London Mayor Blocks Palantir | Hacker News Reader

London Mayor Blocks Palantir

theguardian.com

195 pointsZiiS65 comments

I don't understand how Palantir managed to sell their services outside of the US, given their deep ties to CIA, political positions and involment with US goverments.

"Peter Mandelson’s lobbying company, Global Counsel, until its collapse, and Mandelson took the prime minister, Keir Starmer, on a trip to Palantir’s Washington DC showroom. "

Bribery.

Side note: Peter Mandelson was also a big fan of Jeffrey Epstein.

And thats putting it mildly.

Because until recently that was part of the sales pitch. The post-WW2 political order was that the US Govt was the security guarantor for the "western world," which meant countries allied with the US traded an almost unparalleled security guarantee for things like dollar hegemony and trade policies they probably wouldn't have acceded to otherwise. The Iraq war severely strained that bargain, and Trump's effectively broken it, but for the entire latter half of the 20th century, "this company is part of the American Military-Industrial Technosphere" was why you did business with them.

Wouldn’t that also describe every single US tech and defense contractor? The fact it has deep ties to cia is probably seen as a benefit to the leadership of our allies. Maybe their own public sour on that but you can be sure behind closed doors they are in lockstep with the actual aims of our deep state intelligence services.

The thing is that while EU is allied with the US, they are also competitors in many markets.

Airbus is using Palantir services. The competition between Boeing and Airbus has often be brutal and dirty, and considered significant at the state level.

The fact that a company like Palantir be allowed to insert themselves in the software infrastructure of a critical company that is often working against the interest of the US seems very weird to me.

Why is that weird? Airbus probably relies on windows pcs too along with the rest of europe.

It's called corruption. Politicians are particularly prone to this issue.

whats even more confusing is that the Middle East Palantir team is almost all Chinese ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

They probably don’t care about Middle East geopolitics.

I think a good consideration here is how would the outcry be if it was a Chinese company being woven into governmental and national health systems.

Well, UK Power Networks, the main electric grid for London and most of South-East England was owned by a Hong Kong company until recently (they sold it to the French). So basically Xi Jinping had the power to unplug the British Government at the snap of a finger.

Being owned by a foreign company is not the same as embedding technology controlled by a foreign intelligence service deep into your infrastructure.

The hypothetical snap of the finger from Beijing to shut down power in London (assuming that local operatives would indeed comply, which is not given) could have been easily reverted in a few hours with a snap of the finger from London to replace key people in the company hierarchy or place the company under public administration.

China doesn't have nuclear weapon defense infrastructure on UK soil so it's not really comparable.

The only politicization of technology here was done by the Palantir CEO.

I posted this 5 hours ago and confusingly only received 4 upvotes:

Sadiq Khan blocks £50M Met police deal with Palantir https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48221296

And this new thread was just demoted from the front page despite a lot of activity and upvotes in a short time.

PLTR employees hiding things that make them feel bad?

Anything critical of Palantir or mass surveillance in general tends to get auto flagged / downvoted very quickly. It's a bit ironic for a site calling itself Hacker News, but it's also very fitting and not surprising that a tech site these days is being influenced so heavily by bots/llms.

The only reason I shared that I posted this earlier is in part that I found it incredibly odd it didn’t get traction (it’s a big deal!).

Seeing now that this post may be limited, my tin foil hat gets placed back on.

It’s not like Palantir is a fan of YC, they literally sued them…

His spokesperson said Londoners only wanted to see public money being paid to companies that “share the values of our city”.

I wander if they'd care to further elaborate on that.

Not paying the people helping bomb children in Gaza and Iran is a good start.

is that so?

Yes.

Palantir is effectively a US spy company, and let's face it, even Iran have a better international rep than the US right now.

He's just reading the room - no-one wants to be associated with the current US regime, and given Trump's specific dislike of him (you know, because he's not white), he probably doesn't seem to see much reason to beat about the bush.

The US has proven to be a bad international partner, they flout international law, they engage in piracy, their political system is prone to rapid and catastrophic change, and the people there seem to be just fine with electing a narcissistic fraudulent rapist and felon as president. Twice.

Not just "No" but "Hell, No!"

[ITT: Watch the butt-hurt USAsians downvote because they're not used to someone telling it as it is about the USA]

Saying Iran has a better international reputation than the United States is a massive stretch, but yes, this is emotional decision making.

Its really not a stretch. Not even slightly. That's just how low the US has sunk in international rating.

Iran just killed thousands of protesters. As far as the US has fallen, they're not quite there yet.

What realm of reality do you live in because the United States is a massive force of evil. Invading nations, ignoring international law, starting illegal blockades, bombing school children, bombing first responders, starving children, helping enable a genocide.

The idea that Iran has a worse international reputation is laughable. The US is literally causing a global recession, along with an energy crunch, and likely manmade induced famine that will ruin the lives of 10s of millions of people; or do none of these lives matter because they have the wrong shade of melatonin?

Whatever goodwill the US built from WW2 has been thoroughly destroyed.

I wish I could say we deserve the imperial boomerang but the only people that will continue to suffer, both domestically and abroad, will be innocent civilians while the elites (who are the only beneficiaries of US imperialism) go unpunished.

And this is strictly talking about political governance, US corporations are another layer of evil as well.

I'd ask the same question of you (except all the emotional stuff)

If you can't get emotional over the needless deaths of innocent school children, something is clearly wrong with you.

you get emotional over one specific type of propaganda

The bombing of the Iranian school is fact, not propaganda.

Fact1: Iran executed tens of thousands of citizens over political opposition since the start of this year, and is still executing others today. Fact2: Iran has cut off its population from the internet.

Can you find equivalent facts from USA to justify the parallels you are drawing?

Fact1: USA was founded on a genocide, with an actual legal proceeding to establish that indigenous people had no soul and no rights (Valladolid controversy). Fact2: USA employed slavery for centuries and later replaced it with "wage slavery", and actually never abolished slavery for convict, leading to the highest carceral population in the entire world. Fact3: The USA has broken most of its peace treaties (first and foremost with indigenous nations) and annexed all its neighbors (Texas, Puerto Rico, Haiti, etc).

That's just scratching the surface. Please note i'm not defending the Iranian government which is monstruous. I'm arguing the USA government is just as monstruous. And nothing will ever justify a country attacking a foreign nation. Remember when attacking Iraq and Afghanistan was supposed to liberate their peoples? See how that turned out.

Your "facts" proved my point.

Classic whataboutism. Maybe we can take turns and go back and forth with an atrocity committed by either nation?

Let's start with the systemic suppression of Black Americans, starting with slavery, then Jim Crow and segregation, then the systematic destruction of Black political power by branding Black organizations as terrorists, then the CIA pushing drugs in Black-heavy districts across the country.

Classic nonsense. You can also start with Colombus, but at the current time your government is not restricting your internet access so that you can express your opinions, and is not executing you for these opinions either.

Innocent children dying because of US imperialism should make everyone emotional and angry. I feel bad for you since you seem to be without a soul, hopefully you find one some day before you pass because you desperately need humanity in your life if this is your outlook.

every innocent death is a tragedy. you're just selecting which ones to advance your opinion.

humans aren't robots. When the leader of a country is an absolute arse, and when the people of said country don't seem to care, the decision to revile them, to actively pursue relationships with other countries may in fact be "emotional" but no less correct for being so.

"Emotional" doesn't mean "wrong". If the entire world is making an "emotional" decision to spurn you, it means you done fucked up bad.

Every decision is an emotional decision

Every emotional decision is a decision.

I'm wondering how this will effect the Palantir London office, which is their biggest European office. Local employment has often been a pawn in deals like this (see e.g. Microsoft & Munich), so I'm positively surprised to see a major with a spine here.

Less than 1000 employees in London, they're not a big deal in that sense.

Hopefully it'll mean they'll ... fuck off.

Possibly blocking it from pressure from his own community that it might be used against them? Similar to how Birmingham CCTV cameras were blocked by certain members of the communities in Birmingham as they thought they were spying on them.

Anyway its a conflict of interest that a Mayor that is not a technocrat decides what software the Police uses. Seems so wrong.

>A recent Met police trial of Palantir’s AI to monitor staff behaviour...

To be fair, the Met should get a little credit for applying Palantir to themselves first.

We're going to need to send people to prison when this is all said and done if we're ever going to get other countries' business back.

My understanding of Palantir's actual, technical offering is profoundly boring: a hosted platform that connects to existing diverse sources of data and organizes them according to well-defined (by Palantir's FDEs) useful schemas. I have developed this impression through actually building a product on the Foundry as well as several rounds of interviews. Frankly that is profoundly boring. The anti-Palantir propaganda, portraying them as this all-powerful Skynet software, is as much a part of their marketing as anything else.

On the other hand, their effectiveness appears to be less in question: the article above claims that Scotland Yard found hundreds of police officers to have been abusing their posts in various ways through use of the Palantir system. I am not a fan of corrupt cops, so I think this is good. Similar stories exist elsewhere, like a 68% reduction in 48-hour mortality at a Tampa hospital through deployment of Palantir's anti-sepsis monitoring tech.

Thus I arrive at the conclusion that this decision is ultimately a loss. Khan's legal standing appears to rely on them not investigating other potential suppliers—I'm not sure that there are any, and "develop these simple data systems in-house" is a bad option because if they could have they would. I suppose ultimately I don't think that Palantir's "bad vibes" among constituents should impact governments' desire to be effective in the programs they purport implement.

Anti-Palantir propaganda? You don't need any propaganda when Palantir's actions speak for themselves.

> ICE and Palantir: US agents using health data to hunt “illegal immigrants” https://www.bmj.com/content/392/bmj.s168

> ICE Just Paid Palantir Tens of Millions for ‘Complete Target Analysis of Known Populations’ https://www.404media.co/ice-just-paid-palantir-tens-of-milli...

> Trump Taps Palantir to Create Master Database on Every American https://newrepublic.com/post/195904/trump-palantir-data-amer...

> Palantir allegedly enables Israel's AI targeting in Gaza, raising concerns over war crimes https://www.business-humanrights.org/es/%C3%BAltimas-noticia...

This is far more than just "bad vibes", and just a handful of many examples. The vibes also tend to be pretty bad around things that are used to enable spying, a secret police force, or bombing children.

This isn't even touching on the name of the company itself and the origin of that name, or the fact that Peter Thiel founded it, or many of the other things that give it "bad vibes".

Palantir revolutionized the enterprise software playbook (more government than enterprise, but I digress) by investing heavily in Forward Deployed Engineers, Palantir engineers deployed at customer sites and working hand in hand with engineers at the customers to make it happen. Most software companies pay only lip service to customer success, and seldom provide any engineering after pre-sales.

You don't have to like the company to respect the hustle. I deem them utterly despicable, on par with IBM who sold the Nazis the tools to round up and exterminate Jews during the Holocaust, and indeed their UK division is run by the grandson of Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists.

The grandson of Oswald . . no way . . no waaayyyy . .

  clickity clickity click click

Jesus tap dancing Christ.

Yes, the law of conservation of social capital applies in the UK. There is this inexplicable fascination with the despicable Mitford Sisters (one of which was Oswald's wife). The Germans don't pine for the glamor of Leni Riefenstahl.

Brilliant, no longer a Londoner but I really think Khans done amazing compared to his predecessors.

His alternatives look bleak and elitist, I would not be surprised in the slightest they reverse this.

Excellent news.

Great, now kill the NHS deal

[flagged]

Tories, in particular Steve Barclay and Rishi Sunak

And Peter Mandelson lobbying for them.

Please don't fulminate on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not sure why this is flagged !

There's plenty of people on HN who can't think of any reason why America should be criticised, which extends to any American company.

It's kind of sad, really.

Haven't they already handed over all the data though :/

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