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Came across them a few times. There’s absolutely nothing special about the tech. If anything they’ve probably fallen quite a bit behind now. What is “special” is just a willingness to do things with data that others would consider inappropriate or unethical. There’s a market for that sort of thing.

I think Palantir is highly misunderstood.

As a technology, it is just database joins. It is just that they are able to pull in data from everything from S3 to SAP to ArcGIS, and provide analytics, visualization etc. on top to provide global visibility into any system.

The visibility can be "show me all illegal immigrant clusters" or "show me bottlenecks and cost sinks in CAHSR construction".

When we offload the moral impetus for society from politics to technology, we also squander control. Tech is tech and can be used for both good and bad. It is not that a strategy that aims to cap downsides by preventing the proliferation of technology is inherently bad, but it is doomed to fail. The evidence for dysfunction is not the existence of Palantir but in the failure of the watchdog layer of society (also called the government).

For those who are looking for information and analysis about Palantir, there is an academic study about surveillance technology with useful information about the company:

Sarah Brayne (2020) Predict and Surveil: Data, Discretion, and the Future of Policing, Oxford University Press.

As the book explains, Palanatir is one of the largest companies specializing in surveillance data management services for law enforcement, the military and other corporations. Palantir does not own its data but rather provides an interface that runs on top of other data systems, including legacy systems, making it possible to link data points across separate systems. Palantir gathers its data primarily from "data brokerage firms," including LexisNexis, Thomson Reuters CLEAR, Acxiom, CoreLogic, Cambridge Analytica, Datalogix, Epsilon, Accurint. As Brayne observes, these data brokerage firms "collect and aggregate information from public records and private sources, e.g., drivers licenses, mortgages, social media, retail loyalty card purchases, professional credentials, charities’ donor lists, bankruptcies, payday lenders, warranty registrations, wireless access points at hotels and retailers, phone service providers, Google searches and maps geolocation, and other sources who sell your data to customers willing to pay for it. Yet it is difficult to fully understand the scope of the data brokerage industry: even the FTC cannot find out exactly where the data brokers get their information because brokerages cite trade secrecy as an excuse to not divulge their sources."

Why is this a concern for people living in a democratic society with a legal system that supposedly protects individual freedoms? "Big data companies argue that their proprietary algorithms and data are trade secrets, and therefore they refuse to disclose their data, code and techniques with criminal defense attorneys or the public" (p. 135). This means that, "In many cases it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase data from private firms than to rely on in-house data because there are fewer constitutional protections, reporting requirements and appellate checks on private sector surveillance and data collection, which enables police to circumvent privacy laws" (pp. 24-5, 41-2).

A: By acting in contempt of the law.

Is palantir just a unifying api to google search history emails and Facebook messages and activities? I’m guessing it’s a query, background job, data request to these traitorous citizen civil liberty betraying American companies, comes back unifies the data set then allows you to run a needle haystack search on it?

One of the most elusive big companies today, imo.

The CEO was present on the most recent Bilderberg meeting.

I for one support our frontline data warriors. They are doing God’s work. Please don’t send a kill drone after me. I was drunk when I said the other stuff, not thinking correctly. It will never happen again.

I mean look at the name of the company for pete's sake: Palantir? Sauron indeed..so much of the valley is enabling the surveillance state at all levels of society.

Silicon valley was supposed to do no evil, no wonder this generation hates tech bros

By every measuring stick of "freedom", with the Palantir Cabal strangling D.C, I don't see how America can be considered a "free state" (as per the constitution) anymore.

You cannot be free in a panopticon, no matter how reductive you try to be about it.

In a fair world, Peter Thiel would get the Jack Ma treatment.

Was a bit gob-smacked to find out that Alex Karp's PhD thesis [0] (2002 - cofounded Palantir 2003) derives from Theodor Adorno's theory of aggression. imo reading just the intro was so eye-opening for me about the origins of what is now a behemoth - that you can trace a line from critical theory to Palantir - that I think reproducing the first 3 paragraphs here is worth it; emphasis mine:

> This work began with the observation that certain expressions have a drive-releasing effect, and this effect occurs not despite but because of their apparent irrationality. Expressions that blatantly contradict their own content offer actors the opportunity to formally acknowledge the normative order of their cultural environment while simultaneously expressing forbidden desires that violate the rules of this order. This, in turn, does not trigger cultural or social sanctions. On the contrary, such expressions solidify integration processes by making integration and its psychological costs bearable. Drawing from Adorno, I refer to such expressions as "Jargon." Jargon is not just a self-deception; it is a particular form of self-deception. It not only relieves the speaker but also integrates them into the circle of those who belong. Through Jargon, the present is embellished, rendered promising for the future, and thus made acceptable.

> However, Adorno's descriptions of aggressive actions expressed in Jargon are conceptually challenging to grasp. They slip away under the scrutiny of a rigorously working scholar. The translation of such impressions into a durable conceptual model encounters the limits of various social scientific traditions and quickly runs into difficulties. As much as the advantages of transferring Adorno's critique into a different conceptual framework are apparent, there is a risk that by relinquishing Adorno's premises, their critical rigor may disappear.

> Furthermore, this raises a series of questions that need to be addressed. For example, how can the complexity of modern society be taken into account without ignoring the instinctual elements of social action? What does an aggressive action expressed in Jargon actually look like, and what cultural significance would an action have that is transmitted through Jargon? Adorno's concept of Jargon can ignite a discussion about this. However, it leaves some problems untouched that I must address from my perspective. Adorno refrains from providing answers to such questions. He can afford to do so because he relies on premises that willingly accept a de-differentiation of the social world. Similarly, he does not discuss the specific cultural framework in which the aggressive action expressed in Jargon acquires its meaning. From the perspective of this work, it takes some imagination to understand how Jargon can play a role in integrating aggressive impulses within a coherent culture. The culture-specific transformation of aggression must also be a part of such an exposition. Adorno only partially acknowledges the cultural context in which this aggression expressed in Jargon acquires any meaning, or he does so in its subliminal form. It is evident that Adorno's approach is built upon precisely such culture-specific elements of the expression of aggression.

[0] https://saismaran.org/Dr.Karp's-Thesis.pdf

Lawful Evil-y.

Worth watching the interview with Palantir CEO Alex Karp where he's confronted about their role in the genocide of Palestinians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mhNLTy5pbQ

evil company ran by an evil man

garbage company with a garbage business model

Techdirt was a repost of a The Conversation article from August.

Some more discussion on a related story then:

What does Palantir actually do?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44894910

Very cool how we’re letting a private company become the modern day SS. Especially hilarious when the dude in charge literally grew up in an ex-Nazi stronghold in Namibia.

Should be an absolute red mark to have this company or any affiliated with it in your CV. Absolutely anti-societal.

I would be very surprised if a future democrat government dismantled information sources built on palantir contracts.

They might change aspects of oversight. They might diversify to avoid contract capture.

Sorry to be blunt, but government tends to be amoral when it comes to public noise about things, and actual choices made. Agencies of all kinds from LEA out to health will ask for retained access to the joins over disparate data.

The same across the UK, Europe and the OECD. Plantir is going to do very well, into the future. Some politics will force change. The EU will eventually get robust, onshore, self controlled data analytics and management.

Isn't the data Palatir is using already in the hands of various levels of government? If so, they are just doing glorified database joins. The real issue here is if they start incorporating private data that shouldn't be accessible to governments, such as location data collected by Apple/Google phones, social media posts, interactions with AI tools, etc. Ultimately though, users should blame themselves for giving such data to Facebook, Google, and others. It's been clear from the beginning that those services were free because they were mass surveillance machines in disguise, and that every data point collected would be monetized.