4 ms·

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 wh

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
[flagged]
- Bender 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - gedy 9mo ago
    Yeah if deportation is now Nazism, then the Allies after WW2 were Nazis too for the millions of mass displaced persons to match new borders.
  - filoeleven 9mo ago
    The nazi transformation didn't happen over the course of half an hour. Or one election cycle, even. The history is rhyming pretty hard right now.
    - Bender 9mo ago
      Hitlers security group that transformed a small section of the SS into brutal killing machines happened rather fast and that is what people are talking about when they are digging up the Totenkopf wearing brown shirts. These never existed in the United States of America and never will. Not even the modern day skin-head neo-nazi's or the neo-nazi militias could be compared. They would have been extinguished by the SS nearly instantly for daring to wear the insignia.
      - rubyn00bie 9mo ago
        The brownshirts were actually the SA, a police force Hitler originally used for years to brutalize people before the formation of the SS. The SA are very similar to modern day ICE being made up of militant supporters (like proud boys, J6’ers pardoned) who are willing to commit violence without provocation or any fear of being prosecuted for their violence. The SA was eventually hung out to dry, because Hitler feared Ernst Röhm had too much power (among other reasons)— by executing SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer)… To say the violence of the SS was quick to be extreme really forgets the ten plus year road they took to get there. I’d really suggest, as disheartening and sad as it is, to read about all this yourself. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the US right now are astonishing. It’s almost as if someone in the White House is using history as a playbook. Which sort of goes full circle since Hitler took a lot from how brutal and racist the US towards slaves and non-whites.
- shrubble 9mo ago
  The algorithm was sorting punch cards and then putting the cards in different stacks on a table. We can only hope that the surveillance state is still working with the same algorithm…
GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
doing Bad Things poorly is still doing Bad Things.
newsclues 9mo ago
Because palantirs selling proposition is: you can’t find the answers in your own data, but we can.
roenxi 9mo ago
> ... I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. It isn't usually a question of efficiency, it is a question of damage. Technically there is an argument that something like the holocaust was inefficiently executed, but still a good reason to actively prevent governments having ready-to-use data on hand about people's ethnic origin. A lot of the same observations probably apply to the ICE situation too. One of the big problems with the mass-migration programs has always been that there is no reasonable way to undo that sort of thing because it is far too risky for the government to be primed to identify and deport large groups of people. For all the fire and thunder the Trump administration probably isn't going to accomplish very much, but at great cost.
propaganja 9mo ago
They're not trying to use the data to act efficiently (or in the public good for that matter), and they sure as fuck don't want you to see it. They're trying to make sure that they have dirt on anyone who becomes their enemy in the future.
asdfman123 9mo ago
If they throw out things like due process and reasonable doubt they can do a whole lot with the data they've collected. That may sound hyperbolic but I hope it's obvious to most people by now that it's not.
- radicaldreamer 9mo ago
  They can do parallel construction or use "undercover" informants etc.
  - edoceo 9mo ago
    Fuzzy Dunlop (it's from The Wire). Their CI was a tennis ball (with an unauthorized camera inside).
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics or something, data so aggregate you couldn't determine much from it, but still tells you "holy shit they prevented something crazy" levels of information, harder said than done without revealing too much.
- wil421 9mo ago
  In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.
  - giancarlostoro 9mo ago
    Would be nice if we had some form of statistics in a way that wouldnt endanger any of the intel that just tells the general public "we dont just sit here collecting PB of data daily"
    - dragonwriter 9mo ago
      Any statistics that didn't endanger the intel would also be unverifiable and easily falsified, and therefore not particularly trustworthy for the proposed purpose.
- rtpg 9mo ago
  The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks! There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least. It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.
  - lazide 9mo ago
    Secrecy enables several things, including: - abuse - incompetence - getting away with breaking rules and laws Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons. For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere! Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit. In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially). Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).
AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
>I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. As a former intelligence officer with combat time I promise you there are A LOT of actions happening based on that data.
Eupolemos 9mo ago
Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible. Until we learned that they were.
- XorNot 9mo ago
  Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else. I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".
  - fao_ 9mo ago
    Why are you asking here, versus going to Google and reading the original article from The Guardian? Or the numerous Wikipedia links that are on this page?
    - bdangubic 9mo ago
      that takes effort :)
    - XorNot 9mo ago
      Because saying "experts said things were impossible and then Snowden" could mean literally anything. Which experts, what things? Like I said: I've read a ton of stuff, and apparently what people are sure they read is very different to what I read.
      - browningstreet 9mo ago
        You can read about PRISM, Upstream, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, NSA Section 215 (PATRIOT Act) in a lot of places. But essentially they collected all call records and tapped the Internet backbone and stored as much traffic as they could. It’s not all automatic but it’s overly streamlined given the promises of court orders. Which were rubber stamped.
heavyset_go 9mo ago
No, incompetence is terrifying. No one wants to get caught in a machine driven by imbeciles who don't care about truth or honoring the Constitution. Competence is also terrifying, but for different reasons.
cyanydeez 9mo ago
I see palntir as a techno whitewashing Mckinsey consultant. But the tech is there to make a much bigger problem than prior art, halucinations et al. They are still dangerous even if theyre over promising because even placebos are dangerous when the displace real medical interventions.
throwaway173738 9mo ago
It sure would be convenient if they were always ineffective. Sadly there have been periods in history where governments have set themselves to brutality with incredible effectiveness.
GPurePro 9mo ago
You've never seen it because when it's efficient you won't see it.
alter_synapse 9mo ago
[dead]
tempsaasexample 9mo ago
I honestly tempt fate for fun to see how good police surveillance tech is the last few years. I let one of my cars expire the registration a few months Everytime, because I'm lazy and because I want to see if I get flagged by a popup system Everytime a police officer passes near me. My commute car is out of registration 3 months right now. And old cop friend told me they basically never tow unless it's 6 months. I pay the $50 late fee once a year and keep doing my experiment for the last 6-7 years. Still no real signs they care. My fun car has out of state plates for 10 years now. Ive been pulled over once for speeding, and told the officer I just bought it. I've never registered it since I bought it from a friend a decade ago. They let me go. It makes me wonder if one day they'll say "sir, we have plate scanners of this vehicle driving around this state for a year straight.. pay a fine." Not yet.
- heavyset_go 9mo ago
  Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when. In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest. Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.
peripitea 9mo ago
Except you don't need to solve any remotely hard technical problems for the capabilities to be terrifying here.
somenameforme 9mo ago
I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous. As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw [2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illegal-searches-secret-evidence/ https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...
florkbork 9mo ago
One of the problems is the fundamentals of their tech works "just enough". IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8 - semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database. - feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm - push to human operators You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken! But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction? When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem. To take a non US example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme Debt calculations were flat out wrong The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover) It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions. It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it. No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions. If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.

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

[flagged]

Bender 9mo ago
[flagged]
- gedy 9mo ago
  Yeah if deportation is now Nazism, then the Allies after WW2 were Nazis too for the millions of mass displaced persons to match new borders.
- filoeleven 9mo ago
  The nazi transformation didn't happen over the course of half an hour. Or one election cycle, even. The history is rhyming pretty hard right now.
  - Bender 9mo ago
    Hitlers security group that transformed a small section of the SS into brutal killing machines happened rather fast and that is what people are talking about when they are digging up the Totenkopf wearing brown shirts. These never existed in the United States of America and never will. Not even the modern day skin-head neo-nazi's or the neo-nazi militias could be compared. They would have been extinguished by the SS nearly instantly for daring to wear the insignia.
    - rubyn00bie 9mo ago
      The brownshirts were actually the SA, a police force Hitler originally used for years to brutalize people before the formation of the SS. The SA are very similar to modern day ICE being made up of militant supporters (like proud boys, J6’ers pardoned) who are willing to commit violence without provocation or any fear of being prosecuted for their violence. The SA was eventually hung out to dry, because Hitler feared Ernst Röhm had too much power (among other reasons)— by executing SA leadership during the Night of the Long Knives (die Nacht der langen Messer)… To say the violence of the SS was quick to be extreme really forgets the ten plus year road they took to get there. I’d really suggest, as disheartening and sad as it is, to read about all this yourself. The parallels between Nazi Germany and the US right now are astonishing. It’s almost as if someone in the White House is using history as a playbook. Which sort of goes full circle since Hitler took a lot from how brutal and racist the US towards slaves and non-whites.
shrubble 9mo ago
The algorithm was sorting punch cards and then putting the cards in different stacks on a table. We can only hope that the surveillance state is still working with the same algorithm…

GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago

doing Bad Things poorly is still doing Bad Things.

newsclues 9mo ago

Because palantirs selling proposition is: you can’t find the answers in your own data, but we can.

roenxi 9mo ago

> ... I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. It isn't usually a question of efficiency, it is a question of damage. Technically there is an argument that something like the holocaust was inefficiently executed, but still a good reason to actively prevent governments having ready-to-use data on hand about people's ethnic origin. A lot of the same observations probably apply to the ICE situation too. One of the big problems with the mass-migration programs has always been that there is no reasonable way to undo that sort of thing because it is far too risky for the government to be primed to identify and deport large groups of people. For all the fire and thunder the Trump administration probably isn't going to accomplish very much, but at great cost.

propaganja 9mo ago

They're not trying to use the data to act efficiently (or in the public good for that matter), and they sure as fuck don't want you to see it. They're trying to make sure that they have dirt on anyone who becomes their enemy in the future.

asdfman123 9mo ago

If they throw out things like due process and reasonable doubt they can do a whole lot with the data they've collected. That may sound hyperbolic but I hope it's obvious to most people by now that it's not.

radicaldreamer 9mo ago
They can do parallel construction or use "undercover" informants etc.
- edoceo 9mo ago
  Fuzzy Dunlop (it's from The Wire). Their CI was a tennis ball (with an unauthorized camera inside).

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics or something, data so aggregate you couldn't determine much from it, but still tells you "holy shit they prevented something crazy" levels of information, harder said than done without revealing too much.

wil421 9mo ago
In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.
- giancarlostoro 9mo ago
  Would be nice if we had some form of statistics in a way that wouldnt endanger any of the intel that just tells the general public "we dont just sit here collecting PB of data daily"
  - dragonwriter 9mo ago
    Any statistics that didn't endanger the intel would also be unverifiable and easily falsified, and therefore not particularly trustworthy for the proposed purpose.
rtpg 9mo ago
The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks! There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least. It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.
- lazide 9mo ago
  Secrecy enables several things, including: - abuse - incompetence - getting away with breaking rules and laws Sometimes, those are desirable or necessary for national security/pragmatic reasons. For instance, good luck running an effective covert operation without being abusive to someone or breaking rules and laws somewhere! Usually (80/20 rule) it’s just used to be shitty and make a mess, or be incompetent while pretending to be hot shit. In a real war, these things usually get sorted out quickly because the results matter (existentially). Less so when no one can figure out who the actual enemy is, or what we’re even fighting (if anything).

AndrewKemendo 9mo ago

>I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected. As a former intelligence officer with combat time I promise you there are A LOT of actions happening based on that data.

Eupolemos 9mo ago

Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination. It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible. Until we learned that they were.

XorNot 9mo ago
Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else. I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".
- fao_ 9mo ago
  Why are you asking here, versus going to Google and reading the original article from The Guardian? Or the numerous Wikipedia links that are on this page?
  - bdangubic 9mo ago
    that takes effort :)
  - XorNot 9mo ago
    Because saying "experts said things were impossible and then Snowden" could mean literally anything. Which experts, what things? Like I said: I've read a ton of stuff, and apparently what people are sure they read is very different to what I read.
    - browningstreet 9mo ago
      You can read about PRISM, Upstream, FAIRVIEW, STORMBREW, NSA Section 215 (PATRIOT Act) in a lot of places. But essentially they collected all call records and tapped the Internet backbone and stored as much traffic as they could. It’s not all automatic but it’s overly streamlined given the promises of court orders. Which were rubber stamped.

heavyset_go 9mo ago

No, incompetence is terrifying. No one wants to get caught in a machine driven by imbeciles who don't care about truth or honoring the Constitution. Competence is also terrifying, but for different reasons.

cyanydeez 9mo ago

I see palntir as a techno whitewashing Mckinsey consultant. But the tech is there to make a much bigger problem than prior art, halucinations et al. They are still dangerous even if theyre over promising because even placebos are dangerous when the displace real medical interventions.

throwaway173738 9mo ago

It sure would be convenient if they were always ineffective. Sadly there have been periods in history where governments have set themselves to brutality with incredible effectiveness.

GPurePro 9mo ago

You've never seen it because when it's efficient you won't see it.

alter_synapse 9mo ago

[dead]

tempsaasexample 9mo ago

I honestly tempt fate for fun to see how good police surveillance tech is the last few years. I let one of my cars expire the registration a few months Everytime, because I'm lazy and because I want to see if I get flagged by a popup system Everytime a police officer passes near me. My commute car is out of registration 3 months right now. And old cop friend told me they basically never tow unless it's 6 months. I pay the $50 late fee once a year and keep doing my experiment for the last 6-7 years. Still no real signs they care. My fun car has out of state plates for 10 years now. Ive been pulled over once for speeding, and told the officer I just bought it. I've never registered it since I bought it from a friend a decade ago. They let me go. It makes me wonder if one day they'll say "sir, we have plate scanners of this vehicle driving around this state for a year straight.. pay a fine." Not yet.

heavyset_go 9mo ago
Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when. In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest. Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.

peripitea 9mo ago

Except you don't need to solve any remotely hard technical problems for the capabilities to be terrifying here.

somenameforme 9mo ago

I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous. As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2] [1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw [2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illegal-searches-secret-evidence/ https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...

florkbork 9mo ago

One of the problems is the fundamentals of their tech works "just enough". IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8 - semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database. - feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm - push to human operators You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken! But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction? When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem. To take a non US example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme Debt calculations were flat out wrong The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover) It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions. It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it. No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions. If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.