HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surveillance Complex
dailykos.com
dailykos.com
This is the second smear against Palantir in three days that cites an email without even showing the email to give you some context. They also don't link to Palantirs response to these claims.
Please approach this with some level of skepticism.
A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be terribly trustworthy.
You're right, just tracking the rest of us.
That sounds an awful lot like "If you've got nothing to hide, you should tell us what you're doing".
I'm all for transparent governments, but I don't think transparency should be a requirement of a private company.
So a transparent government is well and good for those who need utmost secrecy. They just contract out to the non-transparent companies!
I am not saying it's like "If you've got nothing to hide, you should tell us what you're doing". I am saying that you have to be able to manage the public image of your company even if it is a private company. Or things like that will happen and it will be hard to restore your reputation over people you ignored.
It's all about the communication, public image, reputation... There are even companies dedicated to do that for you. I don't know for instance they should use the same idea behind their website: a company of high quality dedicated to BigData, and advertise that in every public media with nothing related to war, secrecy or others things... Just a company providing high value products to who you want.
You can't have it both ways. If private companies are going to provide important government services, then those companies must accept a certain measure of public scrutiny and transparency, a much greater measure than an ordinary private company would need to accept.
If the companies don't like it, then they shouldn't bid on government contracts. No one is forcing them to do so. And if you don't think the government should occupy such a large segment of the economy, AWESOME! I'm all for that! I say dismantle the whole military-security-industrial complex!
Also, I don't think it's entirely fair to construct a black-and-white dichotomy between government and private company. Companies working on government contracts are by definition somewhere between the two, so perhaps it's fair to demand transparency somewhere in between? I don't know where to draw those lines, I'm just trying to point out that there isn't, logically, much room for absolute arguments about private vs public on this particular topic.
The company is a defense contractor. Yes, they've successfully commercialized their technology for law enforcement, bank fraud detection, disaster recovery, and whatnot, but you'd be silly to think that intelligence (and "tracking down terrorists") is not central to their business. They were funded by the CIA's VC firm.
That's great, but it's more likely a publicity play than a notable source of revenue.
"Early investments came in the form of $2 million from the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel." They've been catering to the defense industry from the beginning. That's not inherently bad, and there's no reason to skirt around the issue.
One of Palantir's cofounders was recently interviewed (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3052). He reminisced about pitching the product to two defense industry suits who actually high-fived each other at the end of his presentation. That was when he knew he had made it.
If you want to find examples about how the military uses Palantir's software, you don't have to look far. For instance, http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/11/no-spy-software-scan...
2 of the 4 named industries sound like "terrorist hunters" and 3 of the 4 are not generic big data. None of them are e-coli outbreaks.
Palantir is easy to condemn because from their own messaging to third party analysis, every angle you look at them they look like a boilerplate "evil company" on par with Blackwater/XE/whatever they're called now.
Glassbox reviews and interview reviews are absurd and eye opening, tangles with RICO law and unethical business partners seem the norm, and on and on and on. Other than some nice looking tech, they're public image is one of "mercenary nerds for hire".
New, large scale software never gets adopted in the private sector, because the suits that run them are too myopic to think technology can solve core issues that have never been solved with technology before. They only invest in improving the technology they already have in the segments of the business which are already automated.
Oracle sold its first relational database to the United States Air Force. Nobody else thought they needed it at the time.
Palantir actually offers a very general purpose toolset, but it is the intelligence agencies which were the first to have a giant pile of money and a problem that never goes away.
Oracle was the name of the software database Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oats created, named after the CIA project they all worked on together [1]. Imagine a world where Edward Snowden got excited about the NSA surveillance, and dorked out on it. That's these guys. Products of the government, who found a way to sell products to the government.
Palantir smells a lot like the same sort of beast, I think. Just my opinion, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Corporation#Overall_tim...
I'm biased so maybe I'm seeing things where there isn't anything, but if the tech was funded, then it's being deployed somewhere. Where other than the MSM would it make sense to deploy it, and how would the MSM identify sock puppets if they were targeted?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...
There is also a double standard here, isn't it? Working on Big Data technology that has applications for spying by the military = evil. Working on search or data classification technology that has applications to obsoleting workers and putting them out of a job = not evil?
It's not a productive path to start treading down. Or at the very least, something about glass houses or "let he who has not sinned cast the first stone."
I think having the question "Is what we are doing morally virtuous?" hang there as a Sword of Damocles[0] is the way to go.
Sure, few things are 100% morally virtuous. But the fact that you cannot achieve perfection doesn't mean you can or should stop trying.
I see this kind of reasoning a little too often and it's a slippery slope to moral bankruptcy. Once you accept trading in part of your morals, all of them end up for sale, eventually. Instead, trading in morals should be a bloody tooth and nails fight. At best, you should only trade them in temporarily and never should you make your livelihood depend on your trading them in.
We should be as terrified of losing our morals as we are of losing our lives because once a critical mass of our morals is lost, our lives are no longer worth living.
Only once we are all truly terrified of losing our morals, constantly, will we stop not only producing bad (as in: truly questionable) technology, but also using good technology for bad.
The difference between a good and an evil person isn't that the good person is perfect or unfailing. The difference is that good person hasn't stopped trying to be good.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles (including this here because it's an educating read, even if you think you know about it)
Possibly, if that technology also allows us to, says, cure cancer?
Hyperbole aside, putting workers out of jobs are apple-and-watermelon different than "helping" the military industry (spying or otherwise).
And I'm fairly sure that the complaint of too much focus on the ads industry isn't particularly rare either.
It was actually the basis for my adopted quote:
“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads, that sucks.”
For my part, I refuse to work on tech that is a 'single-bladed sword'; I'll work on something that has broad application, but not something with only 'immoral' application.
The crux is where to draw the line of morality. I think that's a reasonable discussion and worth deeply conversing about; morality is both an individual and community affecting thing. Both your self and your community need to consider it.
Rightly divide the words spoken and think about whatsoever is true, just, and commendable...
Anyway, let's tackle (for a thought example) your example. Why should Tor exist? It's a home to real creeps. (Freenet has the same problem).
What precisely do these services offer that is so compelling that it's better to let them exist?
Freedom? Privacy? Are those sufficiently compelling? Why so?
I'm sure there are off the cuff answers out there - but maybe we should look deeper.
What you are calling a "double standard" is actually a false dichotomy.
the joke here is that it is not limited to "other" minds. Being a part of controlling part of society, people frequently start to feel like they are above the control, not a subject to it. It is a very mistaken feeling.
Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I learned a ton in that area.
I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start implementing them yourself.
Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important.
I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption, anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.
I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Even if only a minority of developers are receptive to working on such systems (and I don't think that, outside the West Coast/Bay Area/Startup/HN bubble, these people are actually a minority. I suspect that we are actually the ones that are outnumbered), that minority suddenly being made to think about these companies has probably given them a boost.
I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now. If Palantir is getting investments/revenues from government, I wonder if Facebook too is getting some.
They are unscrupulous.
Just now?
Imagine spooks following you all day, each day, and every time after you talked with someone, they walk up to them and ask what the conversation was about. Imagine dozens of spooks per individual, each of them constantly taking notes on paper that does not perish. This is the society we live in, the society that we built while sleepwalking. Even the spooks aren't aware of what they're doing, not really.
I wouldn't be amazed that they do business with the national-security complex; I'd be amazed if it wasn't by far their #1 customer.
If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts.
These Daily Kos articles play it pretty loose with how they connect the dots together and make it out to be some large conspiracy.
considering the potential of internet advertizing schemas to be used as orders of magnitude larger, easy transcending national borders, v2.0 of "pizza parlor" for things like money laundering, untraceable payments, etc...
Given that programs like PRISM are done in secret, perhaps we shouldn't necessarily assume Facebook's public financial returns are sharing the whole story. Ie- money may be changing hands behind closed doors.
This, aside from the blatant invasion of privacy, should be our biggest concern about the recent NSA revaluations. As participants in a free-market economy it's important we know who is cheating. Ie- those who subvert the free-market via secret gov/intel/military deals.
It's a bit scary though, since a false positive on that could really hurt someone's reputation... if I wrote something like that, I'd actually be a little bit reluctant to share it. :-(
Other accounts post pro-government comments again from young accounts.
We ban them pretty quickly. If you look at a users comment history and they are clearly having an agenda to post - they are either misguided, uninformed or sock-puppets.
As a mod of a ~large /r/ I wish I could see the IPs of the people posting. Specifically, if I could see if they are .mil (i.e. Eglin) IPs - so I could ban the whole range.
So basically the weekly "Check out my dog! He served with me in Afghanistan!" posts on Reddit from hour-old accounts?
So think about the future, where the AI's take over, and these NSA types all over the planet who were just trying to serve thier citizens and thier governments have all the best ways to destroy mankind and his infrastructure and other systems stored all over the place, what made sense for various goverments/technologies controlled by human beings and thier citizens, in the flick of a switch literally becomes total madness in a world where a cyber AI can go through these systems and use them against mankind collectively.
it would just be too tempting for the AI not to use it to control or eliminate us. Folks like Rheingold and annissimov are very worried about this future and stress trying to make sure these future AI's are very benevolent and compassionate. LOL! It is for this reason we should have far more transparency and international agreements to limit this kind of stuff, not to give one nation state and edge over the other, but to prevent a higher intelligence from using all the nation states data/technology against all of mankind. I don't think we stop what is coming in another hundred years or 2. LOL!