Palantir enables immigration agents to look up information from the CIA
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
Stories like this call that snark to mind. "Look at this database databasing!"
I'm loathe to stick up for Palantir, because I think Peter Thiel is a monster, and I have no particular reason to believe that Palantir is an especially moral team in its operations and management. But I think most commentary about Palantir's role in surveillance is overblown. From what I can tell, it's a very expensive consultingware database with a name that has special valence with nerds.
Be mean to Palantir all you want, I guess. But don't let other tech companies off the hook. I've been trying to make this point for years with, I think, pretty limited success: if you're angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.
> Stories like this call that snark to mind. "Look at this database databasing!"
This isn't a technical story, it's a social and governmental one.
> if you're angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.
Isn't Palantir's assistance clearer and more direct? Aren't they building applications with a lot of knowledge of what they'll be used to do? As far as I know, Cisco doesn't sell products like "gigabit mass-deporation cloud router 2239." Any assistance they give is much more indirect.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/ciscos-latest-attempt-...
Nobody bats an eyelash when doctors refuse to help with executions or torture, or pharma companies resist selling execution drug cocktails. But for some reason technologists are just fine selling the technical building blocks of a surveillance and mass deportation system. That's not right; it's a sign of the diminished professionalism of our field versus other professions, and it does need to change.
All of this is just distracting from the real issues at hand.
What what we debating here? ICE's conduct or Palantir being an enabler? Because if we're talking about Palantir, "someone else would have done it" is not a good excuse.
I think the long term question is: how can we make these choices less okay and less profitable?
How so? Exposing and holding people and companies accountable for wrong behavior does not stop anyone from trying to change the government policies that encourage the wrong behavior. The added media exposure probably helps, especially with people that are interested in the person/company but are not aware of the government policies and their impact.
That's the question, right? Is this wrong behavior? It's legal, that's for sure. Just because you don't agree with ICE's actions doesn't mean every Palantir employee agrees with you.
1. "Someone else would have done it."
2. False dichotomy.
And now piling on:
3. Moral relativism.
4. Finish the Job. (#49 in http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/engl1311/fallacies.htm)
As anyone with the pleasure of having contracted with IBM or Lockheed can tell you, there is a significant difference between working with giant government contractors versus the best funded Silicon Valley firms.
And where is the line? Is the programmer who writes code for a surveillance drone ( immoral? What about one who writes code for a submarine that may carry ballistic missiles? Or for the missile guidance system itself?
When a doctor assists in an execution, they participate in what is a murder, just under some other context. Lift that action up and out of the auspices of state and governance, and you have a murderer, accessory to before or after, or an accomplice to.
This isn't a particularly rare occurrence, but someone is there to cut the life short, do harm, and achieve a goal. Justice, revenge, passion, grudges aside. There's a winner and a loser.
It could be a misanthrope and henchmen, or it could be a doctor, somehow more distinguished than a common thug. The doctor chooses gets hands dirty for different reasons, there they are all the same. But the doctor gets to walk away from his murder, and commit more, so long as the state and government are not deposed.
Are (using your example) Cisco and/or Oracle offering material support, other than making the products that are used? If not, I don't see how they could prevent the government from using their products - the government would just buy the products through a cutout if they had to.
But it turns out that no one (initially) cares when doctors do help with torture, either. The APA helped design the American torture program, and despite some inflammatory articles never saw any real consequences for it.
I don't think this devalues your point about technologists, but it does make me suspect that our uniqueness is overstated; quite a few 'respectable' professions have at one point or another joined in on horrific government overreach.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/01/us/report-says-american-p...
> Isn't Palantir's assistance clearer and more direct?
Are you aware that the name "Oracle" comes from the original CIA contract?
(crappy reference I found via wikipedia in case you didn't realise this, but it's not a secret part of company history: https://www.theguardian.com/g2/story/0,3604,215072,00.html )
"Ellison was wrong about the success of massively parallel processing computers (though he invested his own money in the idea), wrong about the success of so-called video-on-demand (as Oracle found when it ran a pilot with British Telecom), wrong about network computers replacing PCs (or at least, there's no evidence yet), and wrong about several other things - though we might have to revise that view in 10 years and say he was right but too early."
looks like history has proven that he was right about all of these things!
I'm not saying that companies should shun the CIA, so that's irrelevant. The distinction I was making was between providing generic products which can be used to implement a policy and products specifically designed to that policy's business requirements. My understanding is Palantir produces the later, and if the policy in question is problematic then they are more culpable than if they developed something generic.
Also, your link doesn't really support your characterization that Oracle Database was developed for the CIA:
> Ampex was developing a giant database for the CIA, and Ellison was assigned to the project, along with Bob Miner and Ed Oates. The CIA's codename for the project was Oracle. The project was something of a disaster, but it led eventually to the formation of Oracle Corporation and its current hugely successful range of databases.
If you pay attention, it says Ampex was the company with the CIA contract, and that project inspired Ellison to found Oracle.
You're giving it more credit than necessary. It's just expensive consultingware. It's only incidentally a database.
The biggest problem that Palantir solves is: we (CIA, FBI, whatever) have to pull together data from 500 software systems that don't share a common taxonomy, hold petabytes of data in totally different ways, live in agencies across the world, and have all sorts of nuanced permissions models (e.g. "Five Eyes" or "this data was shared to New Zealand by a country that doesn't share data directly with the US, but New Zealand does share data to the US. I'm a US agent looking at NZ data, do I see this?").
They basically clean and centralize information. It's super unsexy (probably my least favorite thing to do as an engineer.) But that is the problem that these organizations have.
[edit: clarity]
Exactly. You can find this in almost any 'stodgy' business around. If you see very little computers around or only computers with glowing Word screens, you can be sure, if you find some business person to talk with, he or she can tell you what really would boost their business. And then you suddenly have a business if the competitors also do not have it (usually they don't). Gov is a good one as they are usually slow and not very creative (generally! don't want to step on toes but what I saw so far in the world shows me that this is generally true).
Genuinely curious what you base this opinion on. If it's based solely upon his support of Donald Trump, this is a ridiculous statement. If there is something else that would make a reasonable, politically neutral person agree that he is a "monster," I am not aware of it, so I would be interested to hear what it is.
You're projecting. At least let him explain his reasoning. Creating your own fictional version which you can denounce prior that that explanation doesn't really help the conversation.
Hope that helps.
Last time I checked, 46.09% of 55.3% was a little under 25.5% of all voters.
Please.. you have to register to vote, you have to stand in a line for hours before you can vote. How many people don't vote because it's too much of a hassle? Their opinions are irrelevant?
- People who voted in the last election
- People who have voted previously in an election
- People who are capable of voting (citizens of voting age not otherwise constrained from voting).
It's probably usually obvious which one is meant in a conversation, but there are also likely cases where it can be somewhat ambiguous.
Since some fraction of eligible non-voters wouldn't have voted no matter who the candidate was, the truth of the matter is obviously somewhere in between a quarter and a half. But there's no sense in which "half the vote" isn't misleading.
> No, I am not projecting.
And then you go on to pull out a bunch of statistics and imply the statement was about half of all US voters, and calling them "monsters", instead of the actual statement, which was about a single person.
Then you specifically acknowledge you still don't know what his justifications are:
> If it's just more politically-motivated Valley-bubble drivel, then there is nothing to see here.
Perhaps you need to look up what projecting means. Or, if you prefer, we can call what you're doing a Straw Man man argument. Not quite the same, but related, and it also applies.
My original comment could have been paraphrased as "hey, please don't bring that stuff up without real cause or evidence if it's not the current topic. It's makes things toxic fairly quickly."
Because that's the issue here. This is what the actual process of mass deportation looks like. There are any number of more humane ways of dealing with this, among them what the Obama administration was doing for eight years, but Trump supporters voted for destroying people's lives en masse, at gunpoint, without consideration of any consequences.
This is inhumane. Full stop. This is not about romanticizing any one or any thing, this about asking people to look reality in the face and defend the thing that they're supporting.
> Meh. I'm a legal immigrant
mean in context, in response to talking about illegal immigrants being needlessly mistreated, to mention that random legal immigrant doesn't understand the "glorification" of people? What does "glorification" mean here? The idea that you shouldn't trample on someone just because you can? Just how much do you have to contort and squint to not get a slight... whiff here?
Is that putting words into one's mouth, or explaining their own words to them, because they're too lazy or dishonest to do it themselves. You can't pussyfoot around this stuff on the one hand and then sit on the moral high horse: (likely not even) putting words into someone's mouth is a complete joke to looking the other way when brownshirts do their job. Not minding what the parent poster said, not following up on it with these questions, that's the real WTF here. Please learn from your betters rather than pointlessly berating them. One poster responded correctly, the rest fucking has to live with themselves, how's that for a different view point.
Peter Think is not situated equally to all Trump voters. Even if we accept that it is a priori unreasonable that nearly half of the voting population on the recent election could be described as "monsters" (I don't, as popularity of an act does not contradict depravity of the act), it's quite possible to believe that voting for Trump reveals that one is either a monster or decieved by a monster, and believes that there are things about Think that make it particularly unlikely that he is a dupe, and thus that he is a monster but not all those voting for Trump are.
a) That isn't what projecting means.
b) He asked him about his reasoning and then criticized an explicitly hypothetical scenario. Note the 'if'.
"transfer or attribute one's own emotion or desire to (another person), especially unconsciously."
That seems to apply here, to my eyes.
I don't think it's clearly that, since there are sources that contradict the narrowness of that view.
"to regard (something within the mind, as a feeling, thought, or attitude) as having some form of reality outside the mind"[1]
Specifically, that method in which I was using it is when someone is applying their preconceptions to someone or something else. Which is fine, everyone does that in the normal course of dealing with other people. I was simply trying to point out that there was no solid evidence that tptacek was going by that reasoning, and putting it out there in that manner was non-constructive. All it did was open the door to a political flamewar about what percentage of people voted for Trump, whether everyone that voted for trump is also a monster, etc.
That doesn't comport with your prior statements. You could describe literally any ideological statement as 'projecting' by that standard, which renders your prior comment utterly meaningless. Which of course, in turn, implies that that was not your intended meaning.
> I was simply trying to point out that there was no solid evidence that tptacek was going by that reasoning, and putting it out there in that manner was non-constructive. All it did was open the door to a political flamewar about what percentage of people voted for Trump, whether everyone that voted for trump is also a monster, etc.
No solid evidence, no. But not an unreasonable hypothesis, and one that he gave the OP an opportunity to rebut. Nothing wrong with that. He wasn't asserting that that is what tptacek believes, he was saying "IF this is what he believes, then that is ridiculous".
Yes. It's a natural part of communication, where we model others and use those models to interpret meaning. In this case, I could have said "You're assuming too much" and it would likely have conveyed my meaning more clearly and prevented an ultimately pointless digression into what "projecting" means. That's a failure on my part.
> No solid evidence, no. But not an unreasonable hypothesis, and one that he gave the OP an opportunity to rebut. Nothing wrong with that.
I beg to differ. It pulled in an entire topic that didn't necessarily have any place in the discussion. I could make any number of assertions here that might imply my belief about your state of mind, and doing so and allowing them to be rebutted does not justify their use. For example, "do you think I'm wrong because he's black, because that's ridiculous?" With that statement, I've implied there may be some racism on your part, which is uncalled for without far more evidence, regardless of whether that's the only interpretation I can think of or not, given the little information present (a hypothetical, to be clear). In this case, the possible implication (possible only, because the interpretation allows for some ambiguity) was that tptacek might be capable of branding someone a monster purely because they support President Trump, or supported candidate Trump. If someone feels the need to discount this specific scenario, there are far clearer ways to do so while avoiding that implication. For example, pointing out the natural shortcomings in communication while interpreting someone else's statements. E.g. "Is that because of support for President Trump? I can't think of any other reason you'd call him a monster, but that seems extreme, so likely I'm just failing to see the point you're making. Care to explain?"
"Politically neutral" is a big qualifier to throw in there. You're basically asking why, ignoring his most controversial aspects, someone would find him controversial.
I'm a little unsure how anyone would even approach your question. Thiel is a deeply political person - member of the Libertarian party, for one - how does a "politically neutral" analysis of him rate that? Ignore his politics entirely? To do so is to remove the obvious reason that some consider him to be a "monster". It's certainly possible to consider libertarianism to be monstrous, if your politics aligns as such.
Even in the context of this article: he co-founded Palantir, who are a very controversial company, and will potentially assist the administration in mass deportations. Depending your political leanings, that may well make him monstrous. He co-wrote a book named "The Diversity Myth", statements in which had to apologise for in 2016. Again, those statements might make him monstrous to a person.
I hesitate to even bring it up, but many of the tyrants of the 20th Century were responsible for the death of millions, and for decidedly political reasons. Does a politically neutral person object to calling Stalin a monster on the basis that, aside from his politics, he was a good family man?
(No, I'm not saying Peter Thiel is Stalin. Politics exists in a vast, vast spectrum - but I'm not convinced there is a place where that spectrum doesn't exist)
I'm not suggesting in any way that his actions are on the same level as Stalin's, but where is the "monster line" drawn? I don't see how you could ever answer that question without factoring in someone's own political opinions. So I don't know how you could do a politically neutral examination of Thiel's supposed monstrousness.
You added your parenthesis after I responded (or perhaps while I was responding). But nevertheless, I can't come close to relating the two. Nothing I am aware of with Thiel would make a reasonable person consider him to be a "monster".
This will be my last response to this, since I apparently forgot how many ultra-liberals that hate Thiel and everyone like him would be brought out by such a seemingly simple, non-controversial, genuine question that I posed to OP (not necessarily referring to you, but there seem to be alot of people backing up this opinion based upon nothing other than politics, which makes me sad both for HN and the state of political discourse in the US).
I'll follow your lead and say that this will be my last response too, because your post has shown to me that we're talking past each other entirely.
> there seem to be alot of people backing up this opinion based upon nothing other than politics
The point I've been making this whole time is that you simply cannot separate politics from "other" in the way you wish to. Politics is intertwined in every decision we make and every opinion we hold. The fact that you choose (without evidence) to label those you disagree with as "ultra-liberals" underlines this. You paint yourself as politically neutral yet you are clearly evaluating others in political terms.
We can't have "politically neutral" political discourse, it makes no sense. There is no "non-political Peter Thiel".
Making an analogy between two things/people/events/actions is not the same as claiming the two are equal.
Of course, Peter Thiel is nowhere near as bad as Stalin. Then again, "better than Stalin" is a pretty low bar.
Read: "My safety has never been at risk because of the consequences of someone's political leanings and have either never met or do not consider sufficiently valuable anyone whose safety is"
This would be a good place to use the thread collapse [-] button, and also a good place for the monitors to snip off a political subthread.
"I sort of have a single idée fixe that I'm completely obsessed with on the business side which is that if you're starting a company, if you’re the founder, entrepreneur, starting a company you always want to aim for monopoly and you want to always avoid competition" https://youtu.be/5_0dVHMpJlo?t=26s
But, you could also say, from a virus' view, to reproduce and monopolize a body is also a correct point of view.
However, what Thiel ignores is the world is not just capitalist domain, it has living organisms which those monopolies can make life miserable or worse kill. Just like the virus though, he isn't considering the whole body his views are infecting.
Isn't that the same as saying from Theils' capitalist view the solution is to prevent capitalism from functioning? How do you have capitalism without competition?
But since a multicultural rape charge may indicate nothing more than belated regret, a woman might ‘realize’ that she had been ‘raped’ the next day or even many days later.
----
The purpose of the rape crisis movement seems as much about vilifying men as about raising ‘awareness’.
----
Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.
Not all technologies or companies are neutral in practice.
Several of The Intercept's reporters are former Gawker reporters and clearly carry a grudge against Thiel.
The Intercept has offered brave and groundbreaking reporting on the illicit surveillance operations conducted by the US Government, but has recently adopted the tactic of blending its reporting warning about surveillance with a focus on Palantir, likely due to its notable name and affiliation with Thiel.
Palantir got traction because it was able to meet existing government RFPs at lower cost than existing competitors. Palantir is not the only company building tools for the surveillance state, only the most notable in Silicon Valley.
I wish even a single news organization could keep its personal gripes/grudges out of its reporting. Suggesting that Palantir is unique in its catering to surveillance overreach is disingenuous. I also, fwiw, think that Thiel was within his right to help fund an adversarial lawsuit against Gawker. Gawker capitalized on its own large legal war chest, and it's fair that it suffered the same fate. It was not ideal, as Gawker was a source of good reporting and brave disregard of certain unfortunate laws, but nonetheless fair and not unethical. If all parties in lawsuits had a benefactor many miscarriages of justice would be avoided. This is a flaw of our legal system and nothing else.
The rest of your post makes me totally disagree with this sentiment. If they fail to meet the most basic litmus test for impartiality I don't see how they're any more important than any other news organization.
EDIT: I really, really hope you're not referring to the Hogan case as "brave disregard of certain unfortunate laws".
I'm hoping they come to their senses. They've been doing a lot of "in group" focused stories, which are very annoying. I think most rational readers don't want in-group stories they want solid reporting and clear analysis.
Sure, most people who want to read Greenwald's reporting about the surveillance state also don't mind reading a story implicating Thiel in the overreach, but that doesn't mean they ought to stoop to the level of calling out Tiel and not calling out the A list investors, established larger firms, and government officials who are all part of the reason we should all be concerned about the likely misuse of Palantir's (and a lot of other) tech.
To be fair, The Intercept does great investigative journalism, but as a whole does not position itself as a completely objective source. There are a fair number of "awareness" oriented stories published, and even a few rants. Rants can be very informative but it's important to differentiate them from what is supposed to be unbiased/objective news or analysis.
Sadly, clickbait-oriented metrics likely suggest to the editors of all news-ish publications that the in-group stories are what readers demand.
I think The Intercept is the most important news organization and overall a profoundly beneficial force
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/intercept-reporter-juan-thomp...
"The tweet was sent by the Twitter handle @juanmthompson, which is listed on the Intercept's website as belonging to the reporter..."
Clearly the guy is an activist, it just seems he's got a very unusual system of ethics that guide his activism, which most people would consider over the top or abhorrent. I'm certainly not defending him, I chalk it up to an HR mistake by The Intercept and nothing more.
> "that allows ICE agents, including those in the agency’s primary deportation force, the Enforcement and Removal Office, to query information across several large government databases simultaneously"
But Peter Thiel, the new boogeyman, is involved, so this is somehow supposed to be worrisome news.
It is a problem that DHS is using Palantir to violate that rule. It is also a problem if Palantir is knowingly selling technology for the purposes of violating those rules. But it's doubtless also true that many other tech companies with less interesting names are involved in the same project and profiting from it in the same way.
Laws only matter if they are enforced or if the loopholes used to exploit them are closed.
Or better yet, can you explain the difference between a loophole and a deliberate choice of language intending to make one thing legal and another very similar thing illegal?
The only difference is in the intent of the author or when the law was written. The fourth amendment seems quite clear but we give that up at the border for some apparent reason.
Obviously there's debate about considering a state road 98 miles inside the country a "border zone," and I don't think border rules should apply there, but at the border is pretty much settled law.
Well he is quite vocal about his political opinion, and he is rich. Maybe that is what he wants anyway.
But when I hear stories about border agents asking to inspect peoples' phones, and taking notes if somebody has an app for hookups and asking them about it next time they cross that border it concerns me.
Sometimes making an irresponsible system more efficient is a bad thing. Hitler was only able to exterminate 2/3rds of the Jewish race because there was registry of Jews.
They've assisted NSA, and now they're using some skills to help agents look up info on undocumented immigrants.
Sure, we should be tackling the source of the problem, but enablers such as palantir should be taken to task too.
It should be considered how active a role Thiel took in getting this to happen as a Trump ally, which this in turn benefits his company.
Casting it off as, "it's just a job someone has to do it", is a pretty weak defence.
Entering the country without permission is illegal, but let's not act like it's a crime so heinous that law enforcement should be exempt from due process and warrants and such when prosecuting people for it.
Keep in mind that ICE does sometimes inadvertently deport US citizens, and that there is no central database of who is or is not a US citizen, nor any single canonical way to prove citizenship.
Every country on the planet has borders that are enforced. Every country has immigration policies that just be followed. Every country that finds immigrants that are there undocumented (illegally) deports them and uses databases with public/private cooperation to do so.
There are ways to prove citizenship. Easily obtainable documents like a social security card, passport, birth certificate, etc... . There is no real issue with ICE deporting Americans. None whatsoever.
this is pretty sensationalized. It's very rational to request proof of citizenship before allowing entry to a country
As such, if I am a U.S. citizen, and say so, the burden is then upon the officer to identify a reason to suspect that I am not actually a citizen before requiring that I submit to additional questioning or produce documentation. We desire that our cops be required to have an actual reason before hassling us. That form of behavior was what goaded our forebears into shooting at the king's men.
At the risk of inciting an opinionated pissing contest, I'd say that meekly presenting your official papers to a government authority is reason to suspect that you are not an American, and that loudly arguing with the officer (especially when relying on spurious legal grounds) is almost as good as stapling a notarized copy of your birth certificate to your forehead.
I think a simple majority of Americans would probably prefer the government to treat the public more respectfully and courteously--citizens or not--even if it means some dangerous people will find it easier to commit crimes. I may be mistaken in this perception, but I wish for it to be true. It's a crying shame that people are deciding not to visit because our government is acting like a paranoid brute and that I can't find any rational grounds to disagree with their decisions to stay away.
Obviously if they're undocumented immigrants then they're criminals. My point is that ICE can't consider them to be definitely criminals until that's actually proven in court. You can't just say, well, ICE is totally sure that José over there is undocumented, so it's OK if ICE treats him like a criminal even though they haven't gone to court.
I'm not saying we shouldn't guard the borders or enforce immigration law. I'm saying that it's still law enforcement and the ideas of innocent until proven guilty, and requiring warrants for searches, still applies. Or at least should apply.
Not every US citizen has a social security card, passport, or even a birth certificate. There are quite a few US citizens that get detained by ICE:
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/22/504031635/...
And yes, sometimes they do get deported:
https://news.vice.com/article/the-us-keeps-mistakenly-deport...
Also while people in the US who are here illegally may be permitted due process, it'll be a pretty easy case. Are you a US citizen? Yes? No? Pretty simple. I guess you could argue that the state has to provide evidence that you're not, but if the evidence doesn't exist you're asking the state to prove something exists that doesn't, which is a non sequitor.
I don't understand your last part. If the state can't prove something exists that doesn't, then the state can't prove its case, so the accused should go free, no? We don't change the rules of legal proof just because it's inconvenient to the state.
Because that's essentially what you're saying here.
I'm guessing that ICE is generally able to demonstrate, beyond a reasonable doubt, that most illegal immigrants are not citizens. Most can be fairly easily proven not to have had US citizenship from birth (due to being born outside the US to non-American parents), and there is a central database of naturalized citizens, so if they are also absent from that, done.
What I'm saying here is simply that if it is indeed impossible to prove, as you say, that is not a good reason to relax standards of proof.
> Imagine if the local police were able to use CIA records, including phone and location data, to prosecute you for, say stealing a car.
Imagine if the local police were able to use their plate reader software to identify and prosecute people who had stolen cars?
Police are allowed to use license plate readers because that's considered to be in public view. Since the CIA is separate from both ICE and the local police, let's just use CIA in the analogy too.
Do you have a source for this? It's not clear to me that this is the case -- and if it is we are totally screwed whether Palantir is involved or not.
(·) Edit: Unlawful entry (border hopping) is a crime, punishable by $250 in civil penalties, but no jail time. Essentially a jaywalking ticket. Unlawful presence is not a crime.
Wrong, you can be present unlawfully after completely lawful entry.
> So pretty clear that it's illegal.
Unlawful presence is obviously illegal, but it is not criminal. The two words do not mean the same thing.
What you present is the converse of the claim under discussion. And, for that matter, is also false. A lawful permanent resident alien who enters (say, after a vacation abroad) other than at a designated border crossing is not unlawfully present, but has committed the offense of illegal entry.
No, it's a crime punishable by imprisonment for up to 6 months and/or fine of up to $5,000 (as a class B misdemeanor) for a first offense and 2 years imprisonment and/or fine of up to $500,000 (as a felony) for a subsequent offense.
It is also a civil offense with civil penalties of $50-$250 the first time a civil penalty is imposed, and double that subsequently.
See 8 USC § 1325(a) for the crime, associated imprisonment, and reference to fines under title 18, and § 1325(b) for the civil offense; 18 USC § 3559 for classification of crimes based on maximum imprisonment, and § 3571 for fines based on classification of crimes.
> They've assisted NSA, and now they're using some skills to help agents look up info on undocumented immigrants.
I'm supposed to be outraged that a company is supplying software to help a government employee do their job in an efficient manner?
IBM supplied computation systems to Nazi Germany, where they were used to carry out the murder of millions of people.
Had it done so knowingly, its management should have been taken out back and shot, right alongside the other perpetrators.
I have, however, implied that "Helping the government do its job" has no bearing on the morality of your actions. What the job is does.
Either that or you're being deliberately obtuse and are trolling.
Palantir assists with quite a number of... Ethically controversial government activities.
Comparisons to the current administration are likely overblown, but are not entirely without merit. Comparisons could also be made to past administrations. The important thing is to consider how well the comparison matches, how problematic the features being compared are in each item, and how that works within context.
If those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, so too are those that refuse to consider the past.
I was initially annoyed at how inefficient that software was, how its slow speed and clunky interface inevitably made it hard to focus on the work of identifying suspects. I could think of a lot of ways to make it easier to filter and interactively rank/pin photos for easier on-the-fly comparison. But then on further reflection, I realized it's probably a good thing that that software is so clunky. Making the software slicker (i.e. as portrayed in CSI shows) could mislead or pressure users (both police and victims) into thinking that their human ability to identify people from mugshots is more accurate than it actually is.
Identifying in mugshot does nothing, you have to identify suspect in person and detective will interrogate suspect and you both. There are multitude of checks before anything is done. So still failing to understand how good software which could possible show the suspect is the problem? The main reason possibly could be that they(government) cannot hire good programmers who could build useable systems.
Identifying a mugshot isn't "nothing". It can be used as evidence for probable cause in getting a search warrant or at least paying the suspect a visit.
It was a very sexy startup a while back. And success breeds friends.
Why, pray tell, is he a monster? It can't be his libertarian philosophy that supports individual self-determination. It can't be that's he's a proudly gay, christian role model. I hope its not Palantir, which technology is most often applied in analyzing complex financial crimes and criminal networks. Its tragically ironic that Thiel viewed more for fears about what Palantir might be used for, than for what he's actually accomplished, what he seems to stand for, and how Palantir's software is actually used. Its kafkaesque.
Why not? Complete self-determination is essentially "Fuck off" to everybody else at best and wholesale exploitation at worst.
Libretarians are as guilty as progressives. While the stereotype of zero regulation is untrue, most would argue only for regulations that benefit them, and believe that regulations that detriment them are the one that are unfair. (As a defense of myself and my position - I do the same, but I also acknowledge that, and consider the fact that most people are arguing in their own self interest an important part of how we achieve 'fair')
This is a sardonic and mean-spirited view, but it is a necessary devils advocate - Too much is done with 'hope', not strategy.
The government, and only the government, will write a check (or legislate and require others) to build low-cost housing, provide food for poor children, or provide healthcare so that we don't have lepers dying in the streets. That's not a society, and individuals aren't going to do anywhere near enough - they had their opportunity in 1895, and they acted selfishly, which is how we eventually got to 8 hour work days, medicare and social security.
That's pretty awful, even compared to the notable lack of diversity and bro culture in some tech companies.
[*] USASpending.gov
Also, how is "others are doing it worse, we shouldn't care" an acceptable argument?
This story somehow manages to make it sound like the CIA wanted to keep this information secret, but then ICE hired palantir to hack the gibson. Focusing on the wrong players.
You should also understand that where there is demand, supply will appear sooner or later. If you want to make business, you may want to grab some potentially problematic deals, as if you don't do, others will. After all, it is not you, doing anything bad, and you have to make profits after all. This may make deals potentially problematic in the future still desirable, sometimes simply to retain market share.
Can a miner or an ironworker be held responsible for coal used to make gunpowder and iron used to make guns? If you take responsibility and blame too far from the actors and more importantly the commanders of disgraceful deeds, you may even find yourself guilty in things you would never agree with.
I believe that unless very deeply entangled in those crimes, IBM should not be blamed for anything, if they abided the national and international laws, and acted in good will. (I have not examined this topic in detail, cannot express a more specific opinion about this.) Also I believe this topic is also a bit of storm in a teacup. Palantir did a job that others would have done if they didn't grab the opportunity, and it doesn't seem so hellish to me, just a reasonable tool for use by government agencies, to match the evolving threats a country faces in the 21st century. It seems to me that the anti-immigration spin is only attached to this tool because of recent policy changes and pretty divided opinions about them in the USA.