The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees
washingtonpost.com
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Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all US gov't contractors. It's hilariously ironic seeing the political views of the employees suddenly clashing with their employers views of making money as if it's a new thing.
My grandfather started a company which was a smaller player in the military contracting space.
It was somewhat large and his argument was that he was always 'helping democracy' but he was willfully blind IMO.
It's always going to be a bit fuzzy but it's another thing entirely when the organization you're selling to is just flat out evil.
Unless you're some dinky, meaningless, retail company, you will do business with the government at some point. That's not a bad thing, it means your company is actually doing something important.
I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.
What about OSS projects like R and Python that also enable ICE to analyze data to find people.
Is the expectation that Palantir should not sell software to ICE?
Palantir does bundle software and services. Their software is so complex, it is typically Palantir employees building the models and analytics.
source
Having said that, some people do think Microsoft should refuse to sell to ICE too.
No, can you explain it? It sounds like a way to justify to yourself that "those people are bad", but you're "just doing your job". Are you principled about who you do business with, or not?
OK. Why is that worthy of a boycott? Your democratically elected governments create the laws, and determine the funding for things like beds and toys etc. Boycotts in some cases may make those conditions worse instead of better.
There will always need to be a border force. Wouldn't it be better to focus on improving conditions, increasing funding, and stopping people from crossing the border in the first place?
Under the last administration ICE was only targeting folks who had committed serious crimes, but now they're targeting all undocumented folk. A lot of our economy actually depends on these people, as they tend to be the ones picking vegetables and working in factory farms, preparing livestock for sale - nasty jobs most people don't want. Trump's golf courses and hotels have also knowingly employed undocumented folk, but they don't do much to the people employing undocumented folks (which is actually illegal - being undocumented is not).
Oh, and we're a country of immigrants. (Except the native folk.)
See https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/03/us/politics/fact-check-ic... for a bit more detail.
Most of us probably have no issue with the baker who sold Hitler his daily loaf of bread.
But many of us do have problems with Hugo Boss for designing Nazi uniforms, even though the design work would have been before most of the Nazi war crimes had occurred.
Does not resisting to the fullest of your ability constitute enabling evil?
Would you take Pablo Escobar's donation to build a children's orphanage?
Should gun store owners share the blame when a gun purchased in their business is used in a mass shooting? If you say no, what about if the gun is used in a mass shooting within 30 minutes of the sale and the shooter comes across as under distress, and the gun store owner is worried enough to call in a warning to the authorities.
Why did Bernie Sanders have to return Martin Shkreli's donation? Even if the donation doesn't buy any influence or soft power it allows the "bad" actor to clean their reputation.
From a political perspective there is also the reputation cost to consider. Even if you're morally fine with taking "bad" peoples money, having to answer "why is Shkreli funding you campaign" all the time has a pretty big political cost, even if you have a perfectly legitimate answer.
I became familiar with them through their disease prevention activities trying to evaluate bug transmissions and food borne diseases.
Certainly, you can analyze innocent people, but it’s not like they are a face recognition camera company or something.
I’m not employed by Palantir and not a fan or anything, but am surprised at how mischaracterized they seem to be.
This is like saying Raytheon's core business is antennas. Yes, Palantir does data analysis, specifically for ICE, the military and the police.
I found this article [0] from 2018 that said half of its $1B in revenue comes from government and the other half from corporate.
So if every penny of government work comes from ICE and ICE-likes maybe that’s core.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-16/palantir-...
Perhaps they signed up naively imagining they were working on a tool that would be used for that and nothing else?
What is your alternative?
And had I known they were doing CBP stuff, I may have been OK with it under Obama even. It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I really started opposing it.
HSI special agents investigate violations of more than 400 U.S. laws that threaten the national security of the United States such as counter-proliferation and export violations, human rights violations/war crimes, human smuggling, art theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling and trafficking, arms trafficking, document and benefit fraud, the manufacturing and sale of counterfeit immigration and identity documents, transnational gangs, financial crimes including money laundering and bulk cash smuggling, trade-based money laundering (including trade finance and Kimberley Process investigations), computer crime, including child exploitation, intellectual property rights/trade fraud, import/export enforcement, trafficking of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and other merchandise, mass-marketing fraud, and international Cultural Property and Antiquities crimes.
Willful lack of proportion to score political karma points.
That's silly. It's clear, given the contrast between Obama and Trump on this issue, that the President has substantial leeway on how ICE acts in this regard.
> Laws make it clear that stepping foot on US soil without authorization requires federal detention pending a court date.
This is plainly false. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_detention_in_the_U...
Just how familiar were you, or are you for that matter, with the full scope of ICE’s activities circa 2015?
No-one described those kids in cages as kids in cages until Trump was elected. From what I could tell, only one local news outlet even ran with that shocking, arresting image of a kid in a cage looking into the camera when it was actually news.
Rhetoric in many cases informs policy and vice versa. You can't just say they exist in a vacuum when the reason why the visa ban occured was on racial pretenses.
https://beta.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-prote...
Regarding H-1B's, DHS almost made a decision to make many people on work visas criminals with a catch-22 situation because of the delays in processing H1 extensions. I wish I was making this up.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2018/07/11/new-u...
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/border-patrol-agent-deta...
The editorial also neglects to mention that our facilities are greatly over capacity, that this change will make that much much worse, and that thanks to the backlog of immigration cases these families would have to be in these facilities for 5 years or more. To say nothing of the abuses and poor conditions.
And, once again, these families seeking asylum have not committed any crime, they have done nothing illegal.
That is not correct. Even sites seeking to argue against the high rates of skipping asylum hearings put their no-show figures at 40-50%: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/06/26/how-many-...
There are many issues, yes. Why can't you give the administration credit for fixing one of them? Why point to another problem and say, "but this isn't fixed yet!"
Granted, there have been a large increase in the number of people who skip their asylum hearings. From 2013 to 2017 this figure was lower, averaging ~44%. More recent samples put this figure in the 70% range and by some estimates even into the 90% range.
We could have ICE deport people who miss their hearings but ICE raids generate even more negative PR than detaining people at the border.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/03/world/us-asylum-denial-rates-...
There are a lot of factors involved in those numbers. For starters, immigration court does not provide public defenders. If you can't afford a lawyer, and can't find a lawyer willing to work pro bono, you have to represent yourself. Yes, even if you are a minor. And having an attorney, according to your article, makes it 5x more likely for your claim to be accepted.
There's also the fact that standards for being granted asylum can be arbitrary and not subject to proper review. Immigration judges work for the DOJ, not the judicial system, and are appointed by the Attorney General. The Attorney General also has fairly broad powers to increase the burden of proof for asylum cases, and limiting the circumstances in which an asylum claim is valid. The AG can also directly override the decisions of judges and deny asylum. For example: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/immigration/ag-barr-using-u...
Yes they are, illegally entering the United States is breaking the law.
We could entertain either or both of:
A. Entering the US is not breaking any laws, no matter the manner in which it is accomplished.
B. Applying for asylum grants an amnesty for the laws broken while entering the US.
Crossing into the US illegally is by definition illegal. Misdemeanor, to be exact.
So one border guard does something, and it's okay to say "they do things like this"?
Isn't that exactly the argument Trump makes about illegal immigrants comitting crimes?
Also note that ICE doesn't just enforce immigration laws, they also do things like this: https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/missouri-felon-indicted-se...
Officers executed a search warrant at Lee’s residence and found numerous firearms, ammunition, firearm suppressors, suspected methamphetamine, marijuana, suspected stolen farm equipment, and a large amount of cash. Lee told officers that he received 10 to15 past deliveries of the selector switches, and that he converted and successfully fired a Glock pistol as a fully automatic firearm.
I'd rather take the chance that those several other law enforcement agencies couldn't have worked it out on their own than have thousands of innocent families torn apart and kept in cages.
Conversely, would eliminating HSI prevent such reprehensible treatment of migrant families? Wouldn't the abuses just pop up elsewhere, given the agenda of the current administration?
It sure seems that way. And people often forget that we didn't have these agencies at all before 9/11, and we did just fine. Metal detectors and stronger cockpit doors are well and good, but what we have are agencies that were created in a time of extreme fear, and have held on to fear as their guiding ethos.
> Wouldn't the abuses just pop up elsewhere, given the agenda of the current administration?
Maybe, I don't know. But the problem right now is they have an excuse. We're giving people license to commit whatever thuggish, nationalistic fantasies they want, all sanctioned under some vague "rule of law" argument where the letter has far, far outstripped the spirit. And what we end up with are goon squads harassing and imprisoning innocents based on technicalities. I don't think that sort of thing could persist at this scale without the pretense that these agencies provide.
I'll put it this way: I live in southern Texas. I'm who they're allegedly protecting. And if ICE were abolished overnight, I would throw a party.
ICE wasn't created out of thin air, it was formed by merging and reorganizing existing organizations including Customs and INS.
> We're giving people license to commit whatever thuggish, nationalistic fantasies they want, all sanctioned under some vague "rule of law" argument where the letter has far, far outstripped the spirit.
I agree this is happening and we need to do something to stop it. At the same time, I don't believe this is the only thing that's happening in ICE, as it's a large and complex organization.
> if ICE were abolished overnight, I would throw a party.
If that happened but the fundamental issue of nationalism and lack of concern for human rights was not addressed, I think we could end up in an even worse place than we are currently.
I'm not against abolishing ICE, but I don't think it's a solution in itself. The fundamental issue, in my opinion, is a lack of empathy and understanding for people who seem different, and it's happening on a large scale. I believe that is a much harder issue to tackle compared to restructuring our federal bureaucracy, but that's what we should be focusing on to make a real, lasting impact. Restructuring without addressing the underlying issue seems like a placebo that would do more harm than good.
Sure, the post-9/11 reorganization precedes the current abuses, but I don't see a clear argument that it is somehow fundamental to them. Border Patrol and ICE seem to be the main agencies implementing the problem policies; Border Patrol predates the reports, INS’s enforcement arm would have been in ICE’s role before, but I don't see why that would have made the situation better in an Administration with the same general policy organization.
I'm not raising this point to be pedantic or discount the tragedy. I just think it's important to have an accurate understanding of the organizational structure if one wants to make meaningful changes to it.
see also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_(pamphlet)
etc.
Because there are reports of ICE doing inhumane things toward the people they have detained.
1) Children are being separated from families.
2) Children are dying under ICE facilities.
3) The jailing of asylum seekers.
These are the few things that lead many people to believe ICE is evil.
Where as the other side seems to be concentrating on the illegal immigrants.
It also come down to the morality of what they're doing and if this is similar to internment camp or concentration camp.
This was a quote I thought relevant, however because I don't think it was rainbows and unicorns under Obama either:
"The Obama administration did detain families together — some indefinitely — in hopes of deterring future migrants back in 2014, earning protests and public outrage at the time." [1]
[1]https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/immigration-border-crisis/...
>By the numbers: Under the Obama administration, total ICE deportations were above 385,000 each year in fiscal years 2009-2011, and hit a high of 409,849 in fiscal 2012. The numbers dropped to below 250,000 in fiscal years 2015 and 2016.
>Under Trump, ICE deportations fell to 226,119 in fiscal 2017, then ticked up to over 250,000 in fiscal 2018 and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year (as of June).
Edit: I'm not saying I support Trump or ICE, my point is that Obama was hardly a leftist.
Read again. Nobody asked that.
But the Right is the only place that that happens.
> this has been an ongoing problem for a while.
No, the family separation policy has not been going on for a while; the Obama policy was not to detain illegal crossers with children (absent some other reason for detention), specifically to avoid that, and not to force legal asylum-seekers away from standard border crossings to force them to be illegal crossers in the first place.
That's not too say that there weren't humanitarian problems at the border under Obama, but they weren't at the same level as those deliberately created by Trump policies.
The rate of deportations wasn't the issue, the incidence and conditions of detention of children was the issue; the incidence of that was not as high, nor the conditions as bad, under Obama. But, even so:
> and hit a Trump administration high of 282,242 this fiscal year (as of June).
The federal fiscal years ends at the end of September, so “as of June” is 8-9 months of the year, depending on whether it's June 1, June 30, or somewhere in between, so it's on pace for 376k-423k, assuming a flat line throughout the year though continuing increase throughout the year might be more consistent with the year over year change. So, Trump started low in fiscal 2017 (which started under Obama and occurred largely while Trump was still getting people in place, with immigration policy focussed on fighting over the Muslim ban), and has rapidly reversed the deportation declines of the last 4 years of the Obama administration in the two years since, coming back up to a pace around or exceeding Obama’s peak year. So even if deportation numbers were the issue, your presentation would be misleading.
This certainly was not true and you have not provided sources saying so.
Not really. Here are some things that changed.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/us/politics/fact-check-tr...
But even though I'm predisposed to view cops favorably, the stuff with ICE is shocking to me. America has a big chunk of history [1] where ethnic cleansing was common and ignored or even supported by police [2]. It's hard for me not to see ICE's aggressive dehumanization of non-white migrants as a resurgence of that. So I'm not surprised that even at Palantir people are objecting.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...
[2] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...
Plenty of people who are not white people come to the country legally every year.
https://www.gq.com/story/border-patrol-incarcerated-citizen
ICE and CBP have repeatedly violated U.S. law in their treatment of children, including violating the Flores Settlement (which carries the force of U.S. law), violating Constitutional due process and equal protection rights (ruled in Ms. L case), and violated the civil rights guaranteed under U.S. and international law, for example by refusing to provide hygiene materials and medicine.
It is true that plenty of non-white people come legally to the US. But that doesn't mean that there aren't problems with how those people are treated, or that there isn't bias against those people involved.
So they're horrible abusers if they separate children and now that they are trying to rectify that by keeping children together with family by removing the detention limit they too are abusers. What would make you happy then? The only alternative is open borders which is a non starter.
My hot take: I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride.
Pride here isn't a good thing.
As long as there is sufficient plausible deniability, people will sign up for anything. In the tech domain, this goes back to at least WW2 with IBM selling punch card machines to Germany.
I did have a recruiter reach out a long time ago and remember they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostitution rings.
Hahah, just kidding, Palantir is for chasing down the hoi polloi, not the madams and child abducters who service the country's elite (who after all probably give Palantir a lot of its contracts).
But it's good to always ask this question of any prospective employer: "who are [y]our customers?"
The customers are the ones who pay the company, and unless you're applying to work for a monopoly, they're the ones who ultimately call the shots.
Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions.
My money is on the latter.
In "Winners Take All" Anand Giridharadas has a really good sentence where he points out how major employers usually try to find entry level hires who possess an ideal degree of intelligence and impressionability. The latter is just as important for them as the former. They want people they can mold to think and behave according to the values of the company.
In my personal experience, this is also why companies and industries that tend to have a lot of "lifers" are also often fairly toxic places to work. The people who came up and through the norms of the organization don't actually learn how to interact with normal people who don't buy into their idiosyncratic nonsense, don't seem to understand the concept of "standards" or "best practices," and often the idea that people might leave if they don't like how things are being done just doesn't cross their minds. So they take liberties with each other they shouldn't and do a poor job of forming consensus, actually caring about morale, or treating each other with professionalism or respect.
When people do leave, the narrative is usually framed as if they were too weak or soft to handle the rigorous and exacting standards of the company/team/manager rather than thinking that maybe thing are being run badly.
During the interview process I asked a number of questions about ethics and transparency, and the interviewers responded positively and encouraged me to continue asking hard questions, which gave an impression it's a trait they valued.
After joining, I haven't seen any evidence of people fearing to express a dissenting opinion about either technical or ethical subjects. And I've personally witnessed a consistently high level of professionalism and respect, including respect and empathy for the protesters who want Palantir to sever all ties with ICE.
I don't think Palantir continues to work with HSI due to a lack of questioning, on the contrary, I think what's happened is that deeply questioning the ethical and practical implications of continuing or discontinuing contracts with HSI doesn't lead to such a clear-cut, black and white answer about what the right thing to do is.
Each person I talked to acknowledged that the issues I raised were legitimate, and I still received an offer.
20-30 years ago companies like Yahoo and Oracle were innovators. They had robust software engineering and R&D operations that could attract the top talent in the field. Now, not so much...
That's sort of the crux of it - ICE wasn't supposed to be bad guys.
In fact, ICE could be heroes - they really could be, when they were breaking up trafficking and rescuing people out of criminal control.
Instead, they are tasked with tearing children away from parents and making orphans by deporting parents away.
I suspect there are people in ICE-HSI, who probably hate being lumped in together with the ICE-ERO.
The point is that the tide of public opinion on ICE would be different if the primary visible effect of them would be pulling women out of shipping containers and sending them to hospitals.
Justice might be blind, but justice without mercy has another name.
This is definitely a real issue: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/29/17517870/i...
nope - just WaPo's use of selective editorial bias to paint problems endemic to both parties & us society in general to partisan ends.
It appears they're having an "Are we the Baddies?" moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU
The employees objecting to Palantir's work with ICE are probably not objecting to cooperation with border enforcement on the principle that border enforcement is immoral generally, but that recent activities by border enforcement are immoral. If it weren't for the internment camps at the border, we probably wouldn't be hearing about this.
There's a broader discussion about the 4th ammendment and Palantir's effect there, but I don't think that this particular protest is about that.
The last 15 years of big "tech" have been a giant collective rationalization that building mass surveillance is innocuous.
They think they're singing up to enable palatable use cases of collecting and analyzing that data, and nothing bad will ever happen. Just the same as anyone singing up to work at google/facebook/etc...
"The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psychopath]. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." - Albert J. Nock in “Our Enemy, The State”
In the US, it's popular to think that you can somehow replace elected government (where power is somewhat dependant on votes, and somewhat dependent on advertising budgets/capital) with business (where power is dependent entirely on capital), and that somehow this is more "anarchist". This is a naive idea.
Palantir has a number of commercial customers, here's a few examples: https://www.palantir.com/palantir-foundry/impact/
https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...
Where does this money is coming from ? I mean, does the whole question isn't a level "above" : why does such entity exists in a democratic gouvernement ? Isn't it showing a deep loophole in the system ? Same idea : how is this entity funded ? Isn't it with US-citizens's taxes ? So, aren't all US-citizens involved in this story as well ? Why would Palantir's employees be more involved than all the persons that allowed the money to be there for Palantir to be funded ?
I'm seeing more Palantir as a consequence of a system's failure than its premice.
Woild love to discuss about that however.
Engineer: sure! Just as long as I'm not enforcing a national border that's where I draw the line!
<Some Company>: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help manipulate and control people by violating their privacy through big data?
Engineer: sure! Just as long as it doesn't violate this very specific aspect of my personal ethics!
That could easily describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.
Possibly the Palantir saved middle earth when Aragorn used it to scry events leading up to the final battles.
https://fm.cnbc.com/applications/cnbc.com/resources/img/edit...
It's a pretty good shirt, just going by people's reactions to it. I'm just talking about the shirt in isolation though, not in the larger context of what Palantir the company does for their business.
Those types of articles under the umbrella of "some people on twitter are outraged about something" that give impression of society wide consensus when they are a tiny minority or widespread action are distorting the discourse quite a bit.
Also - they wanted Palantir to donate profits from ICE contracts, but they didn't donate their salaries.
I wouldn't go after Thiel. The guy has a habbit of winning.