Comment by TriangleEdge
10 months ago
Ex Palantir here: Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations. The tools don't collect data. It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case. When I was at Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.
I'm not advocating for the company, but the statement in the comment is shallow. I was a̶b̶u̶s̶e̶d̶ assaulted while employed there, which is why I left, but my comment stands.
Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.
>Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used.
The name of the company itself is another dead giveaway.
Palantir (in tolkien lore) isn't evil itself - it's only used for evil in the hands of those who wield it.
Mass scale surveillance wasn't practical or affordable until Linux HPC and OSS. The whole community is enabling.
Well, ring me up when "Linux HPC" and "OSS" becomes a majority-government contractor, and I'll switch to rack Mac Pros.
Your premise is that absent of Palantir there would be no tooling. Someone is going to do it and it might as well be Peter Thiel & co because they're already doing all the other data surveillance.
No, my premise is that whoever is doing it bears full moral responsibility for it, unless they're literally forced into it.
You are going to die someday, right? How close do you have to be to deaths door for it to be morally okay for me to smother you with a pillow[1]? It was going to happen anyway, why would it matter that I did it?
1. Or carbon monoxide mask, if the distress of asphyxiation is throwing you off the from point I'm trying to make
"Someone else will just do this thing anyway, so I might as well do it" is a fairly weak excuse. I doubt it would hold up as a defense of a crime.
"If I don't, someone else will" can be said about pretty much anything, it is not an ethical get-out-of-jail-free card.
You can justify anything after the fact with this reasoning.
> Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations.
Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same.
For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS).
> Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.
ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.
What I don’t like about this kind of “moral” analysis is you are basically reacting to negative branding. do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use? I don’t think you do, it’s just they may not have the same “bad guy” labels.
> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?
Yes, absolutely. I think it's very common for people to make ethical decisions in how they make their money and how they spend their money.
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> do you make a utilitarian analysis of the impact of your employer or other products you use?
Actually there are us who would consider what impacts our employers have. E.g. I avoid working for adtech, and sure as hell would not want to work for a company providing government surveillance software.
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> basically reacting to negative branding.
I am not. Palantir not only brands themselves as providing data analysis for governments but they also actually sell those tools too.
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This is such a dodge, whataboutism at its finest. “You have a moral critique of a thing? Well that’s weird because you clearly don’t have a detailed moral analysis of literally everything else you do in life, therefore this critique is just because of negative branding”.
“Moral” in quotes is a tell, too. You’re arguing that morality is illegitimate unless someone has done a full “utilitarian” breakdown of everything they do in their lives. And of course you will only accept that breakdown if you deem it sufficient.
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In the Soviet Union, the NKVD had to employ prisoner laborers known as "Zeks" to design and engineer their surveillance equipment. They were motivated to betray others by the thread of a transfer to mines in Siberia that were effectively death camps. This story is told in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the prison for engineers being the metaphorical first circle of hell.
In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.
> It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case.
Sure, if PostgreSQL were specifically selling their tools to organizations known to commit those sort of abuses.
This is exactly what Oracle does.
Oracle and Larry Ellison specifically are routinely called the devil incarnate though, so they're not exactly getting a break here.
I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit.
Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose.
I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of:
working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics
we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.
I appreciate your comment, and it takes courage to post an unpopular opinion, but I'm not convinced about the analogy - Is Palantir used for myriad varied and lovely other cases? Or is it less like Postgres and more like napalm and ICBMs in that sure, it takes a human being to use it for its very much intended purpose?
"We just make and sell bone saws, it's not us that murder journalists by dismembering them while they're still alive. I mean, sure, our only customers are Saudi military and intelligence forces, but how could we possibly predict they'd misuse the tools we make?"
bone saws can't cut flesh fyi
Which is why we’ve partnered with CleaverCo, to synergistically deliver high-performance vertically integrated scalable dismemberment solutions for the enterprise and beyond.
We don't know because we're not in the government to be best buds with Crown Prince Bonesaw
The idea that a saw with a finely serrated edge couldn't cut a steak in half might be a little too far out there for me.
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This is like saying guns are just a tool and not weapons designed to kill people.
Homer: "Marge, a gun is just a tool! Like a harpoon, or a butcher knife or ... an alligator."
The tools don't collect data, but without the tool, the data is almost useless, as it takes a lot of effort to get anywhere.
If I had to choose to be surveilled 24/7, but my data stuck, unlabeled in there, or 20% of my actions randomly sampled, but fed to a tool that can interpret it, I choose the first, hands down
[dead]
You weren't abused. You were just talked to in a way that caused an elevated emotional response.
That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument. An I am a gun rights advocate yet am against Palantir's product usage on US citizens. Good food for thought.
> That said, I do find your argument interesting as it parallels the "guns don't kill people" argument.
The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)? If you had perfect enforcement then it would obviously be the latter, because you'd arrest the murderers without harassing people who buy guns for hunting or self defense etc.
But law enforcement isn't perfect, so there is going to be some spillover where some murderers wouldn't have been caught. Then you have to get into debatable questions like, if it was illegal for them to buy a gun, would they have just bought a gun illegally, or used some other kind of weapon? If there are a lot of murders happening, how many of them could be prevented by using more resources to catch them or e.g. legalizing drugs to reduce gang activity, without banning guns? The pro-gun argument is that the positives outweigh the negatives and/or we're better off doing the other things to prevent murders instead.
You can ask similar questions about Palantir and mass surveillance, but that doesn't mean you have to come to the same conclusion, because it has different positives and negatives and ability to be mitigated if you do it.
In particular, preventing abuses by governments is much harder because you'd be relying on the government to prosecute itself, which is notoriously ineffective, especially with programs that are insulated from public accountability through secrecy. Meanwhile the negatives are much more dangerous because of the speed, scale and severity at which an already-existent mass surveillance system can be converted into a tool of mass oppression when there is a change in administrations. And the positives are muted because the legitimate goals of mass surveillance can also be achieved -- often at lower expense, given how much it costs to sift through a firehose of >99% false positives and innocent behavior -- using traditional targeted investigative methods.
I think I agree with your message, even if I don't, I appreciate you addressing the topic. But what it made me realize is this: there is no Palantir that civilians can purchase that will "aggregate data" of the police that the public can meddle through. That is the core difference, and explains why I feel the way I do. Thank you.
> The general form of both arguments is that you have a tool that can be used for good or bad things, so should you ban the tool (guns) or just the bad uses of the tool (murders)?
I disagree with your framing. The bill of rights specifically guarantees both the right to bear arms and the right to not be unreasonably searched.
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“You weren’t murdered, you were just interacted with in a way that caused cardiac arrest”
Typical cop press brief