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‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid
- kankerlijer 9mo ago[flagged]
- therobots927 9mo ago[flagged]
- bri3d 9mo agoI don’t think this is true. Palantir are fundamentally a consultancy with a graph database and a map. They sell expensive “forward deployed engineer” consulting services to integrate things with their graph database and map. As far as I know they still don’t broker or share data - the customer provides the data and they provide the database and visualization. Has that changed?
- therobots927 9mo agoOkay so they have a “graph database” that transforms client data into actionable insights. I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
- bri3d 9mo agoI'm not trying to make an ethical judgement here; personally, I think there is certainly a reckoning to be had given the role ICE have taken on, and I don't think that "we just make the platform" excuses culpability. However, my concern with the Palantir conversation (and your comment) is that people are giving them too much credit, essentially: there is a public opinion (stoked by Palantir leadership) that Palantir is some kind of superpowered evil fortress full of data allowing the government to circumvent checks and balances. As far as I can tell, really it's a consultancy with a graph database, and the checks and balances never existed in the first place. These two things are very different problems to solve. > I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up. As an aside, this is a common talking point but has also struck me as odd because this is the foundational legal and ethical argument by which IBM continues to exist today. It's definitely food for thought but it's also not exactly a hot take.
- dghlsakjg 9mo agoThey put together a dashboard that presents probabilistic information. We already know from several facial recognition cases that some police have a hard time differentiating known facts from probabilistic guesses. We also know that many agents of the agency using this dashboard have relatively little training, and have demonstrated very loose understanding for of fundamental rights (47 days for new recruits currently). I would be willing to lay a bet worth a significant portion of my net worth that this dashboard will end up being involved in multiple wrongful arrests of innocent people. Anyone working on these products should ask themselves if they believe in what they build or if they are “just doing what they are told”. If the latter, consider the cohort of people who have previously used that justification.
- warent 9mo agoPalantir came to me multiple times over the years asking me to interview as a senior swe. The temptation was very strong back then. Insane pay package as you can imagine... but I had a really bad feeling about them and always turned them down. What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
- warent 9mo agoSure, they build innocent dashboards in the same way that your name is an innocent Dutch word. Obvious bad faith arguments coming from a troll.
- arjie 9mo agoIt appears that the name kankerlijer is an insult meaning "cancer patient", sort of like how in the US the phrase "fucking cunt" might be used (except without the gendered notion - just in severity). Didn't know so caching this here for others.
- accoil 9mo agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_profanity
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo agoa lot of dutch curses and insults come from diseases (kanker/cancer and typhus are common). one of a few things i really appreciate about the Dutch language is they really make the most of a relatively small common vocabulary (compared to english).
- kankerlijer 9mo ago[flagged]
- beej71 9mo agoLots of things aren't fearsome until they're pointed at you.
- therobots927 9mo ago[flagged]
- hnbad 9mo agoOf course it's Palantir.
- phoehne 9mo ago"I was only in charge of transport" was not an excuse.
- backlava12 9mo ago[flagged]
- Forgeties79 9mo agoSo you don’t care how cruel, humiliating, or terrorizing the process is because “it’s the law”?
- backlava12 9mo ago[flagged]
- castis 9mo agoI for one would find it far more acceptable if the people carrying out the deportations would be a little less "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" about it.
- cheese4242 9mo agoThe person you are referring to rammed an ICE agent with their vehicle and the agent suffered internal bleeding as a result. Sorry but there is no scenario where you can strike law enforcement with your car after being repeatedly ordered to exit your vehicle where their wouldn't be a justifiable use of lethal force. Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
- kevinsundar 9mo agoSo the “ICE agent” presented identification to her showing he was law enforcement? Nope. Oh so he got out of a vehicle marked as ICE? Nope. Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense. Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
- casey2 9mo ago[flagged]
- noncoml 9mo agoFascistic is the word you are looking for
- doktor2un 9mo agoI tell my family to go out and be productive citizens. Let’s see where they all are in a bunch of years.
- Hikikomori 9mo agoSign up for ice and kill some libs?
- doktor2un 9mo agoMove out of mommas basement you dolt
- Hikikomori 9mo agoThat's just the previous step.
- doktor2un 9mo agoSo now you’re two steps behind
- baddie_twoshoes 9mo ago[flagged]
- pixelready 9mo agoI’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals. The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bri3d 9mo agoThis is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases. I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.
- genidoi 9mo agoReferring to engineers with top secret+ security clearances as "consultants" seems reductionistic.
- bri3d 9mo agoIn what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.
- doktor2un 9mo ago[flagged]
- drcongo 9mo agoMuch better link with some excellent (and some not so great) discussion already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378
- mentalfist 9mo agoSince it's inception, Palantir has extracted roughly 10 billion usd taxpayer money from the US government. God bless America.
- shevy-java 9mo agoIt is a de-facto corporate state right now. Everyone in the current government tries to see how much money they can steal.
- stronglikedan 9mo ago[flagged]
- SaltyBackendGuy 9mo ago> Trump has been the only one that the corporations couldn't buy Hasn't he accepted donations from many mega corporations? My assumption is that a corporation wont donate money, without the expectation of ROI.
- wahnfrieden 9mo agoOP has the delusion that being rich means you are resistant to corruption by being less likely to pursue riches. That being rich causes one to stop pursuing it.
- array_key_first 9mo agoForm what I've seen in life it's the exact opposite - the most greedy are the richest. The only people who have the seemingly unreasonable desire for infinite wealth are the already wealthy. For most everyday people, there is a cutoff amount.
- Ritewut 9mo agoThis is one of the most insane things I've ever read. You have to be so disconnected from reality to believe this.
- randommar 9mo agoAh yes, beta-tested on Palestinians, how generous of them to ship the polished version to everyone else.
- pixelready 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
- therobots927 9mo agoWelcome to the downvote club folks. It’s an honor to serve here with you.
- bradley13 9mo ago[flagged]
- RIMR 9mo ago1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society. 2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.
- whatthesmack 9mo ago> 1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society. How is that currently working out for all of Europe? Hint: not well at all. > 2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends. You've made a lot of ambiguous accusations right here. Can you please give specific examples?
- idle_zealot 9mo ago1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling. 2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.
- SilverElfin 9mo agoThese raids are the indiscriminate door to door raids right? There are lots of disturbing reports from these. For example ICE agents showing up at a white family’s door to ask which houses have Asian people living in them. The raids are blatantly unconstitutional (fourth amendment) but also, regardless of laws, they are well beyond the pale in terms of morality. It’s crazy that tech companies are willfully participating in this. Palantir must be treated as a criminal enterprise by the next non-GOP administration, and there should be consequences for everyone there. As someone else said, you don’t get to just say "I was only in charge of transport".
- rambojohnson 9mo agoThis, along with the AI slop and agentic nonsense gutting real work, is exactly why I pivoted my career. The industry feels like it's being driven by chest-thumping, siege-heiling authoritarian inbreds at the top, propped up by tepid company-man shills who clap along and call it innovation while the place rots from the inside. my feed on LinkedIn gives me hives. I've since cancelled my account as well. good riddance. tech is dead and I hope the public doesn't have to yet again bailout some late-stage capitalist bullshit when yet another bubble bursts. /rant
- 1234letshaveatw 9mo agoDoesn't your indiscriminate label preclude the involvement of tools like Palantir? Unless you want us to believe that the tooling is worthless. But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
- buffington 9mo agoIndiscriminate can be defined as "done at random or without careful judgment" - I think the latter part of that definition perfectly describes ELITE. I find it nonsensical to dismiss an anti-ICE argument because of one word.
- SilverElfin 9mo agoPalantir is directing them to neighborhoods. The doors are being chosen indiscriminately and people are being stopped or detained on the street indiscriminately. So I don’t think those are in conflict. > But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical. That’s certainly your right and choice. But when we’re spending tens of billions a year on harassing immigrants, you should ask if it is better to just spend the money on supporting them instead. Our economy benefits greatly from immigrants.
- ChrisArchitect 9mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378
- big_toast 9mo agoCan people bring higher effort posts to this discussion so that this thread doesn't get pulled like the others? Is there a specific product line that this app is using? What FOIA laws are applicable to its use? What kind of data does this provide? something else?
- shevy-java 9mo ago[flagged]
- cheese4242 9mo ago[flagged]
- wat10000 9mo agoInternal bleeding? Where do you get this nonsense? I keep seeing completely imaginary "facts" parroted about this case and I really want to know where they come from.
- cheese4242 9mo agoHappy to share: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-officer-who-shot-renee-good-internal-injuries-sources-say/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-officer-who-shot-renee-good...
- wat10000 9mo agoHas this been independently confirmed? I trust nothing these people say. Especially when the video shows nothing happening.
- kevinsundar 9mo agoIt’s kinda funny that conservatives don’t have the ability to think for themselves and rather just repeat what others tell them. Internal bleeding = a bruise
- cheese4242 9mo agoSo you agree he was struck by the vehicle?
- kevinsundar 9mo ago
- backlava12 9mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoThe problem is there is a certain segment of the population suffer from (or have been fed) false dichotomy that either we have open borders and are overrun with criminal immigrants taking all our jobs, or we need a surveillance state that hires masked “Brownshirt” thugs to brutalize its civilian population and who can operate with impunity and immunity. Since people are afraid of the former they try to justify the latter.
- mindslight 9mo agoAt this point where the brownshirts are openly attacking civil society - driving their vehicles into protestors, crashing into other motorists, abducting citizens and lawfully present immigrants, murdering uppity women in the street, and even escalating their violent attacks after citizens speak out against them - it's patently obvious that "illegal immigration" is nothing more than a rallying cry for overt fascism, red in tooth and claw.
- gnarlouse 9mo agoI told somebody that Palantir is building the maid services and rat poison for a post-lower/middle class society. They didn’t believe me. Seeing this is vindicating.
- gnarlouse 9mo agoTo be clear: I’m not enthusiastic about this.
- laweijfmvo 9mo ago“Tracking Apps for Thee, but Not for Me”
- schnatterer 9mo agoOriginal 404media article: https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-find-neighborhoods-to-raid/ https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f... https://archive.ph/wa32f https://archive.ph/wa32f
- periodjet 9mo agoWhy have we all lost the ability to think in a nuanced way? It’s very disturbing to witness, particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change. It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal. Etcetera, etcetera. You don’t HAVE to dedicate yourself to a fully polarized set of beliefs. Nuance is possible. What the hell is causing us to lose our minds like this? Is it really just social media? So frustrating to witness.
- smokel 9mo agoThe core issue is not that people cannot think with nuance, but that nuance is costly and poorly rewarded.
- periodjet 9mo agoI fear you may be right…
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- R_D_Olivaw 9mo agoYes yes, shoot mothers in the face in her car. Grab human beings from their homes and detain them thousands of miles away with no due process. Send human beings to detention camps in another country NOT the one they are from Please, people, have some decency and maintain the nuance. We're not barbarians here! Sheesh.
- periodjet 9mo ago[flagged]
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- anon291 9mo ago[flagged]
- insane_dreamer 9mo agoPeople have been deported for decades but the manner in which deportations occur is important. There’s a world of difference between law enforcement and these brownshirts.
- Altern4tiveAcc 9mo ago> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi Because that idea consists of harming someone over their birth circumstances, rather than any objective harm they may have done.
- anon291 9mo agoPeople who are in the country illegally undermine the rule of law and make people feel unheard leaving people to elect demagogues like trump. I predicted exactly this outcome with the election of Obama and his policies. How can the supposedly educated be so bad at applying history.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Altern4tiveAcc 9mo ago> People who are in the country illegally undermine the rule of law No, they do not. Quite the opposite, they want to live their lives quietly and normally like everyone else. The only law they "undermine" is the one forbidding them to living in a place due to a birth right. Civil disobedience to unjust laws like that is correct and moral. > make people feel unheard leaving people to elect demagogues like trump Disagree. IMO the biggest reasons for Trump's election were inflation and raising living costs. Under those conditions, picking a group of people to elect as the "enemy" is a tact to win elections, but has nothing to do with the underlying cause for the bad conditions in the first place.
- elephantum 9mo ago[flagged]
- farceSpherule 9mo ago[dead]
- fudged71 9mo agoTo tech leaders and hiring managers at other companies: If you're reading this, please consider publicly stating that your company will interview Palantir engineers who want to exit on moral grounds. Create an explicit off-ramp. Lower the barrier to leaving. Make it a tech industry norm that we offer refuge to engineers trying to do the right thing.
- id00 9mo agoWhy shouldn't I do quite the opposite? I don't want people with a questionable morale who knowingly built those systems work in my company
- aeonfox 9mo agoThe options are a) they have to decide between starving their family or continuing compromise their morals and increasing the capabilities of immoral company X, or b) a more ethically aligned company removes them from the resource pool of immoral company X. Which world do you prefer?
- 946789987649 9mo agoIf they're good enough to be hired to palantir as an engineer, I very much doubt at any point they were desperate.
- aeonfox 9mo agoYou're missing my point. If all 'ethical' companies treat all ex-employees of 'unethical companies' as unemployable, they are effectively only going to work at 'unethical companies' regardless of whatever mindset has shifted over time.
- 946789987649 9mo agoI agree they shouldn't become outcasts, but it feels disingenuous to say that the reason for wanting to work for palantir is anything but "they wanted A LOT of money".
- tamimio 9mo agoOnly an idiot will think all of this is about "illegals"; this is a whole infrastructure of mass surveillance and "rogue" police. They might be after specific targets now, but once it's fully normalized, you are next. From data collection and aggregation, the invasive surveillance like Flock and Ring, the use of AI and apps, it's being carefully planned and rolled out for such a mission. There should be a platform to track the people who worked on building these technologies and apps. I would never trust or hire someone who has no morals and worked and spent hours making ELITE app or Flock Android systems or similar; these people are the enablers for such surveillance and should be held accountable.
- bdangubic 9mo agoif you go by “morals” every FAANG employee (current and previous) would need to go plumbing school
- Altern4tiveAcc 9mo agoFair enough, they had (specially their executives and the engineers working on ad tech) a negative impact in the world as well.
- wan23 9mo agoGiven the choice, end users choose free or cheap and ad supported over full price in huge majorities. You have to weigh "I don't like ads" against 200 million (!) people on Netflix's ad supported plan and how much enjoyment they get that they might not otherwise. Not to mention things like Google that are ad supported and genuinely useful. In the real world things have pros and cons.
- upboundspiral 9mo agoI used to buy this thinking, but no longer. People are incredibly resourceful, and instead of innovating towards exploiting and manipulating people, we could choose to innovate towards conserveration of important things, just like we have done in the past. We don't fund out national parks with advertisements. We don't fund our libraries with advertisements. We could create the same structures for the internet as well, where crucial internet resources are protected and stewarded. They don't necessarily need to be in the hands of ad companies. Sure, I will not deny that having things be "free" (and paying for them in other ways) has been a huge boon from one perspective, but we can also evolve to put "free" things in different places. Because things are never free. Advertisements are funding mass surveillance. They are encroaching our civil liberties and normalizing it. There is a total cost to things that extens beyond money. What we don't pay out of pocket we pay as a society.
- mmmlinux 9mo agoPalantir damage control got to this thread faster than the last one.
- therobots927 9mo agoI wouldn’t be surprised if they have a whole team dedicated to running an online bot army to counter dissent. It wouldn’t surprise me if they plan on selling that service to their customers. Ironically the best solution for this is for websites to start de-anonymizing users to the extent necessary to block fake accounts from polluting the airwaves.
- deaux 9mo agoProbably mostly just people who work at companies that bought their software and know it's not special. It's a souped up version of Databricks. If you've worked with it it's always a laugh to see both their supporters on X who drank their koolaid, bought their stock and think it's some kind of one-of-a-kind magic, as well as people on places like HN who think they're data brokers. I guess HN is 90% people who have only worked in pure play tech plus academia. If you have any friends at Boeing, Airbus, Citibank, ask them if they've used it. Ironically most of it runs on the clouds from the average HNer's workplace on big enterprise contracts with AWS and Azure.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- stuffn 9mo ago[flagged]
- hairofadog 9mo agoLet's say a third party was elected and started implementing certain policies. What would they have to do for you to call them fascist? Fascism is an actual thing, after all, so there must be some line that would separate fascism from not-fascism.
- ChromaticPanic 9mo agoIt's only fascism when it comes for them personally. Mask wearing when sick ? "How dare you, that's fascist" . Entering private domiciles without a proper warrant? "Democracy, as the founding fathers intended"
- oenton 9mo ago> Entering private domiciles without a proper warrant? "Democracy, as the founding fathers intended" Or my personal favorite, "a mandate." Interestingly I don't recall any other US President in recent memory (last 30 years) referring to their policies, or more accurately the fact that they won an election, as "a mandate given by the American people." But you only need to go back a few more decades to find similar phrases used by a certain country's infamous authoritarian regime. Are the frogs boiling yet? It's starting to get really uncomfortable really fast.
- muwtyhg 9mo agoDo you think fascism appears instantly, fully formed? Or could it grow through legal political action until such time that it can do away with them?
- blurbleblurble 9mo agoYou just collapsed your own wave-function right in front of us all. I pray it goes back into superposition for you and gives you a chance to try again.
- csmpltn 9mo ago[flagged]
- tencentshill 9mo agoIs your username C. Simpleton?
- jorl17 9mo agoWhen I was 19, an ex-student of my Alma Mater came to give a talk about TDD. While I found the lecture interesting, I vividly remember that a portion of our community rallied against him, attempting to boycott his presence because he worked for Palantir. At the time, I remember thinking how extreme that seemed, and how I was "sure" nothing is black-and-white and that, certainly, while Palantir had shady connections, for sure it must bring some good to the world and, so, why boycott this poor man? It felt genuinely baffling to me. While in many ways I consider myself a more balanced person today (precisely thinking less in black-and-white terms), this is a topic where I do not agree. I would not work for Palantir and, were I to travel back in time, I would join the boycott. Heck, given how I was when I was younger, I'd expand on it greatly and try to rally some form of physical protest. A friend of mine once threw me the argument of "well, the enemy [presumably China] is doing this kind of stuff, so we have to do it, too". This may seem like a compelling argument at first — and it may be so for many — but it can't, to me. It's ethically disgusting. The solution to world with decaying ethics is not to continue contributing to its decay. It erases accountability, it normalizes atrocity, it strips humanity from our very own flesh and blood — it escalates conflict! It. Just. Can't. be. We must fight this filth.
- therobots927 9mo agoWelcome to the downvote club. Anyone who criticizes tech oligarchs on here gets downvoted by bots.
- Swoerd 9mo ago[dead]
- johneth 9mo agoPalantir is a mediocre company staffed by mediocre people making mediocre products, owned by a mediocre person.
- blurbleblurble 9mo agoThe name is giving "bad Malthusian"