Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DyslexicAtheist | Hacker News Reader

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DyslexicAtheist

it was a sham because asking hard questions would require them to admit FB being an important asset for US own intelligence operations.

If they drill too deep they'd need to face very uncomfortable questions about other platforms too, e.g Palantir (Thiel was right there lurking ;)). Facebook is the Internet in many countries (making them less resilient and even more prone to meddling than the US). And so looking at it from the IC perspective FB is too big to fail:

- Remember Palantir worked with CA on the Facebook data it acquired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16690721

- Remember how confident in May 2016 Thiel was of a Trump presidency and when he openly started endorsing Trump? Was he operating with more knowledge than available to the general public: http://fortune.com/2016/05/10/peter-thiel-trump-delegate/

- His $1.25 million donation in October 2016 seems even more interesting now: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/technology/peter-thiel-do...

- Leaked Palantir Doc Reveals Uses, Specific Functions And Key Clients https://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveal...

- This is who runs PRISM: https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-who-runs-prism

Oh and Palantir enables Immigration Agents to Access Information From the CIA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13895827

Also more uncomfortable questions: https://twitter.com/RidT/status/983789426340921349

Everything about everybody, living or dead, is known in near real-time.

We got a demo of Seisent, since bought by LexisNexus, mid-2000s. Our use case was to uniquely identify patients to improve record matching across heterogeneous databases.

Back then, Seisent was just based on publicly available data. It spanned all of North America, The Caribbean, and a good portion of Central and South. In those regions, every single person has been unqiuely identified. Easy to do thru process of elimination with that much data.

When shown my own data set, everything about me was right there. Everywhere I've ever lived, worked. My entire legal trail, like mortgages, marriage. Seisent even inferred my ex-wife's affair (FOAF).

Seisent sold their tech (big graph database, query language, some gear) to the NSA. Who was able to add non-public data. Like phone records, electronic transactions, etc.

That was 10+ years ago. Now I imagine they're slurping data up globally.

Siesent, Palantir, Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, etc effectively know everything about everybody.

I assume foreign efforts are doing the same.

I really doubt this is true, given how poorly targeted advertising performs, how much stuff credit-reporting agencies get wrong, and how much stuff intelligence services miss.

I'm sure they have a lot of data, but like anyone else, it's dirty data, and it's difficult to draw meaningful conclusions from it.

What measure of proof do you require?

PS- One of Seisent's selling points was helping to solve cold cases. The successful example I remember was matching MOs from a set of crimes in multiple areas and then identifying all the persons matching the profile who could also be in those areas at those times.

> What measure of proof do you require?

How about a single targeted advert for a product I want to buy? (Note: products I already bought and then start seeing tons of advertisements for don't count)

> PS- One of Seisent's selling points was helping to solve cold cases.

Did it actually help solve those cases? I haven't heard of any dramatic drops in unsolved murders, or huge numbers of cold cases being closed.

If they really do "effectively know everything about everybody", they're keeping damn quiet about it.

Man, I really wish the paranoia around Palantir would die. It's a federated database search system, and that's it. It searches multiple databases, and returns combined results. With all this complete paranoia around it as a company, people seem to have the impression that it's magically summoning data out of thin air, when in reality it's a glorified JOIN statement (obviously a simplification, but you get the sentiment).

Yeah, Thiel is more conservative than most big names in tech, but that's not surprising given that Palantir started focused on the national defense space.

Oh, and "PRISM"? Yeah, that's just a data importer. Completely separate from the secret CIA project, it's just a classic naming conflict. It was originally named "Palantir Data Importer" or something of that ilk, but Palantir loves fancy names, so re-branded it Prism (which is actually a clever name, as prisms takes white light and separates it into colors, much like the importer takes unstructured or semi-structured data and separates the entities and relationships).

Source: Am former Palantir engineer

Here's the Palantir section of the hearing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/10...

SEN. MARIA CANTWELL (D-WASH): Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Welcome Mr. Zuckerberg.

Do you know who Palantir is?

ZUCKERBERG: I do.

CANTWELL: Some people refer to them as a Stanford Analytica. Do you agree?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I have not heard that.

CANTWELL: Okay.

Do you think Palantir taught Cambridge Analytica, as press reports are saying, how to do these tactics?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I do not know.

CANTWELL: Do you think that Palantir has ever scraped data from Facebook?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I'm not aware of that.

...

CANTWELL: Have you heard of Total Information Awareness? Do you know what I'm talking about?

ZUCKERBERG: No, I do not.

CANTWELL: Okay. Total Information Awareness was, 2003, John Ashcroft and others trying to do similar things to what I think is behind all of this — geopolitical forces trying to get data and information to influence a process.

So, when I look at Palantir and what they're doing; and I look at WhatsApp, which is another acquisition; and I look at where you are, from the 2011 consent decree, and where you are today; I am thinking, “Is this guy outfoxing the foxes? Or is he going along with what is a major trend in an information age, to try to harvest information for political forces?”

And so my question to you is, do you see that those applications, that those companies — Palantir and even WhatsApp — are going to fall into the same situation that you've just fallen into, over the last several years?

ZUCKERBERG: Senator, I'm not — I'm not sure, specifically. Overall, I — I do think that these issues around information access are challenging.

To the specifics about those apps, I'm not really that familiar with what Palantir does. WhatsApp collects very little information and, I — I think, is less likely to have the kind of issues because of the way that the service is architected. But, certainly, I think that these are broad issues across the tech industry.

The initial section about Palantir was very well rehearsed - Zuckerberg immediately clammed up.

> CANTWELL: Have you heard of Total Information Awareness? Do you know what I'm talking about?

> ZUCKERBERG: No, I do not.

Hard to believe someone who has spent the past decade looking at how to monetize data has never heard of TIA.

I mean, it's probably more convincing than "I'm not really that familiar with what Palantir does".

Your average Ivy League CS grad is familiar with the bottom-line summary of what Palantir does - all the claims about secret projects aside, they do give tech talks and put product demos online. Zuckerberg is claiming he's not even familiar with that stuff?

oh and Sarah Jeong just now:

"Going to tweet out amounts received by each Congressperson from Facebook since 2014 as they speak in this hearing"

https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/984075571981266944

this is worth gold!

Sweet! There should be a rule where, whenever a politician is on TV talking about some subject, there needs to be a graphic in the corner showing the total dollar amount of donations that politician received from the 3 most relevant companies.

Like Amazon that Amazon prime feature, X-ray! That would be amazing.

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