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A helpful framework I’ve liked is - Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads
by dogman144 1y ago
A helpful framework I’ve liked is
- Palantir was incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for putting the proverbial warheads on foreheads of insurgents with terrible SIGINT practices and a lot of generated data. You could build and analyze graphs of insurgent networks that were tangibly powerful
- After that, in my mind what was very similar tech was sold to US domestic police, corporate insider threat teams, whatever. As I recall it had uneven adoption due to expense
- Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data under an entirely trustable and stable executive branch.
With those face value facts, a capable technical mind like those in hackernews could draw logical conclusions.
To put a pin in it - threat modeling for what you say and do online as this era progresses is interesting to consider. Now with tech like this, your threat model is now you + your friends. Who’s the “radical” in your friend group, and is the group chat on unencrypted systems? Consider what your graph would be, and how much do you trust tech like this ran by either the current team or the other team.
- spencerflem 1y agoRelated: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lwekzzruji2j https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3lwekzzruji2j
- dogman144 1y agoMilitary integration with law enforcement -> military tech licenses -> focus on cities -> cities have troves of SIGINT Unencrypted group chat -> one friend hates one party -> another friend loves to talk about illegal habits -> tool hoovering it all up -> illegal habits friend is the pretext to look at politics friend Clear as day, as this is what caused a bad time for insurgents in an actual war. Makes a lot of sense to apply it domestically! Tread on me.
- jimt1234 1y agoApparently crime only happens in big cities. It's weird, because where I grew up in rural Missouri, every-other dipshit was a meth junkie, robbing houses to support their addiction. But, well, maybe I just invented all that with my crazy imagination.
- tempodox 1y agoIOW, they facilitate killing people. Got it.
- dogman144 1y agoAnd facilitated it well. And now US fed law enforcement likely will have it.
- Hikikomori 1y agoIt gave them targets but was it correct? Afaik people in LA are targeted by police simply for living in the area of known drug gangs. Guess it's a lot like Israel and Hamas targets.
- dogman144 1y agoYou should look into how the LA targeting works, and what vendor drove data-driven policing like this. If I recall, it might have been Chicago PD or NYC that dumped Palantir bc the issue you note + cost.
- LearnYouALisp 1y agoOr just being on the street and appearing Latino: https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice https://www.google.com/search?q=citizens+abducted+by+ice (See the Guardian story)
- throwway120385 1y agoI figured this was coming. It'll get really bad if we eliminate birthright citizenship because then you'll have to supply papers proving you're a citizen like your parents' or their parents' birth certificates. Good luck providing those to anyone from a prison in Nicaragua or El Salvador.
- apparent 1y agoThe EO only calls for elimination of birthright citizenship on a prospective basis. It would not affect anyone who is currently a citizen. It would simply be marked on your birth certificate if you were a citizen, based on whether your parents are citizens (either one). This is not at all remarkable, and plenty of countries operate this way. The US is somewhat anomalous in granting citizenship to children born to tourists or illegal immigrants, simply because they were in the US when the child was born.
- LearnYouALisp 1y ago> ...incredible technology during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq > - Now in 2025, that same tech is slated to have broad access to American citizen data Speaking of which, only loosely-related, but is there any indication of where the 'recent' leak of British special forces, contractors and/or informants (?) happened? (est. 2022, discovered later, now in news)
- incone123 1y agoNews reported it was data getting passed around as a spreadsheet attached to emails. Ironically it would have been possible to build a case management tool with rbac on Palantir Foundry and avoid that screwup.
- cookiengineer 1y agoDon't forget that Lavender AI, the "cool system" that automatically targets all Hamas fighters (with probably 1000% civilian casualties because it destroyed all hospitals, churches, mosques and schools along the way) was developed by Palantir. The irony is that this really bad SIGINT graph flags also relatives, e.g. cousins of cousins of fighters, just because they had e.g. family events where they attended together, even though all other intelligence data would point to the contrary. The documentary that got banned from BBC highlights this with a lot of stories where e.g. hospital workers were specifically targeted because a distant relative was associated with hamas. Palantir had a video on YouTube where they were even bragging about this graph, though not under its now-leaked codename.
- PicassoCTs 1y agoDon't forget hamas, hiding behind hospitals, churches, mosques and schools makes those valid targets. And it could quit islamo-facism any day of the week!
- Yeul 1y agoThe same can be said for Israel. Just stop believing in god, put some fucking lines on the map and most importantly jail/shoot dead religious crazies who break the peace. You know become a normal country.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stephen_g 1y agoExactly what I remember reading all the time about the Afghanistan war - the OP calls the Palantir tool 'incredible technology' but the one thing I remember seeing reported time and time and time again during that war was reports of strikes against civilians accidentally being targeted because their mobile phones had been nearby to insurgents (like maybe having visited the same mosque or the same family gathering)...
- 1y ago
- Analemma_ 1y agoThat "incredible" tech didn't seem to help all that much in Afghanistan. Not only did the US lose, I never got the sense we were even particularly close to winning, even if we'd stayed there for another 20 years and trillion dollars. In terms of tangible wins, what was Palantir's "incredible" tech actually delivering?
- dogman144 1y agoIt delivered two things, and the easy response to your fair point is tactical tools — a rifle, great software — don’t win wars on their own. 1) Palantir was the first breath of fresh air that brought actually good tech with modern tech support practices to the warfighter, and by extension put the big defense contractors on notice. I personally believe this impact was tremendously important as there were real safety connotations involved, and anyone with a family member downrange could appreciate this. 2) Palantir was great targeting software that worked like modern tech vs a custom Linux distro with a GUI from 1970 and required 5 months of finagling to get vendor support for. So Palantir just brought standard 2010’s tech to soldiers betting their safety on it. This was incredible although ordinary.
- master_crab 1y agoThere’s a name for that: technical arbitrage. Not something you can build a long term company on, because others get wind of it sooner or later.
- nradov 1y agoSometimes you really can build a long-term company on technical arbitrage when the established competitors are incapable of significant improvement due to misaligned internal incentives. Sometimes executives will allow a company to die instead of fixing it because that outcome maximizes their own personal income or career trajectory: this is one aspect of the principal-agent problem.
- stephen_g 1y agoIf anything though, all the civilians that they accidentally targeted probably played a part in radicalising a lot more people on the ground, so if anything the tools probably made things worse. I'm sure it was very shiny looking software though, but that doesn't mean it's good.
- ml-anon 1y ago“Putting the warheads on foreheads” Who the fuck talks like this, seriously?
- vkou 1y agoPeople who inflict war on others and their families, but have never had war inflicted on them and theirs.
- BLKNSLVR 1y agoPete Hegseth
- dogman144 1y agoYou’d be surprised
- hybrid_study 1y agosociopaths
- jonstewart 1y agoAny/everyone who was part of GWOT. It was a common saying in those circles in 2010.
- narrator 1y agoPeople who enjoy being in military combat and talk about it like it's their golf game.
- Natfan 1y agosome USMIL goon
- lisbbb 1y agoMy take is that nearly all military technology, particularly mass surveillance tech, will be applied to the civilian sector eventually. That's why everyone using China as the baseline for human rights worldwide is so terrifying. As far as Palantir goes, they're just another in a long line of corporations that sell such services to the government. Ever heard of RAND Corp? They undertook all kinds of weird studies during the Vietnam era. So please, spare me the concealed distaste for the current Administration, as if the previous one was some kind of wonder for America! The left is, on the whole, far more totalitarian than the right in the US. I sleep better knowing our borders are secure, racist or not. I also sleep better knowing that criminals are getting locked up once again--that's an important aspect of even having and maintaining civilization! It's such a simple concept, yet many of you ignore it or misunderstand it or something. Anyways, if Palantir was anything special, the war in Afghanistan would have turned out much differently. They failed to predict that the Afghan government and military would completely collapse the instant Uncle Sam stopped paying the bills there. It was all a giant scam.
- HSO 1y agoAh the imperial boomerang
- mastermage 1y ago[dead]
- tarsinge 1y agoI heard in reality there was no "tech" but very good PR for consultants ("forward deployed engineers" I think their term was) doing standard data engineering?
- cyanydeez 1y agoThey're mckinsey but for nazis