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Comment by int_19h | Hacker News Reader

Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.

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>Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used.

The name of the company itself is another dead giveaway.

Palantir (in tolkien lore) isn't evil itself - it's only used for evil in the hands of those who wield it.

Mass scale surveillance wasn't practical or affordable until Linux HPC and OSS. The whole community is enabling.

Well, ring me up when "Linux HPC" and "OSS" becomes a majority-government contractor, and I'll switch to rack Mac Pros.

Your premise is that absent of Palantir there would be no tooling. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be Peter Thiel & co because they're already doing all the other data surveillance.

You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it?

1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make

"Someone else will just do this thing anyway, so I might as well do it" is a fairly weak excuse. I doubt it would hold up as a defense of a crime.

You can justify anything after the fact with this reasoning.

"If I don't, someone else will" can be said about pretty much anything, it is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card.

No, my premise is that whoever is doing it bears full moral responsibility for it, unless they're literally forced into it.

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