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Comment by xpaqui | Hacker News Reader

> Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy.

This is disingenuous at best this is a tool for surveillance and its misuse in public life is more obvious than the advantages it might bring. People will naturally distrust a government that spies on them constantly and that has nothing to do with good or bad government.

There is an episode of black mirror on the mother who surveils her daughter constantly if the mother is good why do we feel disgusted by her attitude?

I applauded apple for publicly denying the government a backdoor in their phones.

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It is unclear to me what you are saying here. It is well-known fact (amongst the intelligence community) that our software has been used to save tens of thousands of lifes, prevent hundreds (thousands?) of terrorist attacks, saved billions of dollar in fraud etc. In terms of most of the kind of projects governments do in an attempt to prevent {crime,fraud,terrorism,...}, on a scale for how much bang you get for your buck (where 'buck' might be how much data collection you have to do), I think you won't find many other alternatives that compare favourably. (But then, I might be biased, of course.) In fact, as I described in many agencies the situation actually drastically improves once they start using palantir software, since they already had all the data all along, but weren't properly using it as the law intends them to.

Everyone knows the various forms of law enforcement perform some measure of (and have to, to do their job) surveillance. That ranges from e.g. ALPR cameras to patrolling the streets of some city. Most people agree that this is a perfectly acceptable thing. Do you think instead the police should be abolished? Or stripped of their investigative or enforcing power? I don't think most people would actually enjoy living in whatever society would result from this.

Of course the exact boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not should be fiercely debated.

> Of course the exact boundaries of what is acceptable and what is not should be fiercely debated.

What makes most people uneasy, and especially those of us who work in tech, is that many police departments and 3 letter agencies have routinely abused the trust that people put in them. If you want the citizenry to have trust and faith in law enforcement, they have to demonstrate a desire to not break constitutional rights when they deem fit to do so.

I genuinely don't understand why these agencies wouldn't try to build a good relationship with the citizenry they are supposed to be protecting. It often seems like we live in a very dangerous society and everything we say or do is being monitored by someone and may be used maliciously. That itself is a very terrible thing to live with.

I think it's important to distinguish between individual abuse and systemic abuse.

Every one of those agencies has had, in their history, at least some cases of individual abuse (e.g. one particular individual abusing their power). This is unavoidable (because these agencies employ humans, and humans are assholes sometimes) but as long as the situation is appropriately handled at the organizational level (the responsible party is reprimanded in an appropriate way, e.g. let go, tried, ... and practices and protocols are put into place to deal with and prevent these kind of situations) this is OK, because the agency operating is still a net win for humanity.

Most people who are paranoid about these kind of things are so because the media loves to pick up these stories and hype them up and spread fear -- but I don't think it's that much of a problem.

The thing that's really a worry (and that media usually does not report on) is when abuse happens in a systemic fashion, e.g. agencies bending the interpretation of the law to extend their reach. Incidentally, this is exactly what palantirs software is designed to help with, because it can actually enforce these rules.

That is an excellent point. Its much more sensational when you have a few bad apples but exposing a rot within an organization isn't as "newsworthy". Besides, if the corruption spreads far enough, it might be able to actively silence its critics (e.g. Nixon's shenanigans).

Perhaps a systemic fear of Government overreach is embedded in the DNA of the American people. I would argue that a healthy criticism is very important; but paranoia can be dangerous and unproductive.

No, most aware people do not agree with your anti-privacy view.

> our software has been used to save tens of thousands of lifes, prevent hundreds of terrorist attacks... This is exactly what I mean by advantages vs disadvantages these look like stapled platitudes from the marketing team. It looks like you are conflating war zones scenarios with civil society a bit like promoting an M1 Abram for New York police, due to the effectiveness in Iraq. If you aren't then I'm baffled by how many terrorist attacks we've thwarted, and incredulous. There haven't been thousands of terrorist attacks in civil society before the software was created.

> Or stripped of their investigative or enforcing power? So it's either all the power or none of the power? This is a logical fallacy you are creating a duality for something that does not exist. The police is not the same as your software like you implied. I'm against the government spying on their citizens even with good intentions. See the black mirror episode since it demonstrates where problem lies, it's not in good intentions, it's in the control.

Does this software help the government to spy on their citizens? Yes. Should the citizens have a say in if they want this software to be used for their data? Yes, why don't they have say? Can we live without this software? Yes, like we've done so far. Is this software helpful in a police state? I would say it's the most valuable software for a police state.

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