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Comment by 3am | Hacker News Reader

I won't downvote you, but I'll disagree with you.

We live in the world we live in, and counter intelligence is necessary. The fact that it's privatized is nothing different that what's happening with KBR, Blackwater, Lockheed-Martin, L3, et al. It's more a function of political realities where critical functions are being subcontracted out.

I'd rather have a Palantir than not have one and be outmaneuvered by other geopolitical rivals.

edit: hey, rayiner, fair point. I think that logistics and 'private security contractors' are in a different category than traditional defense contractors. I'm not really sure where Palantir belongs on that spectrum, so I intentional casted a wide net.

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>We live in the world we live in, and counter intelligence is critical.

especially against your own citizens. Do "fusion center" and "Suspicious Activity Reports" generated by Palantir software ring a bell?

If you remember history, the most amount of intelligence gathered and acted upon in USSR, East Germany were against their own people, while it was supposedly under the great goal of counter intelligence against [foreign] enemy spies, agents, collaborators. Fusion centers with modern equipment and software is KGB & Stasi wet dream.

If you remember history, every single extant liberal democracy has had surveillance capabilities for decades, and continue to be healthy free societies.

>If you remember history, every single extant liberal democracy has had surveillance capabilities for decades, and continue to be healthy free societies.

the difference here is the actual massive surveillance (basically total possible by the technological means of the time) performed by the KGB/Stasi outside of the due process inside the jurisdiction of their respective countries. It is exactly the emerging characteristic of fusion centers and NSA activities. Please name an "extant liberal democracy" which has had such massive surveillance capabilities and applied them in such a way.

The FBI during the 1950's and almost certainly Britain's intelligence agencies post WWII.

Remember, the FISA mechanism that attracts so much flak these days was put into place because in the past the NSA had no restrictions or oversight, effective or ineffective.

>The FBI during the 1950's

yes, great example. If people want back to that game of witch hunting, and with incomparably, multiple orders of magnitude, increased capabilities of witch hunters (like J. Edgar Hoover looking into a fusion center palantir by Palantir) - well, i rest my case.

Hoover would have killed for the kind of capabilities that Palantir provides.

But then again, so would have the KGB and East German Stasi.

Palantir's developers aren't evil, but the fact that so many folks wish to don the rose-colored glasses and assume that their work cannot be used for the wrong things makes me nauseous.

Palantir doesn't generate anything except visualization a and an environment in which to manipulate those visualizations. There's no printer hooked up to Palantir that prints out new people to arrest every hour. In fact, the philosophy (and it's well maintained in their product) is that humans make every decision. The software simply helps elucidate options, costs and benefits, and most importantly, to revert the human decision.

At least with Blackwater you can raise the complaint that mercenaries privatize aspects of the military that should be under public control. But to the extent that we have soldiers who carry equipment, nobody seriously thinks that the military should build all that equipment itself.

I'm not sure KBR and Blackwater are the best examples of companies in good public standing.

The argument for Palantir is that pattern recognition applied to big data can save lives. That's enough for me.

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