Palantir’s User Manual for Cops
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Once and for all, it is the policy makers, not the tech industry, who are responsible for these operations. Tech enables people doing things easily, which can be good or evil. It is people, who should decide, be concern and push the lawmakers towards the right/justified path.
It's both/and.
> Particularly powerful are the newly-released copies of the IBM concentration camp codes. IBM maintained a customer site, known as the Hollerith Department, in virtually every concentration camp to sort or process punch cards and track prisoners.
Note: My comment is responding to the general idea of disclaiming responsibility. I don't know enough about this company to judge.
multiple high speed chases around where I live have resulted from police lighting a car up, and the driver failing to stop. Passengers in the car were "released on scene", because there was a recognition that they did not commit the failure to stop (and other associated offenses), nor could they safely extricate themselves from proximity.
I think there is a difference between a truly neutral tool being used for harmful purposes, and a tool specifically made for harmful purposes.
I don't care what race, nationality, or religion they are. I also want to see families and young kids kept together, and treated humanely. But at the end of the day, we [the U.S.] are a nation of laws, or we are not. I'm proud of Palantir's efforts to help enforce the (democratically-enacted, internationally-conventional) law of the land.
No one wants gang members running around shooting people up. We are very clearly not a nation of laws as laws apply differently depending on the very things you claim not to care about. Sentences are harsher, applications of justice are different depending on what race, nationality, or religion they are or even how much justice they can afford. This isn't an affront against the police, I'm good friends with officers, but at the end of the day as citizens it's our responsibility to hold our police accountable and establish the limits imposed upon them. Our founding fathers lived under a police state that was unaccountable to the people and we are drifting closer to that line. Our character as a nation is not defined by what we do when it's easy, but how we act when the decision are hard.
Does anything in Palantir's database require a warrant? Law enforcement can absolutely follow your car without a warrant, check if you've come up on a license plate reader, call another department and see if they have your phone number, list of associates, ect. Point being, police don't need a warrant to investigate you. I don't know if they even need reasonable suspicion or probable cause. You might be able to claim harassment if they interfere with your life. Otherwise, constitutional protections apply to restricting your freedom (eg. detaining/arresting you), ceasing/searching your property, and monitoring your private life (eg wiretaps, bugs, ect). It seems like what Palantir's doing is making it easier for departments to share information that would normally require lots of digging.
I'm not defending the practice at all. I despise this kind of mass surveillance, and am particularly concerned that it's being done in secret. My opinion is that we don't have enough, or practically any, privacy protections in the USA; at least on public property. Might sound like a contradiction, but we spend much of our lives in public, and shouldn't have to hide in our homes to prevent mass surveillance. I don't think the constitution goes far enough to protect us anymore. The founding fathers could not even imagine the world we live in today. Even George Orwell couldn't conceive of the capabilities we have today when he wrote 1984. Yet we've done close to nothing to rein in these capabilities, and all the movement is in the wrong direction.
If you want rule of law, provide work permits and a path to citizenship. Immigrants of all variety aren't going away. We need them.
If a concerted effort was made to improve the lives of such workers, I think you'd be surprised how quickly Americans would be willing to do those jobs.
Americans are, on the whole, unwilling to pay the prices required to provide people with a living wage and proper labor protections.
I would frame it as, "Americans are, on the whole, unwilling to pay higher prices for ethically-sourced food when lower prices can be had elsewhere." The solution is to eliminate the cheaper, unethical alternative.
Do you have source backing this up?
Take a look at the pictures and pretend it's your family members. Still proud?
If you’re helping put people into inhumane conditions, you’re at the very least an accessory to these crimes.
There is of course enormous variance in how countries handle immigration, but the ethical and conventional policy could be summarized as:
1. Border enforcement. Ie, try to prevent people from entering illegally
2. Tolerance for those who are illegally present
(2) Means that a person who emigrated illegally should be able to exist outside the shadows. That is, they should be able to get ID, work, drive, etc while their immigration case is decided, often indefinitely. As well, parents of children born-in country can apply for residence in the EU, for example.
This obviously makes an enormous amount of practical sense. All of the "problems" with illegal immigration ('job stealing', not paying taxes, etc) are exacerbated when people cannot legally work. Distinguishing between MS-13 members and hotel room cleaners is harder when the latter cannot integrate.
Lastly, there is an enormous moral cost to the "crackdown" immigration policy enacted by the US Government. Undocumented immigrants live in constant fear, poverty and exploitation. This is a real ethical and moral cost for an act which is, at the end of the day, pretty benign.
The US is a nation of laws, but the punishment (Can't complain when you're exploited! Can't sign a lease! Get deported to a country you left when you were two weeks old!) for illegal immigration is completely disproportionate to the crime.
https://www.teledoce.com/telemundo/internacionales/mexico-au...
The E.U. tightened their border control policies after a wave of terrorist attacks and upsurge in far-right political activity. We ran the experiment, and it turns out that's what happens when you let in millions of people with little job skills from cultures that broadly have, among other things, very regressive views on women's civil rights.
2) Mexico's deportations are just as unethical as the US ones.
This doesn’t make much sense to me. You are saying people who win the lottery of illegally getting in to a country without detection should be rewarded. People who figure out how to beat country’s systems of legal entry should be handed awards of permanent residency. Why? If citizens don’t want to punish illegal immigrants then they should just eliminate relevant laws. But if laws exist then it should be applied uniformly, equally and with due process to everyone.
I don't think this is true in any other country than USA, and it is only true in USA due to States not being allowed to enact their own immigration laws. California is very tolerant of illegal immigrants since according to them they are not really illegal.
In most countries it works like this: People arrive to a country, as soon as it is noticed that they are illegal they get contacted by authorities and they get to seek asylum etc. If they don't then they are not tolerated. If they do then during the asylum process they are not illegal any longer, and hence tolerated. As soon as a decision is made to deport them they are illegal if they stay and will not be tolerated no matter what they do.
I don't think this is true in any other country than USA
Cars can be used for good or evil. For the most part we leave it up to the users to do the right thing, however we don't just leave it up to the users. If a modern car manufacturer were to make a vehicle with no safety features whatsoever, we would rightly call them out as a bad actor. Seat belts, air bags, bumpers, crumple zones, defoggers, windshield wipers, and on and on. We have laws that require a basic level of safety for these potentially dangerous machines.
There is no reason we shouldn't expect tech and software firms to include basic "safety" considerations of their own.
Remember all those companies that helped implement censorship and spying systems for authoritarian regimes? Still thing it should up to "the lawmakers"?
Of course, for cars, safety is a marketable feature so it behooves them to make them somewhat safe. In this instance, it seems like these precautions are against the user's interests, which complicates things.
Yes, lawmakers are responsible for it, too. But let's not justify the "we just built and sold a weapon, we didn't fire it" mentality.
This is what people working on horrible things say to themselves to justify collecting a (giant) paycheck. Many parties are at fault, whether they write the laws or the software.
Prefacing your opinion with 'once and for all' is not much better than saying 'mine is the only valid opinion' and doesn't make for a good discussion.
Policy makers certainly create the demand for such commercial services, but it is a choice to supply that demand or not, and those who find such demands morally questionable have the capability to frustrate them by refusing to participate or obstructing the supply.
Individuals can of course abdicate the moral decision-making if it makes them uncomfortable, but acting without regard to the good or ill of the outcome is an implicit endorsement of it. If people later decide that certain outcomes are a moral ill, indifferent participants may find themselves considered culpable.
Bottom up direct action is the only real way to fight injustice, law makers move far too slowly to effectively be a barrier to all injustice. Additionally, building a weapon is not simply building a tool (note that I'm not saying weapons aren't ever necessary), and it's foolish to suggest otherwise.
Similarly if the technology being built can be reasonably used for great harms - and one building it is supposed to differentiate between 'knife' and 'Death Star'-level of potential threat - building the technology by itself may become the responsibility.
Tools are abused all the time, but not every tool is as destructive and likely to be abused. The use and abuse should be considered, and mitigation undertaken as part of any basic engineering ethics standard.
Tools aren’t natural, and certainly not these tools. They were made very intentionally. To use an extreme example, you don’t get to make the proverbial genetically targeted bioweapon, and the throw up your hands when it’s used and say, “Hey I’m blameless. I just made the thing.” Well, the outcome of its use, and it’s appeal to bad actors is obvious, it wouldn’t have existed if you didn’t build it.
But let’s look at Palantir in particular. It’s not just software, it also a consultancy via its “forward deployed engineers”. This means that it’s not just a value neutral tool, but actively aiding customers to do whatever.
Organizationally responsible. Ethically, if you provide means to do X and can reasonably predict that someone (e.g. government) will apply X to do something unethical, then you are at least partially responsible for the final unethical result.
I hired a former CIA analyst a few years ago. Part of his job at the CIA was to contribute to the daily briefings provided to president Obama. I asked him how he felt about the ethics of spying on American citizens. He said I wouldn't believe the number of threats that were prevented on a daily basis because of the tools and data they have access to. He said they don't share the information about what or how many crimes they prevent because it would cause panic. They also don't share that information because it would give away how they were uncovering the plans.
It seemed like a viable explanation and I don't think he had any incentive to embellish...but it also seemed like something big brother would say to get me to give up freedoms.
It's the functional equivalent of calling satellite overflights attacks, every time they fly by.
'We are under constant attack!' also helps the internal justification of working for/with agencies like that.
You could argue the same thing about the CIA, but there's no direct financial incentive like there is for growing your cybersecurity business.
I believe the real crux of the problem is intellectuals won't trust intel agencies because there's no evidence that they're being used exclusively for good, and the intel agencies can't provide that evidence without burning their methodology.
There's absolutely no way for us as outsiders to evaluate whether mass intelligence collection tools like PRISM are being used for good or bad, or whether they're even necessary. So instead we have to judge them based on what we know
I didn't say they weren't doing that, I was just suggesting that that frame of mind is fostered for a variety of reasons inside those agencies.
And 'intellectuals' can look at history and see that, categorically, the intel agencies have not used their powers exclusively for good at any point in history under any government. That doesn't mean they're not necessary, worthwhile, or even honorable in intention. But the facts are the facts.
edit. added not. completely changes the ending. sry
Maybe they are simply leaning on financiers via other means, and preventing attacks by re-rerouting or intercepting cash.
Remember: they are very explicitly not law enforcement. Read 'The Black Banners' by Ali Soufan of the FBI to get a good sense of how not-law-enforcement the CIA is.
The physician, whose reputation was such that his name became synonymous with medical science in China, replied, "My eldest brother sees the the spirit of sickness and removes it before it takes shape, so his name does not get out of the house.
My elder brother cures illness when it is still extremely minute, so his name does not get out of the neighborhood.
As for me, I puncture veins, prescribe potions, and massage skin, so from time to time my name gets out and is heard among the lords."
Sun Tzu - Art of War translator's intro
Or to keep up morale at the agency.
The one indisputable fact is that actual attacks are very rare. So there are only two possibilities:
1. Law enforcement is exceptionally effective at stopping them, or
2. There are very few attempted attacks to begin with.
Here's a data point to help you decide which of these is more likely:
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
At least I hope not.
(You might also want to re-read the headline.)
And also keep in mind that the people "preventing" these threats have a vested interested in making these "threats" sound as sinister as possible. It's similar to drug busts by cops - if they seize a kilo of cocaine, they don't say they took "$10,000 worth of drugs off the street", they say they took "$200,000 worth of drugs off the street", by making the most favorable calculation (selling individual grams at an inflated price).
You always hear people say this, but they don't seem to worry about the panic that line might cause.
The background system is called NICS [1], and all information submitted to it is destroyed after 1 day. The system only outputs PROCEED or DENY to the FFL when someone is being checked for a firearms purchase.
1 - "Per Title 28, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 25.9(b)(1), (2), and (3), the NICS Section must destroy all identifying information on allowed transactions prior to the start of the next NICS operational day. If a potential purchaser is delayed or denied a firearm and successfully appeals the decision, the NICS Section cannot retain a record of the overturned appeal."
These books are kept by firearms sellers (FFL) and must be present to the ATF upon request
> There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose.
> That's been a federal law, thanks to the NRA, since 1986: No searchable database of America's gun owners. So people here have to use paper, sort through enormous stacks of forms and record books that gun stores are required to keep and to eventually turn over to the feds when requested. It's kind of like a library in the old days—but without the card catalog. They can use pictures of paper, like microfilm (they recently got the go-ahead to convert the microfilm to PDFs), as long as the pictures of paper are not searchable. You have to flip through and read. No searching by gun owner. No searching by name.
I'm sure internal communication about the product is extremely positive, with phrases like "improved law enforcement accuracy by XX%, decreased customer costs and time by YY," so some may truly believe they are doing something that everyone would agree is good.
For another, I've personally seen my work get turned from a human safety product in one market into a direct instrument of human oppression in another market. Lots of tech is just a tool, which can be used for good or evil. The thing is, once good people see what is possible, it provides them an easy route to doing evil which they might not have had before.
Typewriters can be turned to evil. IBM showed this to the world with their WWII-era Nazi collaboration. That doesn't mean the world should abandon typewriters, or that no self-respecting engineer should work on typewriters, or that they would be necessarily used for evil by the law-enforcement arm of a democratic society.
Should police agencies collect and store real-time location data for every private car? Probably not. I'd support legislation to restrict such practices. Should Palantir help police officers sort and present the data they collect, in general including not only LPR data but also criminal records, known associates, and vehicle information? I'd say yes.
IBM's relationship with the Third Reich was not based on the mere supply of typewriters; such a suggestion reduces your credibility on this topic to zero.
"Punchcards can be turned to evil."
The specific type of dual-use technology is irrelevant to my point.
Any other company with enough developers and data scientists can do what Palantir does. It's the massive amount of information their software uses that is the concern. But that data is collected by our government, and so we have legal recourse to it, either under current law or by passing new privacy laws.
What can Palantir do to you?
1) these efforts do not guarantee their safety and comfort (though others might, these don't) and
2) that even if they did, the ethical price of hunting down undocumented immigrants is inexcusably high. That in the same way that you wouldn't behead someone for speeding, you shouldn't separate families and cause people to live in the shadows simply for having the privilege of cleaning your hotel sheets.
It’s not like the people against mass surveillance all want their kids to live in unsafe neighborhoods, or be blind to terrorist plots. But everything must be balanced within our set of liberties — and the American way of due process, etc, is purposefully skewed to protect individual rights and liberties.
This is why gun rights is such a hot button issue — some would like to see stricter regulations, because they feel unsafe sending their kids to school in a world of mass shootings. Others feel those restrictions place an undue burden on individual liberties afforded by the constitution.
When it comes to law enforcement, there is a lot of abuse of Power present in the system, which disproportionately affects people of color. Thus, there’s a very valid argument to be made that some of this tech is too dangerous in the hands of law enforcement, despite how much people of all political stripes want their families to be safe.
My aim here is to illuminate the differences in the arguments. I’m not trying to force my (admittedly liberal) point of view on the conversation, because HN isn’t really for politics. My goal here is to show how, despite politics, people can all desire safety for their family, and personal liberties, but have honest disagreements about the best way to achieve that.
If Obama's daughters (or Trump's if you are on the other side) were killed in some horrific racist incident, wouldn't you approve the usage of such software if it was the only hope of getting the perpetrator? Or would you say "as much as I am saddened, I cannot approve such massive invasion of privacy".
EDIT: I see what you mean. I had mistaken the meaning of OP. Please ignore this comment.
The latter, every time. The nature of principles is that they do not change with changing circumstances. I find your example extremely unpersuasive.
Yes, I would take that stance every time, and twice on Sunday.
https://twitter.com/FogbeamLabs/status/1086757478312960002
What safeguards do you have in place to make sure that personally identifiable information of customers that companies using your tech have is not aggregated and pulled together for nefarious use? For example very targeted lead sourcing or targeted advertisement?
Oh, none, you actually advertise that you are mining all the databases for:
> Prospect and identify leads
But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.
The differences between us and Palantir then:
1. We don't pitch our software to intelligence agencies, law enforcement, etc., or encourage it's use for these kinds of ends. But we can't specifically block those uses, or we'd be in violation of the OSD.
2. We've been very public with our unwillingness to embrace working with intelligence agencies and the like. See, for example: https://www.wraltechwire.com/2014/04/30/why-a-triangle-tech-...
3. Everything we do is Open Source, meaning that at least the public can take a look inside and see what's going on... modulo any changes a given end user organization makes and keeps private.
4. Our technology is positioned primarily for internal knowledge management / collaboration use inside organizations. But, again, we have no means, legal or technical, to stop somebody from using it for other purposes. And even if we did, they could just download Lucene, ManifoldCF, blah, blah, etc., and build up their own Nefarious Indexing System.
But I understand that it can be hard to see certain things when your income depends on you not seeing them.
There is nothing in this regard that we "don't see". Taking your argument to it's logical conclusion, even a worker mining sand somewhere, to use to fabricate silicon chips, which can be used to power computers, which can be used to run privacy violating software, is "guilty". I don't think I need to point out the absurdity of that position. Furthermore, if we really just cared about "get all the money at any cost" we would have immediately jumped at a chance to talk to In-Q-Tel and the possibility of juicy, rich contracts supplying the CIA and their brethren with technology.
Since you advertise that your tech is suitable for lead sourcing, you obviously don't see anything wrong with mining and linking databases of PII information, as long as it's done by "the good guys".
We don't. The line you quoted above is from my LinkedIn profile where it's describing my responsibilities as founder of the company. So, of course, part of what I do is prospecting and identifying leads. All companies do that, I don't think anything we do falls into the "nefarious" range. We aren't using retargeting or buying user information from data mining companies, etc. Our prospecting basically starts and stops with Twitter and LinkedIn... Not exactly spook stuff.
And while I can respect that some people take things to such extremes that they can even find mundane things like advertising unethical; I'm pretty comfortable with my own sense of ethics and our attempt to do the right things. In either case, attempting to draw any parallel between us and Palantir is an exercise in absurdity. Notice that there's no HN top-page stories titled "Fogbeam Lab's Secret User Manual For Cops", etc. :-)
This. A difference between a rock in a sling and a nuclear bomb can, hyperbolically, viewed as a better UI for rather similar goal.
Does it explain the things? Do you see how quantitative differences become qualitative?
I have my answer, but I don't think it's nearly this black and white. Palantir probably does a lot of good, just like all the big tech companies, even though it's the bad stuff that mostly makes the news.
Yes, I'd rather not aid law enforcement in spreading disinformation and targeting journalists, for example [1].
Though I do agree that it's not as cut and dry as "Palantir is evil".
[1] https://www.thetechherald.com/articles/Data-intelligence-fir...
Most of the responses I'm seeing here are about money and while that is probably a factor at some level, I like to believe that people need to have a lot of pressure put on them by society for other reasons to give up their personal morals in exchange for money.
"No one is the villain in their own story".
If you look at us biologically speaking, we are herding creatures.
That means the majority will go along with what the leaders want.
While the Milgram experiment was skewed, the reality is most people will shock you to death just because an authority told them so. And if you ask them at the end if what they did was right, they will say yes, or they wouldn't have done it.
Being a decent of German Jews, I normally think: "Who of the people that I know wouldn't turn me in."
The sad reality: very few. It's by design. Herds don't work when everyone is trying to go their own way. There will always be individuals who eschew herd. Biologically, they generally die, but a few find new environments or start their own new herds. Of course the herd problem then starts over.
Most of your feelings aren't rational conclusions based on sound analytical reasoning, and if your day-to-day is just making widgets for other widgets, you probably aren't often forced to update them.