Revealed: Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Revealed: Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops (2019)

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I always would see Palantir at career fairs, and I always wondered what, exactly, their software looked like.

This seems...relatively innocuous? Just a database browser with a very okay UX.

I've used it before in a military capacity (actually during test deployments of the system). Interface-wise it's basically google earth, complete with ability to turn on layers and filter temporal ranges. The real magic was how data was induced into the system, and how it could be parsed. Basically geographically aware SQL, with a bunch of tools for correlation and inference of different data types. At the time, our head of intelligence was smitten with it, thought it would end our current conflict.

I ran a booth at UMD near theirs back in like... 2014?, and holy shit did they have a huge line. They were giving away so much swag, it was not sane.

We had ~5 resumes dropped off, I assume Palantir had ~200. I don't even remember seeing a Google or Apple booth, I assume mostly because this was east coast and on Palantir's "home" turf (for fed contracts at least), among other things.

Hah. If it was 2014, I was probably at that fair.

I was ignorant of Palantir at the time, but I wonder now if the lines/excitement were because they were the "cool" (read with dripping sarcasm) defense contractor among the stodgy ones (LM, Raytheon, and all the other beltway bandits).

I don't recall an Apple booth, but I do remember a Google one. IIRC, they were off in a corner.

I went to their event for free pizza

That's how they get you! (I used to run recruiting marketing there as a side job and good pizza was part of the playbook).

How? What's in the pizza?

What more do you need? The value is in the data. All you need to be able to do is to be able to efficiently add to and query the database.

Just like XKEYSCORE!

I guess the problem with XKEYSCORE was the data that it was browsing should have been private -- isn't everything we're seeing here pretty normal as far as police data goes? (Arrest records, etc?)

The objection here has always been that having this amount of data about people, all aggregated in a central location, is what's harmful.

Good chance the capabilities have improved... Also check out project gotham... Crazy stuff

Discussed at the time:

Palantir’s User Manual for Cops - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20421490 - July 2019 (150 comments)

Meanwhile, everyone was losing their minds on 9/12/2001 about the fact that the US Government wasn't able to do this.

(2019)

Added. Thanks!

You're welcome!

I would have communicated this sooner, but, apparently, this site limits me to no more than 5 comments at a time, and hides the fact behind an un-actionable error message that doesn't tell me what I did to deserve it.

It's sort of impressive really...

The stasi were impressive also. They would have loved this.

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