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Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. Al

Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. Also Palantir customers should understand that by buying Palantir services/products they are doing business with U.S. defense company. I don't say that this is positive or negative, it just clarifies the relationships and it should set the expectations.

ch4s3 6mo ago
Yeah, for sure. Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. All else being equal, if we want to live in a safe and successful society we want good/talented people working in defense. The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
- discreteevent 6mo ago
  > Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. This is true sometimes. But many times the companies and the government get together to kill people for money (The dead people's money or the taxpayers money - they don't mind which, money is money)
  - ch4s3 6mo ago
    > The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
- jmward01 6mo ago
  I don't agree with this. Just because the DOD says it is ethical doesn't mean it is so contractors have a duty to maintain ethical standards in the face of changing DOD standards. To me this means a DOD contractor decides before they go in that they will have limits and sticks to them. I think anyone working for Palantir right now should be considering the limits they have and if the company is going beyond them or not. I know that I for one do not consider their work ethical and would not work for them even though the DOD says it is ok. Understand before you sign.
  - ch4s3 6mo ago
    To a large degree you can't choose how the DoD or other letter agency uses what they buy from you. Obviously you can set some contractual guardrails but realistically if you build drones that can mount hellfire missiles you have to know that it can be misused by some 22 year old. Its tempting to believe that software is different, but once its on-prem its out of your hands.
    - jmward01 6mo ago
      The difference is scale and accountability. Surveillance tech is impacting everyone and is part of every kill chain but its not what people see so there is very little accountability for it. Building a drone that launches something has far less scale and far more accountability since its effects are visible. I personally think there is a big difference between being part of something with at least some accountability and limited scale compared to unlimited scale and no accountability. Of course many people would disagree and set their levels lower (mine are actually lower than this now) but I think that DOD contractors can think in at least this level of terms and decide to be apart of some things and not others in a meaningful way. No matter what though, a problem being hard isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up and saying 'I'm good because the DOD says it is ok'
- throwaw12 6mo ago
  Defense is good Offense, killing is not good. Current department understands that and hence renamed to department of war
colechristensen 6mo ago
I have had an active hand in designing weapons at a defense contractor (I was at one time an expert in external ballistics simulation) and I'd feel uncomfortable with the morality of working at Palantir.
- Rooster61 6mo ago
  How do you reconcile having worked in this capacity mentally? Not being snarky or judgemental, genuinely curious as to the mindset of someone who has been in this position.
  - dmitrygr 6mo ago
    "If we do not design better weapons, those countries who do will subjugate us. I'd rather that not happen." Edit: I honestly and directly answered the question and am getting downvoted for it? Lovely
  - colechristensen 6mo ago
    Pragmatism. We live in the real world, one where threat of violence and actual violence is indeed sometimes necessary. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was peaceful and we could all get along happy and free? Sure, but that's not the world we live in and sticking my head in the sand and leaving the necessary dirty work to other people would bring me no more peace than helping do the necessary things as well as possible. The most weaponlike thing I worked on was a sniper rifle program, and to me precision weapons are one of those best you can do in an imperfect world kinds of things.
  - elzbardico 6mo ago
    There's usually a bit more accountability in using a missile than using palantir systems. At least legally, a missile could only be used in defense or in a war authorized by the congress. Until recently, most of the population believed that the vast majority of America's military actions were somewhat just and legal, for noble reasons. Dark stuff like Palantir was never like that.
    - 6mo ago
Hikikomori 6mo ago
I believe they're called war companies now.
- Rooster61 6mo ago
  Until the next administration, at least
bastawhiz 6mo ago
> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company. The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" the country.
- TheCoelacanth 6mo ago
  Regardless of what the Trump administration will tell you, that's not it's name. The executive branch is not empowered to unilaterally change the name of a department.
  - Ritewut 6mo ago
    Regardless of what the name legally is, they are in fact initiating war against other nations and Palantir is one of the main players in those wars.
  - Panda4 6mo ago
    Even by ignoring the name change, that is its function. Even if it was called department of defense, it's actually department of war.
  - Planktonne 6mo ago
    If it's what they call themselves and what they're currently doing, how much does it matter what the official name is?
    - thewebguyd 6mo ago
      Because soft power is a real phenomenon and by going along with the illegal name change, we are giving legitimacy to an illegitimate act. Its anticipatory obedience. Do not obey in advance. It signals to the regime how much power they actually have.
throwaw12 6mo ago
In isolation your clarification is right, but considering that US department of War actually kills hundreds of thousands of people, there should be no question about negativity of that department
- lazyasciiart 6mo ago
  Still minimal compared to DOGE.
jimbo808 6mo ago
It's a U.S. domestic surveillance operation, disguised as a defense contractor. Or really, it's not disguised at all. The company is named after Tolkein's palantíri, so they weren't being shy about it. It's a company that exists solely to exploit a loophole that shouldn't have been upheld, effectively eliminating the fourth amendment.
- tootie 6mo ago
  Wrong. It does surveillance for multiple countries militaries. And also for private companies.
  - Manuel_D 6mo ago
    Also wrong. Palantir itself does not do surveillance. It sells software to government agencies, who use that software to conduct surveillance. If the IRS uses Excel, that doesn't mean Microsoft is actively catching tax evasion. Microsoft is selling spreadsheet software, and one of the users of that software is the IRS.
- Teever 6mo ago
  The way I see it is that sousveillance is the correct response to surveillance. If people feel threatened by this organization and the people who make it up they should start doing to them what they're doing to everyone else. Who specifically works at Palantir? What do they look like? Where do they live? What kind of vehicle do they drive? How do they spend their free time? Who do they associate with? These are all very interesting questions. Questions that can be answered and answers that can be distributed online, forever. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. No secrets.
Zigurd 6mo ago
Boeing is a US defense contractor. Yet there are plenty of Boeing employees who can have a high expectation of ethics in their jobs. You may think you are being even handed and neutral in some way. If you are actually, find me that part of Palantir that's doing good.
- jjtheblunt 6mo ago
  https://www.palantir.com/interoperability/ https://www.palantir.com/interoperability/ looks to be a computing tool used for purposes currently popular and not warcraft
  - Zigurd 6mo ago
    A "multimodal data plane?" Popular? Jargon heavy middleware for linking kill chains?
brodouevencode 6mo ago
> Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA This was obvious from the start. Not sure why people "are starting to wonder", which I don't believe either.
JumpCrisscross 6mo ago
> Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company I can't imagine any of them are confused about this. I'd expect most are proud to support our military. The line that's been crossed is the military being turned against Americans. Palantir helping ICE surveil and round up folks who turned out to be, in many cases, innocent American citizens, seems to be what's prompting–correctly, in my opinion–the crisis of faith.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
chasd00 6mo ago
> they are doing business with U.S. defense company. any time you're flying on a Boeing 737, 787, 777 etc you're doing the same. Just like every time you turn on a GE light bulb.
- Rebelgecko 6mo ago
  To pick some nits, the GE who does US defense sold off all their consumer products decades ago.
- austinjp 6mo ago
  I'm unsure of how this information is being presented. But it's entirely possible for the majority of people on Earth to avoid all those things. And it's entirely possible for many people who are (perhaps unwittingly) funding U.S. defense companies to stop doing so.
pryce 6mo ago
This makes it sound as though doing business with Palantir is akin to doing business with Lockheed Martin, RTX Corp (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman etc. This ignores important, qualitatively different ways that Palantir is worse: eg intentional white supremacist goals from Karp (Oswald Mosley fan) and Thiel (dismantling of multiculturalism), as well as Palantir's role in the surge of surveillance capitalism that treats US citizens as the opponent, rather than the more classic statist-aligned goals of US Govt/US Capital whose contempt for human life and human rights was pointed externally - so, while harmful, was still esstentially compatible with democratic principles.
PieTime 6mo ago
If they can look at their leaderships statements as positive or neutral then they are part of the problem.
tptacek 6mo ago
They're defense contractors the same way IBM and Oracle are. Palantir has a huge USG business, but they're also widely used across the Fortune 500. From the coverage of Palantir online you'd think the company actually manufactured Palantirs, but they are in fact a database consultingware company; one person described them to me as "Oracle but with the benefit of the Web 2.0 technology stack". People read things like this and a switch flips in their brain, that they're being told to be more charitable to Palantir, and that's not at all where I'm coming from. Rather: the attention paid to Palantir does a very effective job of running cover for Oracle, IBM, and Cisco. Obviously, the ludicrous marketing/communications operation Palantir is running doesn't make any of this any simpler to reason about. Imagine getting a manifesto from AWS alongside your S3 bill urging you to reconsider Apostolic succession in the traditional Catholic church; that's the vibe they've managed to create.
- eucyclos 6mo ago
  Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.
  - tptacek 6mo ago
    We all get that Oracle has literally the same naming provenance, right? Actually more so: they took the name from the Central Intelligence Agency project they started the company with. Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database was something that stirred disquiet in the press; people were worried databases were going to take over society. It was not a completely crazy concern!
    - mindslight 6mo ago
      "You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like seventeen computers a day." Seventeen. How quaint.
latentsea 6mo ago
> U.S. defense company Uh... don't you mean U.S. attack company?

ch4s3 6mo ago

Yeah, for sure. Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. All else being equal, if we want to live in a safe and successful society we want good/talented people working in defense. The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.

discreteevent 6mo ago
> Defense contracting is as good or bad as the policies of the government which is going to change over time. This is true sometimes. But many times the companies and the government get together to kill people for money (The dead people's money or the taxpayers money - they don't mind which, money is money)
- ch4s3 6mo ago
  > The trick is holding the government accountable for its policies and profligate defense spending.
jmward01 6mo ago
I don't agree with this. Just because the DOD says it is ethical doesn't mean it is so contractors have a duty to maintain ethical standards in the face of changing DOD standards. To me this means a DOD contractor decides before they go in that they will have limits and sticks to them. I think anyone working for Palantir right now should be considering the limits they have and if the company is going beyond them or not. I know that I for one do not consider their work ethical and would not work for them even though the DOD says it is ok. Understand before you sign.
- ch4s3 6mo ago
  To a large degree you can't choose how the DoD or other letter agency uses what they buy from you. Obviously you can set some contractual guardrails but realistically if you build drones that can mount hellfire missiles you have to know that it can be misused by some 22 year old. Its tempting to believe that software is different, but once its on-prem its out of your hands.
  - jmward01 6mo ago
    The difference is scale and accountability. Surveillance tech is impacting everyone and is part of every kill chain but its not what people see so there is very little accountability for it. Building a drone that launches something has far less scale and far more accountability since its effects are visible. I personally think there is a big difference between being part of something with at least some accountability and limited scale compared to unlimited scale and no accountability. Of course many people would disagree and set their levels lower (mine are actually lower than this now) but I think that DOD contractors can think in at least this level of terms and decide to be apart of some things and not others in a meaningful way. No matter what though, a problem being hard isn't an excuse for throwing your hands up and saying 'I'm good because the DOD says it is ok'
throwaw12 6mo ago
Defense is good Offense, killing is not good. Current department understands that and hence renamed to department of war

colechristensen 6mo ago

I have had an active hand in designing weapons at a defense contractor (I was at one time an expert in external ballistics simulation) and I'd feel uncomfortable with the morality of working at Palantir.

Rooster61 6mo ago
How do you reconcile having worked in this capacity mentally? Not being snarky or judgemental, genuinely curious as to the mindset of someone who has been in this position.
- dmitrygr 6mo ago
  "If we do not design better weapons, those countries who do will subjugate us. I'd rather that not happen." Edit: I honestly and directly answered the question and am getting downvoted for it? Lovely
- colechristensen 6mo ago
  Pragmatism. We live in the real world, one where threat of violence and actual violence is indeed sometimes necessary. Wouldn't it be nice if everyone was peaceful and we could all get along happy and free? Sure, but that's not the world we live in and sticking my head in the sand and leaving the necessary dirty work to other people would bring me no more peace than helping do the necessary things as well as possible. The most weaponlike thing I worked on was a sniper rifle program, and to me precision weapons are one of those best you can do in an imperfect world kinds of things.
- elzbardico 6mo ago
  There's usually a bit more accountability in using a missile than using palantir systems. At least legally, a missile could only be used in defense or in a war authorized by the congress. Until recently, most of the population believed that the vast majority of America's military actions were somewhat just and legal, for noble reasons. Dark stuff like Palantir was never like that.
  - 6mo ago

Hikikomori 6mo ago

I believe they're called war companies now.

Rooster61 6mo ago
Until the next administration, at least

bastawhiz 6mo ago

> They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company. We should stop using the word "defense". They're war contractors at a war company. The Department of Defense is the Department of War. They changed the name and then immediately started taking military action against other countries. We're in a war in Iran for reasons that nobody can quite articulate, but it certainly has nothing to do with "defending" the country.

TheCoelacanth 6mo ago
Regardless of what the Trump administration will tell you, that's not it's name. The executive branch is not empowered to unilaterally change the name of a department.
- Ritewut 6mo ago
  Regardless of what the name legally is, they are in fact initiating war against other nations and Palantir is one of the main players in those wars.
- Panda4 6mo ago
  Even by ignoring the name change, that is its function. Even if it was called department of defense, it's actually department of war.
- Planktonne 6mo ago
  If it's what they call themselves and what they're currently doing, how much does it matter what the official name is?
  - thewebguyd 6mo ago
    Because soft power is a real phenomenon and by going along with the illegal name change, we are giving legitimacy to an illegitimate act. Its anticipatory obedience. Do not obey in advance. It signals to the regime how much power they actually have.

throwaw12 6mo ago

In isolation your clarification is right, but considering that US department of War actually kills hundreds of thousands of people, there should be no question about negativity of that department

lazyasciiart 6mo ago
Still minimal compared to DOGE.

jimbo808 6mo ago

It's a U.S. domestic surveillance operation, disguised as a defense contractor. Or really, it's not disguised at all. The company is named after Tolkein's palantíri, so they weren't being shy about it. It's a company that exists solely to exploit a loophole that shouldn't have been upheld, effectively eliminating the fourth amendment.

tootie 6mo ago
Wrong. It does surveillance for multiple countries militaries. And also for private companies.
- Manuel_D 6mo ago
  Also wrong. Palantir itself does not do surveillance. It sells software to government agencies, who use that software to conduct surveillance. If the IRS uses Excel, that doesn't mean Microsoft is actively catching tax evasion. Microsoft is selling spreadsheet software, and one of the users of that software is the IRS.
Teever 6mo ago
The way I see it is that sousveillance is the correct response to surveillance. If people feel threatened by this organization and the people who make it up they should start doing to them what they're doing to everyone else. Who specifically works at Palantir? What do they look like? Where do they live? What kind of vehicle do they drive? How do they spend their free time? Who do they associate with? These are all very interesting questions. Questions that can be answered and answers that can be distributed online, forever. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. No secrets.

Zigurd 6mo ago

Boeing is a US defense contractor. Yet there are plenty of Boeing employees who can have a high expectation of ethics in their jobs. You may think you are being even handed and neutral in some way. If you are actually, find me that part of Palantir that's doing good.

jjtheblunt 6mo ago
https://www.palantir.com/interoperability/ https://www.palantir.com/interoperability/ looks to be a computing tool used for purposes currently popular and not warcraft
- Zigurd 6mo ago
  A "multimodal data plane?" Popular? Jargon heavy middleware for linking kill chains?

brodouevencode 6mo ago

> Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA This was obvious from the start. Not sure why people "are starting to wonder", which I don't believe either.

JumpCrisscross 6mo ago

> Palantir employees should understand that they are not regular employees at a regular company. They are U.S. defense contractors at an U.S. defense company I can't imagine any of them are confused about this. I'd expect most are proud to support our military. The line that's been crossed is the military being turned against Americans. Palantir helping ICE surveil and round up folks who turned out to be, in many cases, innocent American citizens, seems to be what's prompting–correctly, in my opinion–the crisis of faith.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

chasd00 6mo ago

> they are doing business with U.S. defense company. any time you're flying on a Boeing 737, 787, 777 etc you're doing the same. Just like every time you turn on a GE light bulb.

Rebelgecko 6mo ago
To pick some nits, the GE who does US defense sold off all their consumer products decades ago.
austinjp 6mo ago
I'm unsure of how this information is being presented. But it's entirely possible for the majority of people on Earth to avoid all those things. And it's entirely possible for many people who are (perhaps unwittingly) funding U.S. defense companies to stop doing so.

pryce 6mo ago

This makes it sound as though doing business with Palantir is akin to doing business with Lockheed Martin, RTX Corp (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman etc. This ignores important, qualitatively different ways that Palantir is worse: eg intentional white supremacist goals from Karp (Oswald Mosley fan) and Thiel (dismantling of multiculturalism), as well as Palantir's role in the surge of surveillance capitalism that treats US citizens as the opponent, rather than the more classic statist-aligned goals of US Govt/US Capital whose contempt for human life and human rights was pointed externally - so, while harmful, was still esstentially compatible with democratic principles.

PieTime 6mo ago

If they can look at their leaderships statements as positive or neutral then they are part of the problem.

tptacek 6mo ago

They're defense contractors the same way IBM and Oracle are. Palantir has a huge USG business, but they're also widely used across the Fortune 500. From the coverage of Palantir online you'd think the company actually manufactured Palantirs, but they are in fact a database consultingware company; one person described them to me as "Oracle but with the benefit of the Web 2.0 technology stack". People read things like this and a switch flips in their brain, that they're being told to be more charitable to Palantir, and that's not at all where I'm coming from. Rather: the attention paid to Palantir does a very effective job of running cover for Oracle, IBM, and Cisco. Obviously, the ludicrous marketing/communications operation Palantir is running doesn't make any of this any simpler to reason about. Imagine getting a manifesto from AWS alongside your S3 bill urging you to reconsider Apostolic succession in the traditional Catholic church; that's the vibe they've managed to create.

eucyclos 6mo ago
Palantir also deliberately choose a name with sinister overtones, they're just short of calling themselves "torment Nexus builders Inc" or something. I used to think their logic was that someone would build it so it might as well be people who saw the moral hazard, but now I think they're just going all in on the evil overlord brand. Summer kind of pied piper thing maybe.
- tptacek 6mo ago
  We all get that Oracle has literally the same naming provenance, right? Actually more so: they took the name from the Central Intelligence Agency project they started the company with. Every time this comes up, I find myself asking, "what do you think a secret phase conjugate tracking system is for?" Maybe it's just that I'm older than the median here, but when I was a kid, the mere concept of a relational database was something that stirred disquiet in the press; people were worried databases were going to take over society. It was not a completely crazy concern!
  - mindslight 6mo ago
    "You could sit at home, and do like absolutely nothing, and your name goes through like seventeen computers a day." Seventeen. How quaint.

latentsea 6mo ago

> U.S. defense company Uh... don't you mean U.S. attack company?