Palantir has secretly been testing predictive policing technology in New Orleans | Hacker News Reader

Palantir has secretly been testing predictive policing technology in New Orleans

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64 pointsrising-sky20 comments

Palantir is one of those companies that has used Valley tactics and perks (free gourmet food, gyms, ping pong tables, etc) to aggressively recruit tons of talent in the DC area to help build the surveillance state.

People I know have COMPLETELY drunk the kool-aid to the point where they wear Palantir t-shirts and walk around talking about being "forward deployed engineers" like a cult.

And I only blame them a little. The DC area is starved of such benefits, so it's easy to pick up tech talent.

I live in Baltimore, that's even worse, but I still won't work for any DoD contractors, even though that's where the money is around here.

I'm sure I make significantly less than anyone working for Palintir and I don't have those "cool benefits". But I still make a hell of a lot more than most people in Baltimore (ie the median income in Baltimore, what 50% of people make less than). I'm not looking for praise, but, yeah, you can hold people responsible for the work they do, even if they do it for cool benefits. If you're willing to sell out for gourmet lunches and a ping-pong table, your price wasn't very high.

I used to take pride in working in software. Increasingly, I see tech being used to severely undermine civil liberties, abuse privacy etc. I guess techies are becoming as bad as bankers

I take pride in the work I do, but I think working as a software engineer makes me hate tech _more_ than the average person. I know how it works, and I think it's bad for us.

I second this. The longer I work in tech, the more I want to jump ship and work the land instead.

I don't necessarily want to leave tech, but I would prefer to work on my own projects or at least for something open-source, free and positive.

I guess there are lots of opportunities to build software outside of the 20s, 30s well to do crowd. Like for old people, poor people, disabled people and so on. If money is taken out of the equation, lots of areas where software can make genuine positive difference in people's lives

The problem is paying your own rent when money is taking out of the equation!

I actually still have a flip phone! (Although I also have a 3G iPad, which I don't carry with me daily, but put in a bag when needed). People are like "How can you be a software engineer and not have a smart phone?" I'm like "I think that's probably _why_ I have a flip phone!".

Reminds me of the following a couple years ago in my city. There are sure a lot of philanthropists interested in funding the tech police state, eh?

Just like New Orleans, "The arrangement was kept secret in part because it never appeared before the city's spending board, paid for instead through private donations handled by the nonprofit Baltimore Community Foundation."

Report of secret aerial surveillance by Baltimore police prompts questions, outrage

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-...

Baltimore actually seems to be kind of the center of these generous philanthropists wanting to help out with police state surveillance.

Bloomberg donates $5 million to Baltimore police for new cameras, technology http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-...

In the last year in New Orleans, there has been a proliferation of very visible CCTV crime cameras and license plate readers at the parish boundaries (all entry and exit points into the city as well as traffic chokepoints). The city wants to combine this with cameras outside every place with an alcohol license and stream it all in real time into a police control room.

If you want to donate to the people opposing this - check out https://maccno.com/join-the-opposition-to-new-orleans-40-mil... - sign and donate if possible

What reasons do they give for hiding these programs from the public? Will it somehow reduce their effectiveness?

The answer, I would guess, is that they think the public wouldn't like it, but what reasons do they actually state?

Slowly boil the frog.

Does this remind anyone else of The Minority Report? At least in that book/movie people were aware of the predictive policing.

Worse than Minority Report because at least in there they were actually seeing the future not predicting it.

It reminds me black mirror. it's scary.

If someone is using machine learning to advertise to me on the web and they come up with some crazy ad they think I might like, no harm done. Using the "probabilities" they may be making the ads marginally better. But if someone uses this for police actions, that is a different story. I expect a little more certainty for something like police actions.

The scary thought from black box hi-tech policing like this is that you don't know what little things you said/did that made the algorithms think you're bad or worse a target.

What if there is a bug(and there will be) in such predictive analytical tool? A swat team watching every move of a guy going to get groceries?

goes hand in hand with the ambitions of NIST working on the IES SmartCities framework. We are literally building this future right now and there is no discussion on ethics or who will benefit from it and who bears the costs (financial & social). If you want to change things consider subscribing to the NIST mailing list and and make your case.

https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/96442652181220557...

EDIT: https://pages.nist.gov/smartcitiesarchitecture/

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