From a cynical British perspective, when I think of government departments and civil servants. I think inefficiency, data siloing, politics and lack of communication between departments and also internally not communicating between teams. Not withstanding a lack of cooperating and willingness to change.
Did Palantir have a political mandate, or can they just cut through the bureaucracy or bypass it with technology?
The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
I would be curious to have data / information showing that.
It's also kind of a problem to say "Oh well, we've got no concrete data, let's continue to let them deport whoever they like and shoot anyone who gets in the way".
This is the pitch of every consulting company ever.
In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.
The U.S. government almost certainly has intimate health data on every Briton as a result of these deals.
Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...
There really isn't anything special about Palantir the company. They have disrupted consulting on marketing alone (all this forward-deployed stuff is more fluff than anything) which is not unheard of, and continue to receive all this bad press due to their clientele and the kind of data they're processing. Government departments, military. They are happy to take credit for all the "conniving" allegations because it makes them look like they have a plan, and anybody with purchasing power involving with them knows it corresponds very little to the company operationally, i.e. what the company does.
It's the privatization of what started as an intelligence program.
Recommended watching (The REAL Story Behind Palantir's Dystopian Pre-Crime Takeover (w/ Whitney Webb)):
What are you using to conclude their effectiveness?
It appears Palantir “brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address” [1]. That’s like VLOOKUP.
On effectiveness, Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did with a tenth of the budget.
[1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...