‘450 Amazon employees tell Bezos to kick Palantir off AWS’ | Hacker News Reader

‘450 Amazon employees tell Bezos to kick Palantir off AWS’

sociable.co

25 pointshinchlt25 comments

This is a very confusingly written article. It repeatedly refers to Rekognition as a Palantir product, but it is in fact an AWS offering[1]. This is much clearer in the ACLU article they link to [2], which makes no reference to Palantir.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/rekognition/

[2] https://www.aclu.org/blog/privacy-technology/surveillance-te...

Solid point and the article has been updated.

We live in an age of private companies owning the infrastructure facilitating daily life. For instance:

1. Communications infrastructure: FB, Twitter, private sites hosted on big cloud vendors

2. Payments: Stripe, Braintree, ...

3. Cloud: Google, AWS, MSFT-Azure, ...

4. Transportation: Uber, Lyft, ...

5. Domain registration, hosting: GoDaddy, Google, AWS, ...

Imagine running a real business while being banned from the aforementioned platforms --> It's unfeasible!!!

Never ever in history have companies from the valley held outsized control over private communication and business. With this power comes great responsibility - one of which is tolerance for an opposing political thoughts. If these "infrastructure" companies start making it unfeasible for those with differing politics to exist online, they'll immediately draw regulatory ire. Not to mention that systemic censorship of certain thought is unethical.

If AWS employees disagree with Palantair & ICE, they should consider other channels of expression - from social media to pressuring their elected representatives to call for change. But, if Palantair isn't engaged in illegal activity, they should be sent to an orientation in tolerance for opposing political philosophies.

When's the most recently that private companies haven't owned the infrastructure facilitating daily life? Railroads are private businesses, the telephone companies are private businesses, payments have to go through credit card companies and banks, TV and radio are private businesses. Roads are public, but you have to go through private businesses to buy, maintain, repair, and fuel your car.

Commercial infrastructure providers have always had similar power, and sometimes even use it. The main reasons for them not using it has always been a combination of purely commercial motives for running a business--which is undermined by the founding myth of Silicon Valley as a haven for idealistic hippies trying to change the world--and the potential for competition--which is undermined by the monopolistic tendencies of the tech industry and the cultural groupthink on the West Coast.

Ironically, Silicon Valley, the Internet, and the field of computer science itself all originate from WWII-era military R&D.

When companies get to monopoly status (which the SV companies are), many of the kinds of things they could do as non-monopolies are no longer legal. They also face greater political scrutiny and legal action.

This is as it should be.

The railroad companies are heavily regulated, as are the phone companies, as are the energy companies, etc. They tried applying 1930s phone laws to the internet, and that didn't work out. At some point, they'll have to nut up and make some laws that prevent monopolies from doing bad things, or they'll have to allow the FTC to start breaking 'em up.

Yeah, it’s a hard problem. And I think GP is right in the sense that being good stewards of their power will forestall any legislative action targeted against them. The Bell monopoly persisted for years by being on good terms with the government. Which is ironically an incentive for them to take defense and intelligence contracts.

Railroads and telephone companies are regulated. AFAIK, telecoms can't just refuse service to people because they disagree with their politics. Likewise, a toll-road can't just say, "we're not letting traffic from X company use this infrastructure." Private companies that sell cars are de-facto incapable of refusing service to certain groups, since another entity can just by the car and resell them to the banned party. Private common carriers like UPS and whatnot are also bound by similar rules if I'm not mistaken.

I think it is fairly unprecedented that many of the pieces of infrastructure central to running a business are increasingly owned and run by companies that are allowed to refuse service to people on a whim. At least unprecedented since the early 20th century.

Political philosophy is not a protected status, nor should it be, and private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association. Consumers should have options, of course, but we get that through good old monopoly-busting (the situation is different for physically-entrenched monopolies like ISP's, but none of your listed industries are that).

Aside from maybe payment processing, you're also drastically overstating how limited the options in these spaces are. There are literally hundreds of domain registrars. Hosting providers are also plentiful and you can always colo. Facebook and Twitter are not infrastructure. Uber and Lyft are not known for their business services in any case.

Capricious bans do happen, but if someone somehow manages to get blacklisted from all of AWS, GCP, Azure, Rackspace, and DigitalOcean, odds are pretty good that that's society working as intended. It's nearly impossible to convince that many businesses not to take your money without actually being a terrible person who doesn't deserve to have your views publicized.

"If [an entity] somehow manages to get blacklisted from [every major player in a given industry], odds are pretty good that's society working as intended."

I can see the logic behind your statement, but I think it is easier than you are asserting for zeitgeist to start a ball rolling that cannot be easily stopped in terms of pushing people/actors/organizations out of society for being on the "wrong side."

Do you have any examples in mind?

I am not invoking Godwin, but I happen to be reading a very interesting book on WWII that focuses largely on the industrial/logistical effort of the main actors. The coverage of Germany's industrial sectors, particularly the aeronautics companies like Messerschmitt, Junkers, etc. is a pretty good example. Looking deeper (read: other sources) shows a world where the political lean of the Order of the Day had massive influence on what products got made, which ideas were given attention and funding, and which people were either supported or blackballed. In 1930s Germany, the engineers and firms that maintained the proper signalling, or political tone, were given a wide berth in deciding what was relevant and irrelevant with little or no consideration for what worked and what did not. This is what sprang to mind when I read your comment.

> Political philosophy is not a protected status, nor should it be, and private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association.

This justifies 80% of McCarthyism. Are you comfortable with this implication?

If by "justifies" you mean "doesn't explicitly outlaw" then yeah, I am, because libel laws also exist.

Is it your position that the real problem with McCarthyism was that actual communist spies were being denied jobs and service? I don't know how else you could be drawing the connection to what you quoted.

There's no legal burden of proof requirement for firing somebody for suspicion of belonging to a non-protected class.

American libel laws also require that, to convict someone of libel, you need to affirmatively prove that the defendant's claims are untrue, particularly if the victim is a public figure.

The real problem with McCarthyism is that even actions by non-governmental entities to enforce social norms against genuinely totalitarian ideologies by means that fall within the bounds of the law can still be unjust if they are pursued to extremes.

> American libel laws also require that, to convict someone of libel, you need to affirmatively prove that the defendant's claims are untrue

That's true, but potentially misleading: under the civil standard of proof (“preponderance of the evidence”), all the burden of proof means is that you are obligated to provide some evidence from which that conclusion could be drawn.

> particularly if the victim is a public figure.

No, while there are other things that must be proven when the plaintiff is a public figure or the issue is one of public concern, the degree of responsibility or required proof on the falsity element of libel doesn't change. (What does change, specifically, is about the publisher’s mental state; while for libel more generally mere negligent misreprentation will suffice for libel, for issues of public concern actual malice is required.)

I don't know why you're bringing burden of proof into it. Of course people get fired for unjust reasons all the time. If those reasons are petty prejudices that have existed for the duration of humankind's existence, and that the best efforts of societal and political leaders have failed to stamp out, we use the sledgehammer of protected classes to try and limit the damage.

If the reasons have more to do with a massive, nation-wide disinformation campaign instigated by powerful political figures, those are some very particular problems that are not best fixed by putting additional shackles on those pesky private businesses.

"<thing> can be unjust if pursued to extremes" is not a provocative or substantive comment for any value of <thing>. But before I go on, let me seek clarification: for the purposes of this discussion, are you actually suggesting that political affiliation should be made a protected class? That seems like where this is going but I don't want to accidentally end up fighting a straw person.

My argument is that private entities should be pressured to exercise their freedom of association responsibly and fairly, even when failure to do so falls below the legal standards of non-discrimination.

I agree that legal "sledgehammers" and "shackles" are burdensome. It's because of my eagerness to avoid such remedies that I strongly advocate other measures to discourage private firms from abusing their market power to effect political change by selectively including or excluding potential customers and employees for political reasons. While I suppose I technically agree that "private entities should not be under pressure to give up their freedom of association", they should be under pressure to use extreme discretion in exercising that freedom.

Okay, that's generally reasonable, but in the context of the current US political climate I think you're concerned about the wrong thing. While the national situation is frequently described as being rife with political intolerance, those attitudes belong mostly to the masses and to politicians. The megacorporations in question skew heavily techno-libertarian and display little propensity for censoring their platforms beyond removing illegal content and porn. In the case of social media in particular, it's the major platforms' lack of interest in curating political content that has allowed them and their "unbiased" algorithms to become the unwitting tools of those who would undermine our political institutions. If the likes of Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit would choose some principles to stand for rather than trying to be everything to everyone, they and we would be less susceptible to that sort of manipulation.

Social media is a whole other can of worms.

What do you consider “undermining our political institutions”? If that consists of spreading disinformation and propaganda, those have been part of politics for as long as there have been politics. If it’s because the propaganda is inserted by witting or unwitting agents of a hostile foreign power—well, that was the rationale for blacklisting suspected Communist screenwriters. This wasn’t the angle I was coming from, but it does circle back to that somehow.

> Political philosophy is not a protected status

It's not federally protected; state laws vary.

Is it feasible to build alternatives to 1, 2, 3, and 5?

Communication? Sure. Decentralized works well enough. Diaspora?

As far as privatizing the physical infrastructure: your hardware should be yours. Anything past that should be common carrier/ISP. Need an alternative? Good luck.

Decentralize the cloud? Owncloud works on most hardware.

Decentralizing payment software? What do ya think bitcoin is supposed to be?

But decentralizing DNS... Yeah... That's a challenge. Probably not gonna happen non-maliciously for a long time.

Decentralizing payment software? What do ya think bitcoin is supposed to be?

The 20-teens equivalent of tulip bulbs.

"An anonymous Amazon employee verified by Medium’s editorial staff wrote yesterday that Amazon should not be selling facial recognition software “Rekognition” to law enforcement as it was being used by police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) without ethical oversight."

I'm curious who's ethics and who's oversight this is referring to? I read the article and the medium post and that still seems unclear to me.

this will never ever ever ever never ever happen. don't waste your time reading this

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