's product usage on US citizens. Good food for thought.

weakfish 2y ago
“You weren’t murdered, you were just interacted with in a way that caused cardiac arrest”
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  Typical cop press brief
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc. But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead. You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it. In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
- mulmen 2y ago
  > The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    That's because the bill of rights enumerates some of the rights people have against the government rather than the other way around. But that doesn't really get you out of it Suppose you have a private mass surveillance system, where people "voluntarily" (i.e. because the market is consolidated and every company is doing it) give up their data to a private company that keeps a big database. Then the company "voluntarily" informs on citizens to the government (because the company wants to be on the government's good side), or imposes penalties for crimethink all on its own. Is that okay then? Should we be satisfied with it because it's not the government? Nope. Still a big problem. The reason isn't that it's the government, it's that it's a bad trade off. Suppose you're the "good guys" and trying to catch terrorists. There are 330 million people and 50 terrorists. If you have a mass surveillance system with only a 0.1% false positive rate, the system is totally useless. You have 330,000 false positives and investigating all those dead ends would be a huge waste of resources that would be better spent using traditional investigative methods on traditional leads. Now suppose you're the bad guys trying to catch resistance fighters, with the same mass surveillance system. 0.1% false positive rate? Okay, round up the 330,000 people and execute them all without trial. Way cheaper than having to sift through them. Very effective system when you don't have to care about that guilt or innocence stuff. And that's what makes the system so dangerous. It's only useful in proportion to how little you care about innocent people, and the extent to which an entity does is a thing that can change over time, so it's massively dangerous to leave a system like that sitting around without vigorous efforts to dismantle it.
- gosub100 2y ago
  I think I agree with your message, even if I don't, I appreciate you addressing the topic. But what it made me realize is this: there is no Palantir that civilians can purchase that will "aggregate data" of the police that the public can meddle through. That is the core difference, and explains why I feel the way I do. Thank you.

sweeter 2y ago

I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit. Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose. I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of: working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.

jakelazaroff 2y ago

> It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. Sure, if PostgreSQL were specifically selling their tools to organizations known to commit those sort of abuses.

chaps 2y ago
This is exactly what Oracle does.
- AlotOfReading 2y ago
  Oracle and Larry Ellison specifically are routinely called the devil incarnate though, so they're not exactly getting a break here.

int_19h 2y ago

Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.

p_j_w 2y ago
>Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. The name of the company itself is another dead giveaway.
- chii 2y ago
  Palantir (in tolkien lore) isn't evil itself - it's only used for evil in the hands of those who wield it.
hindsightbias 2y ago
Mass scale surveillance wasn't practical or affordable until Linux HPC and OSS. The whole community is enabling.
- nxobject 2y ago
  Well, ring me up when "Linux HPC" and "OSS" becomes a majority-government contractor, and I'll switch to rack Mac Pros.
matthewaveryusa 2y ago
Your premise is that absent of Palantir there would be no tooling. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be Peter Thiel & co because they're already doing all the other data surveillance.
- sangnoir 2y ago
  You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it? 1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make

bigiain 2y ago

"We just make and sell bone saws, it's not us that murder journalists by dismembering them while they're still alive. I mean, sure, our only customers are Saudi military and intelligence forces, but how could we possibly predict they'd misuse the tools we make?"

immibis 2y ago
bone saws can't cut flesh fyi
- aprilthird2021 2y ago
  We don't know because we're not in the government to be best buds with Crown Prince Bonesaw
- zoky 2y ago
  Which is why we’ve partnered with CleaverCo, to synergistically deliver high-performance vertically integrated scalable dismemberment solutions for the enterprise and beyond.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  The idea that a saw with a finely serrated edge couldn't cut a steak in half might be a little too far out there for me.
  - cratermoon 2y ago
    Have you ever seen a cast saw in action? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx1AiQdMQro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx1AiQdMQro
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Some bone saws may have that sort of action, but not all of them do.

NikolaNovak 2y ago

I appreciate your comment, and it takes courage to post an unpopular opinion, but I'm not convinced about the analogy - Is Palantir used for myriad varied and lovely other cases? Or is it less like Postgres and more like napalm and ICBMs in that sure, it takes a human being to use it for its very much intended purpose?

mbesto 2y ago

> Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same. For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS). > Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution. ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.

liontwist 2y ago
What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.
- et-al 2y ago
  > do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    You’re telling me bad guy labels (bad image for you), not impact. You're personifying on organization. For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. Your job at the children’s charity could be scamming old ladies.
    - et-al 2y ago
      > For example, your job at the ad tech company could be anonymizing data and protecting people’s privacy. This only happens because companies need to adhere to regulations, not because they're doing it out of respect for people. And by simply not working in adtech, I don't need to go through some mental gymnastics to justify what I spend 40 hours a week building. The beauty of being a programmer is there's a bunch of work out there that doesn't involve crappifying the internet.

starluz 2y ago

[dead]

heavyset_go 2y ago

This is like saying guns are just a tool and not weapons designed to kill people.

DFHippie 2y ago
Homer: "Marge, a gun is just a tool! Like a harpoon, or a butcher knife or ... an alligator."

whatshisface 2y ago

In the Soviet Union, the NKVD had to employ prisoner laborers known as "Zeks" to design and engineer their surveillance equipment. They were motivated to betray others by the thread of a transfer to mines in Siberia that were effectively death camps. This story is told in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the prison for engineers being the metaphorical first circle of hell. In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.

hibikir 2y ago

The tools don't collect data, but without the tool, the data is almost useless, as it takes a lot of effort to get anywhere. If I had to choose to be surveilled 24/7, but my data stuck, unlabeled in there, or 20% of my actions randomly sampled, but fed to a tool that can interpret it, I choose the first, hands down