8 ms·

With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced, it won't take more than a few minutes for FBI to start taking actions, IF they had anything tangible. This i

• jatora 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  • lovich 9mo ago
    “Citizens of law enforcement” What a phrase
    • 1potatonagger 9mo ago
      ... that is correct.
    • zem 9mo ago
      the fine nation of law enforcement, which has only colonised the united states for its own good and to bring civilisation to the heathen masses
    • jatora 9mo ago
      you're aware that LEO are citizens right? with rights as well?
      • zeckalpha 9mo ago
        If they completed their I-9
      • lovich 9mo ago
        The comment was trying to replicate the same feelings as “people of color” but in regards to a lifestyle choice instead of an immutable characteristic, hence my flabbergasted statement at the audacity
  • nyc_data_geek 9mo ago
    Seems like citizens are the ones who need protection from law and immigration enforcement, considering the public executions we've all witnessed in the past week or so.
    • 1potatonagger 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • freejazz 9mo ago
        Woof
  • janalsncm 9mo ago
    While we’re getting rid of the first amendment maybe we should also get rid of the fourth and fifth amendment too since they make law enforcement harder? I’m sure cops in North Korea have a much easier and safer job.
    • jjk166 9mo ago
      Can't argue with their 110% conviction rate, North Korean tactics work.
    • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      You only have rights you exercise. Don't let the cops trample on your rights. Though... this does seem to work better for white, rich, older dudes than for other people.
      • janalsncm 9mo ago
        I’m reminded of (I think) people in Shanghai complaining that their posts about covid lockdowns were censored, saying “we have free speech”. And if you believe in universal rights, they’re right. They do. The question is whether the government will respect and protect those rights or not.
      • freejazz 9mo ago
        Thanks.
      • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
        I love that THIS is the post that gets me down-voted.
    • charcircuit 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • ceejayoz 9mo ago
        And protesting is not vigilante justice.
  • awesome_dude 9mo ago
    The whole premise of the second amendment is about citizens being armed in order to resist/overthrow a government
    • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      [citation needed]
      • ceejayoz 9mo ago
        It's not exactly an unusual claim, and it was very much the loudly espoused position of the Republican Party until, well, last week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_to_the_United... > In Federalist No. 46, Madison wrote how a federal army could be kept in check by the militia, "a standing army ... would be opposed [by] militia." He argued that State governments "would be able to repel the danger" of a federal army, "It may well be doubted, whether a militia thus circumstanced could ever be conquered by such a proportion of regular troops." He contrasted the federal government of the United States to the European kingdoms, which he described as "afraid to trust the people with arms"...
        • hollandheese 9mo ago
          This was posited as the nice sounding reason for the second amendment, when the more accurate reason was to ensure citizens had guns to drive out the indigenous peoples and steal their lands. We rather quickly saw the federal government rolling over the people even with weapons in the Whiskey Rebellion.
          • ceejayoz 9mo ago
            I don't disagree. But it's still very funny seeing the Right wrestle with "wait, the other team has guns?!" and "wait, Trump sounds like he wants gun control?!" right now when this claim has been the basis of their argument for decades.
  • nielsbot 9mo ago
    If ICE agents were actually in danger or subject to "vigilante justice", the administration would be CROWING about it SO LOUDLY we'd never hear the end of it. They're spending their entire working days searching for evidence of it. They can't hardly wait! That's not what is happening here.
    • filoeleven 9mo ago
      s/searching for/manufacturing Remember, they're accusing the people they killed of heinous motives for their narrative. They can't find it, so they make it up. Keep filming, y'all.
• OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
  Meh. Palintir is optimized to sell data to the government. Said governments usually don't care about the quality of data about any one individual. Wear sunglasses when you go out and stay off facebook and it's amazing how little palintir signal you send up. Bonus points if you created an LLC to pay your utility bills. But... Palintir is not as good as you seem to be implying.
  • subscribed 9mo ago
    Oh, you don't need to have Facebook account to have a very comprehensive and accurate profile: https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-profiles-and-should-you-be-worried/ https://www.howtogeek.com/768652/what-are-facebook-shadow-pr...
    • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
      cell phone cameras work both ways.
• crystal_revenge 9mo ago
  I'm never sure why people assume that Palantir is magically unlike the overwhelming majority of tech startups/companies I've worked at: vastly over promising what is possible to create hype and value while offering things engineering knows will never really quite work like they're advertised. To your point, but on a larger scale, over hyping Palantir has the added benefit of providing a chilling effect on public resistance. As a former government employee I had the same reaction to the Snowden leaks: sure the government might be collecting all of this (which I don't support), but I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. Incompetence might be the greatest safety we have against a true dystopia.
  • OhMeadhbh 9mo ago
    lol. came here to say pretty much the same thing.
    • forshaper 9mo ago
      I've generally held this position, but assume a sufficient combination of models could do a lot more than was possible before.
  • blurbleblurble 9mo ago
    Incompetence could also be incredibly dangerous given enough destructive willpower. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nsa-palantir-israel-gaza-ai/ https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nsa-palantir-israel-...
  • sixsevenrot 9mo ago
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    • Bender 9mo ago
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      • 9mo ago
• mikkupikku 9mo ago
  How does Palantir defeat Signal's crypto? I suppose it could be done by pwning everybody's phones, but Palantir mostly does surveillance AFAIK, I haven't heard of them getting into the phone hacking business. I think Israeli corps have that market covered.
  • blurbleblurble 9mo ago
    It doesn't, they're infiltrating the groups and/or gaining access to peoples' phones in other ways.
    • fireflash38 9mo ago
      As ever xkcd holds true - https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    • cmxch 9mo ago
      Which is not much different than how the January 6th people were caught.
  • autoexec 9mo ago
    My guess is that Signal has been compromised by the state for a very long time. The dead canary is their steadfast refusal to update their privacy policy which opens with "Signal is designed to never collect or store any sensitive information." even though they started keeping user's name, phone number, photo, and a list of their contacts permanently in the cloud years ago. Even more recently they started keeping message content itself in the cloud in some cases and have still refused to update their policy. All the data signal keeps in the cloud is protected by a pin and SGX. Pins are easy to brute force or collect, SGX could be backdoored, but in any case it's leaky and there have already been published attacks on it (and on signal). see https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice.com/en/article/signal-new-pin-feature-worries-cybersecurity-experts/ https://web.archive.org/web/20250117232443/https://www.vice.... and https://community.signalusers.org/t/sgx-cacheout-sgaxe-attack-signals-cloud-storage-and-contact-discovery-vulnerable/14892 https://community.signalusers.org/t/sgx-cacheout-sgaxe-attac...
• q34tlR4y 9mo ago
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• fudged71 9mo ago
  It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever. Maybe now is exactly the right time to publicly call out the apparent uselessness of Palantir before they fully deploy their high altitude loitering blimps and drones for pervasive surveillance and tracking protestors to their homes. (My greater theory is that the slide into authoritarianism is not linear, but rather has a hump in the middle where government speech and actions are necessarily opposite, and that they expect the contradiction to slide. Calling out the contradiction is one of the most important things to do for people to see what is going on.)
  • larkost 9mo ago
    I think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin). This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear after ICE knocked down his door (without a warrant), because they thought two other men (of Thai origin I think) were living there. The ICE agents attitude was that they must be living there, and ChongLy was hiding them. That being wrong does not cost those ICE agents anything, and that is the source of the problems.
    • freejazz 9mo ago
      But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.
      • habinero 9mo ago
        No, it's pretty clear they don't care and will never care.
• Barrin92 9mo ago
  >With all the predatory tech Palantir has produced Palantir is SAP with a hollywood marketing department. I talked to a Palantir guy five or six years ago and he said he was happy every time someone portrayed them as a bond villain in the news because the stock went up the next day. So much of tech abuse is enabled by this, and it's somewhat more pronounced in America, juvenile attitude toward technology, tech companies and CEOs. These people are laughing on their way to the bank because they convinced both critics and evangelists that their SAAS products are some inevitable genius invention
  • sosomoxie 9mo ago
    You don't need sophisticated tech to cause damage, you just need access to data. Palantir is dangerous not because it has some amazing technology that no one else has, it's that they aggregate many data sources of what would be considered private data and expose it with malicious intent (c.f. any interview with the Palantir CEO). Reading my email doesn't require amazing programming, it just requires access.
    • deaux 9mo ago
      Postgres can aggregate many data sources of private data. So can SAP. So what is it about their tech that you think makes it different? SAP is a good comparison.
      • sosomoxie 9mo ago
        Like I said, their tech is meaningless. It's the deals they cut to gain access to data and the deals they cut to expose that data.
        • deaux 9mo ago
          Why would they be the ones cutting deals to gain access to data? The Party is cutting those deals and has been for ages. Deals like these: > Spyware delivered by text > In August, the Trump administration revived a previously paused contract with Paragon Solutions, an Israeli-founded company that makes spyware. A Paragon tool called Graphite was used in Europe earlier this year to target journalists and civil society members, according to The Citizen Lab, a research group based at the University of Toronto with expertise in spyware. > Little is known about how ICE is using Paragon Solutions technology and legal groups recently sued DHS for records about it and tools made by the company Cellebrite. ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about its Paragon Solutions contract and whether it is for Graphite or another tool. > Graphite can start monitoring a phone — including encrypted messages — just by sending a message to the number. The user doesn't have to click on a link or a message. > "It has essentially complete access to your phone," said Jeramie Scott, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a legal and policy group focused on privacy. "It's an extremely dangerous surveillance tech that really goes against our Fourth Amendment protections." Deals with Flock, and so on. It makes no sense for Palantir to be the one doing those deals rather than the Party. They've been doing so for a long time now. That's the whole point of data brokers, on this site alone there are hundreds of comments and posts about how the Party abuses those to get around laws on mass surveillance - can't legally (or are too incompetent to) gather data ourselves? Just buy it off a data broker. And Snowden showed us more than a decade ago that even without them they can just.. not care about the "legal" part.
• billy99k 9mo ago
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  • computerthings 9mo ago
    [dead]
• tombert 9mo ago
  I'm far too lazy to go to a big protest or do anything terribly interesting, but at this point I'd be lying if I said I wasn't afraid publicly criticizing this administration. Palantir is weird and creepy and has infinite resources to aggregate anything that the government wants, and they could be building a registry of people who they're going to deem as "terrorist-leaning" or some such nonsense. It's not hard to find long posts of me calling the people in the Trump administration "profoundly stupid", with both my "tombert" alias and my real name [1]. I'm not that worried because if Palantir has any value they would also be able to tell that I'm deeply unambitious with these things, but it's still something that concerns me a bit. [1] Not that hard to find but I do ask you do not post it here publicly.
  • gizzlon 9mo ago
    > I'm far too lazy to go to a big protest Then you are part of the problem. Get off your ass and do something, before it's too late. FFS!
    • tombert 9mo ago
      How exactly am I part of the problem? I vote in every election I'm allowed to vote in, I didn't vote for Trump, I donate to political organizations that support causes I believe in. Because I don't go outside and hold a sign that no one is going to read I'm enabling this? Get off your high horse. My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She's a citizen now, but that doesn't appear to be something that matters to this organization. There is no way in hell I am going to put her in jeopardy just to go protest.
      • gizzlon 9mo ago
        I'm sorry, that sucks, it's a bad situation to be in :( But I think we know from history, and other (attempted) authoritarian takeovers, that it only gets worse until people stand up and push back. It's in their best interest to make everyone feel there's nothing they can do, there's no use in protesting etc etc. I do think it works! And in addition to protests in the streets, and strikes, I think consumer boycotts would work. If a percentage of people stopped buying anything other than the necessities a lot of US companies would really feel it.
• zombot 9mo ago
  I admire your optimism. They already started killing civilians openly on the street in bright daylight.
• zahlman 9mo ago
  I can easily think of reasons why an intelligence agency might not want to act immediately against members of a group they're interested in, simply because they've managed to identify those members. I'm sure that people who actually work in intelligence agencies could think of more reasons.