8 ms·

HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surveillance Complex

107 points by dfc 13y ago

fixxer 13y ago
I wonder how much of this news has resulted in an entirely new cohort of software engineers applying for jobs with these companies? I'd bet the HR departments at places like Booz are extra busy right now.
- Homunculiheaded 13y ago
  For me it's had an almost opposite effect. Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I learned a ton in that area. I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start implementing them yourself. Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important. I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption, anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    That's been closer to my experience as well. I feel like I have a moral obligation to use my ability to learn and hack on technology, to help people protect their privacy. I'm not necessarily going to be implementing anything new, but at the very least I feel like I should learn Tor, TrueCrypt, I2P, GPG, etc. at a very deep level, then offer to teach other people, and help with advocacy and promotion for this stuff.
  - ahlatimer 13y ago
    For reference, here's the Steve Yegge talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 I thoroughly enjoyed it.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    I suspect the effect it has had on you also effects many, perhaps even most, other programmers as well, but I would still wager that their HR departments are particularly busy right now. Even if only a minority of developers are receptive to working on such systems (and I don't think that, outside the West Coast/Bay Area/Startup/HN bubble, these people are actually a minority. I suspect that we are actually the ones that are outnumbered), that minority suddenly being made to think about these companies has probably given them a boost.
- myndless 13y ago
  I can only speak to my own experiences, but at least in my case the news has really turned me off to these companies. A year or so ago I turned down an offer from Palantir due largely to privacy and ethical concerns, and since that time every single instance of Palantir showing up in the news has made me think to myself "Man I'm glad I didn't take that offer." I suspect I am not alone in my desire to make the world a better place through hacking and technology. Then again I also suspect that there is some set of less scrupulous engineers out there following the dollars. In that case I would guess that the effect of this kind of publicity is polarizing, but not in a single direction.
  - martinlandau 13y ago
    It was great to read your post, I helped a kid called Palmer Luckey 4 years ago with VR HMD ideas. He took my help and others and has now took funding from Joe Lonsdale, coufounder of Palantir, and I lay awake at nights at how has this happened? This cool open source kid that we all liked selling out to the darkside of people like lonsdale and In Q tel, why couldn't he be MORE like YOU? When he realized it was Palantir Types throwing the money at him, I wish he could have been a cool jedi like you and said no thanks, I don't want your money, you may have good objectives at heart Palantir, but there is just too much negativity about stuff like you guys do and I don't want any part of it. That you had ethical and moral character that I see lacking in Palmer Luckey makes me still have hope in mankind.
- dfc 13y ago
  It may have created a slight uptick in applications but not a lot. I can't imagine that there were many people interested in working in this field that were unaware of Palantir or BAH before the news coverage. BAH and Palantir are big names in the government IT space.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rdudekul 13y ago
This is scary stuff! I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now. If Palantir is getting investments/revenues from government, I wonder if Facebook too is getting some.
- ihsw 13y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of incestuous guild of business partners/software developers that flow between each organization (eg: ex-gov employees working for Palantir/Facebook/etc, vice versa).
  - samstave 13y ago
    FB is riddled with .gov/,mil employees. Their head of security went from NSA to FB to NSA. They are unscrupulous.
  - VladRussian2 13y ago
    {x: has_security_clearance(x) = true}
- psbp 13y ago
  "I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now." Just now?
- nir 13y ago
  Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - boi_v2 13y ago
    In FB you use your wall to publish the info you want to share openly, the other important stuff like private chats, online behavior (clicked links, friends you visit, photos you see, time of login/logout), groups you participate, GPS locations of places you've been or are and etc are not supposed to be open to anyone.
ganeumann 13y ago
Curious to know where the Ntrepid $2.8 million "sock puppet" tech is spreading propaganda. I have noticed many of the same irrational comments being made on articles about Snowden in the MSM and then being voted up more than they seem to deserve (See, for instance, the comments on any NYTimes article on Snowden. Not that the NYTimes comment sections are any model of rationality normally.) I'm biased so maybe I'm seeing things where there isn't anything, but if the tech was funded, then it's being deployed somewhere. Where other than the MSM would it make sense to deploy it, and how would the MSM identify sock puppets if they were targeted?
- LoganCale 13y ago
  I don't have a source to back this up right now, but the claim when the sockpuppet program first became news was that they were only operating in non-English communities, e.g. terrorist-affiliated web forums, and that they said it would be illegal to use domestically, therefore they avoided any English usage. Whether that's actually true… who knows.
  - mindcrime 13y ago
    There's a pretty good article on it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...
marze 13y ago
The sock puppets are most interesting. Would any be posting here?
- mindcrime 13y ago
  I don't know, but it's interesting to ponder how one would detect them if they were. I'd love to see a project to scrape HN comments and try to auto-detect the sockpuppet posts. It's a bit scary though, since a false positive on that could really hurt someone's reputation... if I wrote something like that, I'd actually be a little bit reluctant to share it. :-(
  - samstave 13y ago
    We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response. Other accounts post pro-government comments again from young accounts. We ban them pretty quickly. If you look at a users comment history and they are clearly having an agenda to post - they are either misguided, uninformed or sock-puppets. As a mod of a ~large /r/ I wish I could see the IPs of the people posting. Specifically, if I could see if they are .mil (i.e. Eglin) IPs - so I could ban the whole range.
    - jlgreco 13y ago
      > We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response. So basically the weekly "Check out my dog! He served with me in Afghanistan!" posts on Reddit from hour-old accounts?
      - samstave 13y ago
        Yes, those and the accounts that come in attempting to shut down criticism and discussion on other topics where their is clearly a national narrative the MSM is trying to push.
sheri 13y ago
"Bonesaw"?? Really? That sounds like a McBain movie from the Simpsons.
- skore 13y ago
  I particularly enjoyed the use of the word "holistic" in the sentence "a holistic approach to target discovery".
- bitwize 13y ago
  BOOOONESAAAAW IS RAAAAIDY!
skore 13y ago
I saw the best minds of my generation write software to surveil and control the other minds of my generation.
- 3am 13y ago
  This is not a new phenomenon.
  - skore 13y ago
    Agreed, sadly.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- rayiner 13y ago
  If we are going to attack every company that isn't morally virtuous, then there won't be much to talk about here on HN. E.g. building products for the advertising industry might seem less harmful than building products for the defense/intelligence industries, but how much economic harm is caused by an industry that preys on cognitive biases to get people to overpay for otherwise fungible commodity products? There is also a double standard here, isn't it? Working on Big Data technology that has applications for spying by the military = evil. Working on search or data classification technology that has applications to obsoleting workers and putting them out of a job = not evil? It's not a productive path to start treading down. Or at the very least, something about glass houses or "let he who has not sinned cast the first stone."
  - dfc 13y ago
    Add any company associated with the fashion industry to the list of companies that are far from virtuous. If you have not seen "Girl Model" I highly recommend it. I never had any illusions that modeling was a virtuous industry but this documentary really opened my eyes to the evil inherent in the industry.
  - skore 13y ago
Permit 13y ago
I cannot believe we are doing this again. Just because Palantir was asked by Aaron Barr to use their technology against Greenwald does not mean that they did. Palantir later confirmed that their technology didn't even have the ability to do what Aaron Barr was asking. This is the second smear against Palantir in three days that cites an email without even showing the email to give you some context. They also don't link to Palantirs response to these claims. Please approach this with some level of skepticism.
- glesica 13y ago
  Just as we should approach Palantir itself with a great deal of skepticism... A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be terribly trustworthy. I realize this community loves the idea of Palantir and many people probably know people who are involved. But why should Palantir get a free pass to go about their business with excessive secrecy in an area that features massive abuse without the additional scrutiny that must accompany such behavior?
  - Permit 13y ago
    A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be terribly trustworthy. Their business does not center around tracking down terrorists. They do all things "Big Data". That includes finance and tracking the source of E-Coli outbreaks. The problem is that people like yourself know nothing about the company, yet still feel qualified to condemn them.
    - wavefunction 13y ago
      >>Their business does not center around tracking down terrorists. You're right, just tracking the rest of us.
    - nazka 13y ago
      Well just to cut the apple in two pieces. Maybe for this point it's the fault of Palantir. Their business is in the finance, government with secret projects, and others B2B areas that are far away of any american's ear. For this reason they didn't manage their public image, and now you have this exploding in their hands... So at the end, they deserve what they get.
cliveowen 13y ago
An interesting article for sure, but I'm confused about the point the author wanted to make. Many countries employ so called cyber-weapons, and if you want a chance to deploy your malware you have to have 0-day exploits. And wherever there's a demand for high-skilled services, there's someone ready to offer it, at a price. Also, even if you're an activist trying to unmask some kind of governmental conspiracy, disseminating credit card codes and threatening FBI agents isn't going to buy you any sympathy from any court. As to Michael Hastings's death it's early to make any kind of analysis and, as of now, it's nothing but wild speculation.
- martinlandau 13y ago
  ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_shouldn_t_belong_to_a_robot.html Here was Suarez at a recent ted talk mentioning robotic control of lethal weapons. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/like-a-swarm-of-lethal-bugs-the-most-terrifying-drone-video-yet/273270/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/like-a... Here is a nice video of Drone insects with lethal kill abilities. I know some people at the pentagon, USAF, etc, am on a base now. These people really do have good intentions and are trying to do good things I believe. However as Snowden just said in some interview, part of his "job" was to find and document infrastructure weaknesses that could be targeted in a Stuxnet kind of way. All governments certainly have all this data stored, best way to use cyberattacks to take down a foreign government, etc etc So think about the future, where the AI's take over, and these NSA types all over the planet who were just trying to serve thier citizens and thier governments have all the best ways to destroy mankind and his infrastructure and other systems stored all over the place, what made sense for various goverments/technologies controlled by human beings and thier citizens, in the flick of a switch literally becomes total madness in a world where a cyber AI can go through these systems and use them against mankind collectively. it would just be too tempting for the AI not to use it to control or eliminate us. Folks like Rheingold and annissimov are very worried about this future and stress trying to make sure these future AI's are very benevolent and compassionate. LOL! It is for this reason we should have far more transparency and international agreements to limit this kind of stuff, not to give one nation state and edge over the other, but to prevent a higher intelligence from using all the nation states data/technology against all of mankind. I don't think we stop what is coming in another hundred years or 2. LOL!

107 points by dfc 13y ago

I wonder how much of this news has resulted in an entirely new cohort of software engineers applying for jobs with these companies? I'd bet the HR departments at places like Booz are extra busy right now.

Homunculiheaded 13y ago
For me it's had an almost opposite effect. Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I learned a ton in that area. I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start implementing them yourself. Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important. I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption, anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mindcrime 13y ago
  That's been closer to my experience as well. I feel like I have a moral obligation to use my ability to learn and hack on technology, to help people protect their privacy. I'm not necessarily going to be implementing anything new, but at the very least I feel like I should learn Tor, TrueCrypt, I2P, GPG, etc. at a very deep level, then offer to teach other people, and help with advocacy and promotion for this stuff.
- ahlatimer 13y ago
  For reference, here's the Steve Yegge talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8 I thoroughly enjoyed it.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I suspect the effect it has had on you also effects many, perhaps even most, other programmers as well, but I would still wager that their HR departments are particularly busy right now. Even if only a minority of developers are receptive to working on such systems (and I don't think that, outside the West Coast/Bay Area/Startup/HN bubble, these people are actually a minority. I suspect that we are actually the ones that are outnumbered), that minority suddenly being made to think about these companies has probably given them a boost.
myndless 13y ago
I can only speak to my own experiences, but at least in my case the news has really turned me off to these companies. A year or so ago I turned down an offer from Palantir due largely to privacy and ethical concerns, and since that time every single instance of Palantir showing up in the news has made me think to myself "Man I'm glad I didn't take that offer." I suspect I am not alone in my desire to make the world a better place through hacking and technology. Then again I also suspect that there is some set of less scrupulous engineers out there following the dollars. In that case I would guess that the effect of this kind of publicity is polarizing, but not in a single direction.
- martinlandau 13y ago
  It was great to read your post, I helped a kid called Palmer Luckey 4 years ago with VR HMD ideas. He took my help and others and has now took funding from Joe Lonsdale, coufounder of Palantir, and I lay awake at nights at how has this happened? This cool open source kid that we all liked selling out to the darkside of people like lonsdale and In Q tel, why couldn't he be MORE like YOU? When he realized it was Palantir Types throwing the money at him, I wish he could have been a cool jedi like you and said no thanks, I don't want your money, you may have good objectives at heart Palantir, but there is just too much negativity about stuff like you guys do and I don't want any part of it. That you had ethical and moral character that I see lacking in Palmer Luckey makes me still have hope in mankind.
dfc 13y ago
It may have created a slight uptick in applications but not a lot. I can't imagine that there were many people interested in working in this field that were unaware of Palantir or BAH before the news coverage. BAH and Palantir are big names in the government IT space.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

rdudekul 13y ago

This is scary stuff! I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now. If Palantir is getting investments/revenues from government, I wonder if Facebook too is getting some.

ihsw 13y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of incestuous guild of business partners/software developers that flow between each organization (eg: ex-gov employees working for Palantir/Facebook/etc, vice versa).
- samstave 13y ago
  FB is riddled with .gov/,mil employees. Their head of security went from NSA to FB to NSA. They are unscrupulous.
- VladRussian2 13y ago
  {x: has_security_clearance(x) = true}
psbp 13y ago
"I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now." Just now?
nir 13y ago
Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- boi_v2 13y ago
  In FB you use your wall to publish the info you want to share openly, the other important stuff like private chats, online behavior (clicked links, friends you visit, photos you see, time of login/logout), groups you participate, GPS locations of places you've been or are and etc are not supposed to be open to anyone.

ganeumann 13y ago

Curious to know where the Ntrepid $2.8 million "sock puppet" tech is spreading propaganda. I have noticed many of the same irrational comments being made on articles about Snowden in the MSM and then being voted up more than they seem to deserve (See, for instance, the comments on any NYTimes article on Snowden. Not that the NYTimes comment sections are any model of rationality normally.) I'm biased so maybe I'm seeing things where there isn't anything, but if the tech was funded, then it's being deployed somewhere. Where other than the MSM would it make sense to deploy it, and how would the MSM identify sock puppets if they were targeted?

LoganCale 13y ago
I don't have a source to back this up right now, but the claim when the sockpuppet program first became news was that they were only operating in non-English communities, e.g. terrorist-affiliated web forums, and that they said it would be illegal to use domestically, therefore they avoided any English usage. Whether that's actually true… who knows.
- mindcrime 13y ago
  There's a pretty good article on it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-social-networks http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...

marze 13y ago

The sock puppets are most interesting. Would any be posting here?

mindcrime 13y ago
I don't know, but it's interesting to ponder how one would detect them if they were. I'd love to see a project to scrape HN comments and try to auto-detect the sockpuppet posts. It's a bit scary though, since a false positive on that could really hurt someone's reputation... if I wrote something like that, I'd actually be a little bit reluctant to share it. :-(
- samstave 13y ago
  We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response. Other accounts post pro-government comments again from young accounts. We ban them pretty quickly. If you look at a users comment history and they are clearly having an agenda to post - they are either misguided, uninformed or sock-puppets. As a mod of a ~large /r/ I wish I could see the IPs of the people posting. Specifically, if I could see if they are .mil (i.e. Eglin) IPs - so I could ban the whole range.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    > We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response. So basically the weekly "Check out my dog! He served with me in Afghanistan!" posts on Reddit from hour-old accounts?
    - samstave 13y ago
      Yes, those and the accounts that come in attempting to shut down criticism and discussion on other topics where their is clearly a national narrative the MSM is trying to push.

sheri 13y ago

"Bonesaw"?? Really? That sounds like a McBain movie from the Simpsons.

skore 13y ago
I particularly enjoyed the use of the word "holistic" in the sentence "a holistic approach to target discovery".
bitwize 13y ago
BOOOONESAAAAW IS RAAAAIDY!

skore 13y ago

I saw the best minds of my generation write software to surveil and control the other minds of my generation.

3am 13y ago
This is not a new phenomenon.
- skore 13y ago
  Agreed, sadly.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
rayiner 13y ago
If we are going to attack every company that isn't morally virtuous, then there won't be much to talk about here on HN. E.g. building products for the advertising industry might seem less harmful than building products for the defense/intelligence industries, but how much economic harm is caused by an industry that preys on cognitive biases to get people to overpay for otherwise fungible commodity products? There is also a double standard here, isn't it? Working on Big Data technology that has applications for spying by the military = evil. Working on search or data classification technology that has applications to obsoleting workers and putting them out of a job = not evil? It's not a productive path to start treading down. Or at the very least, something about glass houses or "let he who has not sinned cast the first stone."
- dfc 13y ago
  Add any company associated with the fashion industry to the list of companies that are far from virtuous. If you have not seen "Girl Model" I highly recommend it. I never had any illusions that modeling was a virtuous industry but this documentary really opened my eyes to the evil inherent in the industry.
- skore 13y ago

Permit 13y ago

I cannot believe we are doing this again. Just because Palantir was asked by Aaron Barr to use their technology against Greenwald does not mean that they did. Palantir later confirmed that their technology didn't even have the ability to do what Aaron Barr was asking. This is the second smear against Palantir in three days that cites an email without even showing the email to give you some context. They also don't link to Palantirs response to these claims. Please approach this with some level of skepticism.

glesica 13y ago
Just as we should approach Palantir itself with a great deal of skepticism... A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be terribly trustworthy. I realize this community loves the idea of Palantir and many people probably know people who are involved. But why should Palantir get a free pass to go about their business with excessive secrecy in an area that features massive abuse without the additional scrutiny that must accompany such behavior?
- Permit 13y ago
  A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be terribly trustworthy. Their business does not center around tracking down terrorists. They do all things "Big Data". That includes finance and tracking the source of E-Coli outbreaks. The problem is that people like yourself know nothing about the company, yet still feel qualified to condemn them.
  - wavefunction 13y ago
    >>Their business does not center around tracking down terrorists. You're right, just tracking the rest of us.
  - nazka 13y ago
    Well just to cut the apple in two pieces. Maybe for this point it's the fault of Palantir. Their business is in the finance, government with secret projects, and others B2B areas that are far away of any american's ear. For this reason they didn't manage their public image, and now you have this exploding in their hands... So at the end, they deserve what they get.

cliveowen 13y ago

An interesting article for sure, but I'm confused about the point the author wanted to make. Many countries employ so called cyber-weapons, and if you want a chance to deploy your malware you have to have 0-day exploits. And wherever there's a demand for high-skilled services, there's someone ready to offer it, at a price. Also, even if you're an activist trying to unmask some kind of governmental conspiracy, disseminating credit card codes and threatening FBI agents isn't going to buy you any sympathy from any court. As to Michael Hastings's death it's early to make any kind of analysis and, as of now, it's nothing but wild speculation.

martinlandau 13y ago
ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_shouldn_t_belong_to_a_robot.html Here was Suarez at a recent ted talk mentioning robotic control of lethal weapons. http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/like-a-swarm-of-lethal-bugs-the-most-terrifying-drone-video-yet/273270/ http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/like-a... Here is a nice video of Drone insects with lethal kill abilities. I know some people at the pentagon, USAF, etc, am on a base now. These people really do have good intentions and are trying to do good things I believe. However as Snowden just said in some interview, part of his "job" was to find and document infrastructure weaknesses that could be targeted in a Stuxnet kind of way. All governments certainly have all this data stored, best way to use cyberattacks to take down a foreign government, etc etc So think about the future, where the AI's take over, and these NSA types all over the planet who were just trying to serve thier citizens and thier governments have all the best ways to destroy mankind and his infrastructure and other systems stored all over the place, what made sense for various goverments/technologies controlled by human beings and thier citizens, in the flick of a switch literally becomes total madness in a world where a cyber AI can go through these systems and use them against mankind collectively. it would just be too tempting for the AI not to use it to control or eliminate us. Folks like Rheingold and annissimov are very worried about this future and stress trying to make sure these future AI's are very benevolent and compassionate. LOL! It is for this reason we should have far more transparency and international agreements to limit this kind of stuff, not to give one nation state and edge over the other, but to prevent a higher intelligence from using all the nation states data/technology against all of mankind. I don't think we stop what is coming in another hundred years or 2. LOL!