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Comment by zitterbewegung | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if all they did was parallel reconstruction . None of what was in the article was doable or feasible. Predicting crime like they said they could is just probably another form of profiling but just automated instead . Figuring out influencers in a social network is hard from my experience as an undergraduate researcher and community detection can be done but to predict people’s behavior is quite another. I wonder if any other customers of Palantir will have more fallout if people find out what they are doing ?

http://leitang.net/presentation/Community%20Detection%20in%2...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/260598010_PREDICTIN...

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First, it's "parallel construction", not "parallel reconstruction".

Second, that term refers to the use of SIGINT (or, more likely, aggregates) collected by intelligence agencies to inform law enforcement but not add to evidence available to prosecutors.

Despite the scary name, Palantir is not in fact a signals intelligence agency.

There is a lot to be concerned about with police department gang member databases, but police departments predict crime routinely. It's a core part of what it means to run a large city police department. You don't allocate patrols uniformly across the city; that makes no sense.

maybe "parallel construction" is not the right term for this but I think the suggestion is, the investigators may have found the evidence through an illegal method that would not stand up in court and then made it seem like they arrived at the evidence using Palintir or some other legal method.

But the article suggests the opposite? The prosecutor denied using Palantir in that case. That's not the way to whitewash some evidence.

Not only that, but there's no indication that use of Palantir would have been illegal in any way in the case, only that if analysis leading to the conviction was obtained with Palantir, then it was withheld from the defendant. Conversely, they argue, if Palantir held no such analytical evidence, then its absence is proof of innocence. That later part if very much a stretch though, as it implies a level of sophistication, if not omniscience, that is not in reality possible.

Isn't that _exactly_ how parallel construction works?

"No, your honour, we didn't use any of those grey-area or outright illegal surveillance technologies, we just got lucky in a random traffic stop. Again. Amazing how all these gang bosses drive around with tail lights out, isn't it?"

I could believe that they used illegal Palantir and retconned a search warrant. I could believe they did an illegal search and retconned a Palantir insight. But I'd like to know which claim is being made. Is Palantir the crime or the coverup?

These bits of the article stand out to me:

"Hickerson, who was sentenced to 100 years in prison, has accused prosecutors of suppressing analytic evidence obtained through the use of Palantir, arguing he had a right to view the evidence if his name surfaced as being affiliated with a gang, or if his name was absent from any analytic data related to 3-N-G."

and

'Ken Daley, a spokesman for the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office, said in a statement Wednesday, however, that Palantir "played no role whatsoever in Mr. Hickerson's indictment and prosecution."'

The defence is claiming the investigators used "analytic evidence" obtained from Palantir but are refusing to allow him to view it. The prosecution are claiming Palantir played no role - which is exactly what you'd expect if parallel construction were being used.

Related - cynical me considers 'no role whatsoever in Mr. Hickerson's indictment and prosecution' to be exactly the sort of weasel-worded denial you'd use if you had used Palantir information to construct a story explaining how you'd indicted and prosecuted someone based on _other_ evidence that you wouldn't have known about without the unacknowledged Palantir-sourced evidence you'd want to hide from judicial scrutiny...

Second, that term refers to the use of SIGINT (or, more likely, aggregates) collected by intelligence agencies to inform law enforcement but not add to evidence available to prosecutors

It's not this narrow. Stingrays have been used to create a map of behavior and stuff that is later executed upon.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180110/14482038982/repor...

Regardless of whether IMSI Catchers constitute according-to-Hoyle "parallel construction" or not, Palantir is database software. It's not a SIGINT source.

That was just an example about rank and file law enforcement participating in the practice.

I don't think "db vs SIGINT" is as distinguishing as you do, not to mention that surveillance work is rife with the words "query" and "selector."

Seems to me the major ethical problem with "parallel construction" isn't whether or not the information used to identify and detain the suspect comes from a signals intelligence agency, it's the intentional deception by law enforcement investigators and prosecutors of how and why they acquired and discovered evidence.

If the NSA illegally (or "legally" as they'd no doubt claim) intercepts private communications, and tells local traffic cops to find a pretext to pull over a particular car and search it - telling the defence and the court that the drugs were discovered in a routine traffic stop is parallel construction.

If the tip off comes from Palantir instead of the NSA, and the investigators and prosecutors deceive the court and defence about that involvement - I'd argue it's still parallel construction.

No, the problem with parallel construction is that it involves the introduction of tainted evidence into the law enforcement process. The fundamental protection we have against the abuse of surveillance and searches is the Exclusionary Rule, which dictates that the entire chain of evidence that begins with unconstitutional search is off-limits in prosecution. Parallel construction sidesteps that by avoiding the introduction of tainted evidence into cases at all, while still taking advantage of it during investigation.

But Palantir is a mechanism for collecting and analyzing evidence, not generating new evidence. It's database software. Policing has been predictive for decades; without Palantir, the police just use even dumber predictive methods.

Your argument assumes absolutely none of the information that Palantir uses is tainted. That's a surprisingly difficult thing to demonstrate, and based on the amount of data analyzed highly unlikely.

Thus, the impetus to use parallel construction to sidestep these issues.

This is a little like saying that a police department's use of Postgres might be a sign that there's parallel construction happening.

We know that parallel construction has, at various times and in various places, been heavily used by some law enforcement elements. We don’t need to know anything about the software used by law enforcement to know that, and to suspect that this may be happening now. Systems such as those provided by Palantir are just a more sophisticated way that tainted evidence could be used.

It seems reasonable that, given a reasonable suspicion that such evidence is used, that we should fear and want to prevent more widespread and systematic use of that illegal evidence.

No, this is more specific than just using a DB. If they use Postgres to handle HR then it's irrelevant. This is specific to using large quantities of potentially tainted information and then not disclosing the use of that information. Which is more or less the definition of parallel construction.

Further the problem with parallel construction is not that it hides tainted evidence it's that the courts can't decide that the evidence was tainted. Even if all the information was fine the technique inherently creates problems.

While I agree with you in general here I'm not convinced that Palantir is actually smarter than a detective.

Palantir doesn't do the work of a detective. It's a tool for the detective.

> police departments predict crime routinely. It's a core part of what it means to run a large city police department. You don't allocate patrols uniformly across the city; that makes no sense.

Predicting crime at the geographic level is much different than predicting it at the individual level, in terms of people's freedom and rights. EDIT: And even on the geographic level, it leads to many abuses including 'stop and frisk'.

The problematic policy in "stop and frisk" is the stopping and frisking, not the prediction.

I'm not sure if I have parsed this correctly. My understanding of stop and frisk is that there is a significant racial bias involved. To me this seems like part of the prediction. In my mind both aspects of stop and frisk are problematic.

I think most opponents of stop and frisk disagree with you: it's both. Police routinely "predict" that black and brown people are criminals, and stop and frisk allows them to act on these predictions without evidence. I think the argument here is that systems like Palantir quickly and easily become a technological proxy for these "predictions" and makes permanent the biases and racism used to create the data sets that drive them.

If NYPD set up patrols on wall street to stop and frisk bankers on their way home from work searching for cocaine or evidence of fraud it would be a very different issue.

> You don't allocate patrols uniformly across the city; that makes no sense.

And simply concentrating on areas with "high _reported_ crime" isn't a winning strategy, either.

Ok, the experience I had with Palantir was I saw them at Reflections Projections when they were hiring for a software engineering position. They gave me the impression that not only they performed data collection using an ontology but they also performed inference and also analysis on that ontology.

When I also interacted with their software as a trial user their marketing material made it seem like they not only performed data storage of semantic data but also they gave insight to that data. From my impression they not only created databases but also aided in the analysis of the resulting data.

I must have been mistaken in my analysis and interaction and they fleeced me. Thank you for correcting me. (Also for the typo correction). I appreciate your insight in this matter also.

Just because you weren’t able to identify influencers in social networks as an undergraduate researcher doesn’t mean that Palantir hasn’t figured it out.

Link analysis of criminal organizations is something literally every detective knows how to do. I don't understand the difficulty here unless they think finding good marketing candidates on Instagram is anything like a criminal investigation.

Cops keep track of your associations (hence why they can no longer force you to show them the contents of your phone; your contact history is juicy intel that used to reveal lots of links!). Modern technology just makes it easier.

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