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ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117

If I'm reading this correctly, they're just straight up violating the law. They're sharing information with ICE under an obligation to share information of aliens, but they're actually sharing everyone's information in an effort to identify aliens. That seems like a pretty slam shut case if there were any mechanism to investigate and prosecute it.

Shameful

Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because they have every incentive to invent new ways of surveilling you that they then try to sell to governments, or private actors who want to influence the world. It's like classic government surveillance but every company you interacted with and every app you use may at some point turn on you and use your data against you, just because someone realized "hey, I bet we can sell this data"

We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough.

From the leftist-Communist rag (/s) Wall Street Journal:

> It started out that way. At the beginning of 2025, 87% of ICE arrests were immigrants with either a prior conviction or a criminal charge pending, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project. Only 13% of those arrested at the beginning of 2025 didn’t have either a conviction or a pending charge.

> But the criminal share of apprehensions has declined as the months have gone on. By October 2025, the percentage of arrested immigrants with a prior conviction or criminal charge had fallen to 55%. Since October, 73% taken into ICE custody had no criminal conviction and only 5% had a violent criminal conviction, according to a Cato Institute review of ICE data.

* https://archive.is/https://www.wsj.com/opinion/mass-deportat...

Under Obama 3M illegal immigrants were removed, and there wasn't all of this drama.

(Hint: this isn't about public safety or illegal immigration.)

Impeach. Remove.

Laws and protections do not just apply for citizens. They apply anyone in the United States.

How are Palantir so effective (as this article is alluding)?

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?

Isn't this the company that NVIDIA is proudly partnering with?

The "small government" conservatives really showed their true faces in 2025 and 2026. Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.

....OK who signed a data sharing agreement without having the thought "who am I sharing the data with" when they were at the doctors?

Remember: every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well. Techies have a responsibility as well. Remove them from your applications, or replace them with safer alternatives, and don't log (meta-)data just because it might be useful one day.

Here's what people should take from all this: the Constitution isn't a magical document that guards your rights. It's a piece of paper. Judge, particularly Supreme Court judges, are political actors, not some neutral paragons of legal scholardom that come dwon from their Ivory Tower every now and again to hand down missives and maintain order.

The classic example of the mental gymnastics do won't punish any of this is civil asset forfeiture. It's legalized theft. The Fourth mandment quite literally starts with:

> The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated ...

You might think if you are stopped by police and you have cash on it, that it is your "effects" and it can't be seized without any crime but you'd be wrong. The legal theory surrounding this is that it is a civil action against property, not a criminal action against its owner, even though the basis for the civil action is a crime that not only doesn't have to be proven, it doesn't even have to be alleged.

Medical info is just one prong of a massive effort to acquire all sorts of personal information, seemingly to build a database so citizens can be targeted. If you think it's going to stop at immigration enforcement, you're crazy. Examples:

- AG Pam Bondi has sought voter rolls from the majority of states [1], which most recently came up as a random demand to end ICE terrorism in Minnesota [2], which has so far refused to hand over that information. Consider where Minnesota sits in the estimated number of undocumented migrants [3]. Why is ICE there and not, say, Texas or Florida?

- DOGE previous accessed (and alleged copied) all the data from the Social Security Administration [4]. Why? What's happened to it? Who has it now?

I personally believe this has long reached the point that in a just world, Palantir employees would be prosecuted and sent to jail. Palantir is (allegedly) knowingly providing the means to kill journalists and target people while they're at home so a missile strike will also kill their entire family [5][6].

This "immigration enforcement" goes well beyond undocumented migrants. Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident married to a US citizen, was targeted for organizing peaceful protests against Israel's genocide.

At this point if you don't see how all these things are interconnected, you're burying your head in the sane.

[1]: https://stateline.org/2025/07/16/trumps-doj-wants-states-to-...

[2]: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/26/pam-bondi-mi...

[3]: https://immresearch.org/publications/50-states-immigrants-by...

[4]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/whistleblower-responds-aft...

[5]: https://www.972mag.com/ai-surveillance-gaza-palantir-datamin...

[6]: https://www.972mag.com/lavender-ai-israeli-army-gaza/

The older one gets, the more one agrees with rms.

What is not clear to me from the article is what data they are getting from CMS. The article references Medicaid data, but everyone that has access to Medicaid is legally present in the country. They have to be to qualify. Some possiblities:

* They are going after people legally here on temporary visas such as SIV that give them access to medicaid

* They are going after people that are not on medicaid and have no insurance but received care (either emergency care or charity care) at a hospital or clinic that takes medicaid (I don’t know if hospitals capture this information for CMS).

* ?

Amazing the hoops that people will jump through to not enact strong employer penalties.

Well, they are illegal so technically they shouldn't be getting medical aid here go back home and get medical help. Otherwise, totally fair game to use that data to catch em.

As a non-American, I'm just wondering, why won't you help these people get legal citizenship status since it's clear as day most people want them in?

Why won't you protest against current citizenship rules, since it's clear you want them to be changed?

edit: I see it's just a simple "f** ice" and "you need to go" case. I'll show myself out

We are on the darkest of paths. It’s like the current US administration is using our collective greatest fears about data privacy as a playbook.

There is no morally defensible reason to work for Palantir.

That, + of course all the data that DOGE took from various other institutions while nobody was supervising them. You can bet all of this stuff has found its way into some kind of unified datastore by now.

I am sorry, but what did you expect? Since before Snowden we knew this was coming and this dystopian future is here only because we didn't care enough to do something about it.

Now, where are all these 'I don't have anything to hide people?' I don't see them anywhere...

Both Trump presidencies have really shown how little check there is on the White House when it comes to coordinating among these agencies. Heck literally one of the first the things he did in Jan 2016 is try to find out which park ranger posted a sparse inauguration photo. It wouldn't even occur to me that he was the de facto boss of millions of people in this way

Cause consider the previous status quo. It was considered somehow scandalous for Bill Clinton to have an opinion on what his AG Janet Reno was doing

Part of the Miranda warning is "anything you say can and will be used against you." I think of the "will be" part as a lie, because they're usually not that diligent or competent even when they're that malicious. But it's still a good heuristic when it comes to giving your PII to the government. I used to be an outlier conspiracy theorist for believing that. To those coming around to it, welcome.

Palantir is just the data platform. Yeah, they have algorithms and software for aggregating large amounts if data and connecting them. They don’t “have” the data. It’s still with the government.

The data shouldn’t be shared unless comsent is provided. But I’m unsure of why Palantir is the bad person for developing software.

I don’t work for Palantir or hold their stock.

Elon Musk did the biggest data heist of all times.

Even more reason to lie on the race box in medical records

I remember Peter Thiel saying that "we were going to invest in Facebook regardless" of the meeting with Zuckerberg

I guess they just needed a Dumb Fuck to do whatever they wanted, Lifelog and whatever