Palantir blocked China’s CDH Investments from buying stock, says a lawsuit
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
Also don't see why a Chinese company can't buy shares in a company. Financial products, just like other products, are purchasable by any nationality.
If Palantir is doing something that risks national security then they ought to work with the government on that. I don't think we know enough about Palantir to make a judgement there.
Are you kidding?
By any measure that is available China is a country that is inferior to a vast chunk of the world when it comes to civil liberties and political freedom.
Palantir or a substantial portion of it in the hands of the Chinese (and, by extension in the hands of the Chinese authorities, direct or indirect) is something that you simply should not want.
Seriously? What does that have to do with investing in the stock market?
Palantir isn't the Manhattan Project. Plus, the US is on friendly terms with China. Most of our computer hardware is made there. I don't see how Chinese investing in Palantir somehow hurts our national security. No need to spread FUD or build walls in the stock market.
Your comments seem to be in line with Thiel and Trump, who fear other countries, so I can see where you're coming from, I just think it's 1950's style thinking and not reflective of 2017 reality.
It isn't Coca Cola either.
Why assume they'd stop at a minority interest?
A Chinese equity buying a sizeable chunk of equity in Boeing or Lockheed would be a huge deal, comparable to the Aixtron acquisition (German chipmaker, deal got blocked by Obama administration on national security grounds). Ditto for Fairchild and Philips.
The Chinese directly or indirectly trying to gain a sizeable chunk of a company like Palantir is not just any old stock transaction, it is a strategic acquisition.
If the China angle is an issue, then should it be an issue when Palantir gives immigration agents access to CIA files, ergo is involved in arbitrarily denying visas, ergo de facto building the 'Muslim registry'?
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/17/palantir-enables-immigra...
http://www.voanews.com/a/african-trade-conference-canceled-a...
I don't see why not. China is a live and let live sort of government. They're not trying to export their civil liberties or political system to other parts of the world. They mainly care about what economic inputs/outputs they share with other countries.
Also, why do we care if China have access to Palantir's technologies? I agree that if they have access to the data, that would be a bad thing in terms of national security. But their technology wouldn't be any threat to us.
Tibetans might disagree with you.
China rarely interferes with the internal affairs of foreign governments.
I don't see why giving China technology it's not likely to use outside of its borders is an issue here. Like I said before, access to data is another thing all together.
I've been paying pretty good attention to the news the last 3 decades or so and I'm going to have to disagree with you there. They're not as bad as some but they are definitely players.
On the other hand, if they are already working with the government on things that have an impact on, or are related to, national security, then it is perhaps prudent not to sell large portions of the firm to foreign buyers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Foreign_Investmen...
There is already an established consensus that foreign nations can't invest just like 'everyone else'.
I doubt that China is on the brink of holding a majority of Palantir, or that they would gain access to its data by investing.
I am not making any claim about why or why not, just that they are currently in a posistion where they can control these things, right? If they were public this seems like it would be a different issue...
Also, if the US govt were very concerned about this, I imagine they would step in and block it.
Hmm I don't know if that's common. I think the company often has right of first refusal for founders, meaning the company can buy shares being sold, though not sure whether they can block sales outright.
> Also, if the US govt were very concerned about this, I imagine they would step in and block it.
Yeah, I agree. The security argument sounds like an investor's way of hyping the value of the company, since it's "so valuable China shouldn't be allowed to invest in it". Also could be Thiel's version of "I don't want to bake your gay wedding cake", substituting the Chinese for gays.
There is no way an acquisition at this level is made from China without party approval. You can't more more than $50K out of China without a very specific permit.
> why do you have a blanket distrust of "the Chinese"?
When did you stop beating your wife?
Either way, the Board should have put some political/newspaper test language in their shareholder rights documents as it pertains to transfers.
You lack imagination. Blackmail, espionage, economic advantage are all possible if a you have the kind of data that Palantir is fairly routinely assumed to have access to.
https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal...
If you feel that in light of that the Chinese having access to such information is a no-op then I have no further counter arguments.
What you're saying is wildly short-sighted, and frankly bound in a very dangerous false dichotomy.
It's just a statement of fact.
>What is it about Peter Thiel that you feel would raise animosity?
The article makes sure to highlight that for anyone that might have missed it :) " It’s well-positioned to cash in on more government work thanks to Thiel’s relationship with President Donald Trump."
Edit: Mentioned, sure. In the article title when he's not central to the story? Click bait.
Who should they disclose this information to? Shareholders can negotiate this right when they make their investment, just as founders can. Why should someone who isn't an owner have access to private information about someone elses business?
Lets say you and a friend develop an innovative new startup (let's call it "Instawham"). Some friends join you and very quickly you become successful enough to have a bunch of customers and strong VC funding, but you are still a small company with a few dozen employees. You are a forward thinking CEO so you share information about the business with all of your employees, but caution them it's all proprietary and that sharing with competitors could hurt the business, so you are confident they won't share.
A big company, say Facebook, offers to buy you for a few billion dollars. But besides not wanting to work for Zuckerberg, you think they are just trying to get access to your financials and business plans to compete with you and will pull the offer as soon as you disclose. So you say no.
Now TechCrunch approaches you, and reminds you that by the newly passed "saycheese law" any multibillion dollar valued startup must release it's financials, shareholder lists, risk assessments, etc. They demand all of that information so they can publish it and sue you when you decline. Your lawyer tells you because of "saycheese law" you will lose, so you turn it over and Facebook launches their competitor soon after the TechCrunch article.
http://www.ibtimes.com/trump-adviser-peter-thiels-palantir-t...
Trump Adviser Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies To Aid ICE In Immigration Raids Using Surveillance And Data Analysis
Trump Adviser Peter Thiel's Palantir Technologies To Aid ICE in enforcing Country's Immigration Statutes Using Data Analysis & Available Metadata
Corporations already provide user data when provided a valid court order to do so, they have been doing it for decades.
This is a false equivalence, as searching for drugs is not actually illegal, nor is believing in a certain faith.
A better analogy would be "Should Google be reporting the addresses of people who are distributing child pornography? Should Facebook be informing the TSA of people who are planning to bomb a plane?" In both cases, the answers is yes, and they are almost legally obligated to if they have clear evidence of wrong-doing.
Very very rarely does someone type into their browser that they want to rape a child, or share on Facebook their plans to bomb a plane. Instead the authorities make inferences, inferences that often lead to the harassment, even prosecution, of innocent people.
This is a technology licensing case. Would you be angry at Google for licensing its search technology to help run background checks on childcare providers? Would you care if Facebook licensed its social graph technology to see if you should be eligible for a drivers' license based on your medical history?
Your response was they should, if those people were clearly committing crimes.
My response was, it's very rarely clear whether some is committing a crime or not from their web history, and that companies can be easily coerced into sharing information that is just indicative of a possible crime, which can lead to innocent people being harassed or charged.
Specifically thousands of crimes a day (if not more) are committed by Facebook users, and some of those users leave traces of those crimes on Facebook. Facebook is heavily incented to help turn in those criminals to show they are good corporate citizens, and to head off extensive regulation and even civil penalties that could be created by grand standing lawmakers. Facebook has little to no incentive to protect my rights.
Now my kid posts "I love weed" on their FB profile, and it's caught the massive dragnet of data being turned over to authorities every day from Facebook. Police get a warrant, bust down my door, and arrest my child if they find weed in their room. If my kid had a couple ounces of pot and the cops think I'm a jerk, they may seize my home.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/03/us/philadelphia-drug-bust-hous...
If they don't find weed but find painkillers in my wife's purse not accompanied by her legal prescription for them, they will arrest her to justify the raid.
Or a dozen other bad things could happen, like they could shoot my barking 60 lb dog (who has never bitten anyone in her life), or worse.
So no, I don't want web service providers who have access to my personal information sharing that information with law enforcement. The police can do real police work to catch real criminals, most of their time they seem to abuse the constitution to arrest people for victimless crimes, I don't think they need more tools for that.
Thanks for proving the example false equivalence. Palantir is not a service provider to you, it is a data analysis company.
If Google or Facebook performed data mining on data it owned, that'd be one thing. Palantir is providing tools that analyze publicly available information.
> Or a dozen other bad things could happen
Yes, that's life. At any point any bad things can happen that's out of your control.
If somebody in your family posted "I love weed" on a public billboard, you might expect increased police attention.
Extrapolating a dead dog and painkiller arrests (both vanishingly rare events) are hysterical statements not based in fact.
So you might not be concerned about getting trapped in the maw of our now enormous law enforcement machine, but plenty of people are given virtually every adult in the US has committed a felony at one point or another because of one crazy law or another. Not only do I not want Google or Facebook using automated algorithms to pit me in the maw, I don't want them sharing that data with Palantir so it can do it either. That gives for Chase Bank, Verizon, etc.
We already provide such information, which is completely legal.
For instance, if there's a pipe bomb, police track down the list of people who've bought ingredients from the bomb (from retailers, cell phone companies) and other sources of information to narrow down the list of probable suspects.
The Boston bombers were caught by such techniques. I don't see why this is any different.
Regardless, your reframing is not convincing. Portraying immigrants as "criminals" isn't gonna make people want to deport them any more than saying drug users are inherently criminals. The reality of the law is way less important than its actual morality, which people have made up their minds about already.
Palantir is a company selling data analysis software. They're doing what they're paid to do. How is this corporate vigilantism?
> The reality of the law is way less important than its actual morality
That is absolutely untrue. There are ways to change the law. People fail to understand that when you break the law to protest it, you still have to face the consequences.
This latest federal judge injunction against the travel bad is a horrible thing for our system, no matter what you think of the ban.
The president is well within his purview to establish regulations and restrictions for foreign travel. For an activist judge to make a decision like this, gives ample reason for his removal and/or sanction. Once you have the judicial branch trying to enact policy or morality, you have the ability for the executive branch to remove all dissent.
And there is something very wrong with US immigration policies.
Or maybe just a throwaway created by a part interested in the transaction
Another commenter holding different views from you, or even posting a bad comment and being wrong, is not evidence of astroturfing or shillage.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&prefix=true&page=0&dateR...
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13901243 and marked it off-topic.
I see there are official ways of reporting suspected shilling, at a time where astroturfing is having an important impact on the real world it's important that the administration keep these in check in this space.
Most of us are orders of magnitude too quick to interpret our own cognitive bias as abuse by others (e.g. X seems obvious to me so anyone arguing ~X must be a shill). This places the threshold for useless, nasty arguments ('you're a shill. no, you're the shill') dangerously low. Combine that with the evil catnip power of meta and you get a strain of offtopicness that's especially malignant.