Palantir's role or non-role aside, the idea that we're even looking into whether people wrote about a student protest is absurd. The "combating antisemitism" cover story for all of this is incredibly cynical.
It shows how quickly the far left abandons its charity cases once it finds greener pastures. Remember all the "end ___ hate" campaigns? Not when there's a new group to manipulate for votes.
It’s terrifying that anyone would not only accept forbidding travel to critics, but also thinks it’s normal. From de Toqueville and Dickens to de Beauvoir to Žižek, the US used to welcome and embrace criticism.
Have we really become as thin-skinned as North Korea?
Does anyone anywhere qualify in this if your understanding? What does it mean to live here and not have an effect on on US politics? Can we use this same rationale to deny folks with dual citizenship office if they seek it?
The title does not do the content justice. Since Snowden it's been known to the entire world, even outside of HN, that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.
What has changed is that now they're actually using this to a degree that even China generally does not do. If a German had written a comment in support of the Hong Kong protests on Facebook at some point in time, they're extremely unlikely to get denied entry to China over this, despite them almost certainly having even stronger capabilities and databases to easily find this out.
> that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.
This is an important point.
The Bush admin established systems to surveil ~everyone in the US (not suspected of a crime) in bulk. Bulk surveillance is the well known, core component of systems intended to harm people (in bulk).
This got a pass from Bush supporters (inc me at first). It got little-to-no strong pushback elsewhere.
The Obama admin massively expanded Bush era surveillance systems. This got a pass from nearly everyone (excepting a period after the Edward Snowden revelations).
Not holding a reasonable PotUS accountable - this gifts power to the unreasonable ones that follow.
> The Obama admin massively expanded Bush era surveillance systems. This got a pass from nearly everyone.
Obama's first campaign ran on him opposing warrantless wiretapping and blanket immunity for telecoms. He also unequivocally condemned torture, promised to revise/sunset the Patriot Act, copperfasten Roe v Wade 'Day 1', etc...
But virtually all the Democrats I knew didn't give a single shit when he 180'd on all of that in his first few months. Still blows my mind a bit to this day; a marvel of mass brainwashing.
Now we're at the point where Democrats can arm and enable a literal holocaust inflicted on some of the world's poorest and most beautiful people, then get on a high horse when someone suggests voting for a non-genocidal party.
The ratchet effect is beyond extreme; and quite obvious for observant people with an outside perspective. Yet somehow Americans still seem to have hope that voting Dem hard enough will fix things. I wish I knew what it would take to inflict a sense of morality on the country.
Snowden showed that the tools were available to intelligence agencies operating under questionable rules. Now the coordination of those agencies is led by a Russian agent, and poorly trained keystone cops have access, courtesy of Palantir.
Also note that the IRS and Social Security data is protected and access is a serious crime. So the responsible Feds are long fired or resigned.
It’s remarkable to me how someone like Thiel could be such a fan of Lord of the Rings, with its central themes of the corrupting influence of unchecked power and good triumphing over evil and evil’s will to control and dominate—then decide to become Gollum.
In all of these types of stories, "evil" rules for long enough that makes it appealing for those with the same views. Sometimes, it's generations before "good" overcomes. Plus, each one of the "evil" leaders feel like they are special and different. It's easy to understand why. You just need to be able to see it yourself.
There are no evil people, media (books, TV, movies) have plainly evil people so the story is easily digestible and appealing to the masses. But it is completely incorrect framing of how the world actually is.
In reality "evil" people almost always want to genuinely make the world a better place, and they are fighting "ignorant" people who are dragging society down by not conforming to their golden vision. And then "evil" becomes largely a function of who you ask. It's the opposition that labels them evil, not society on the whole.
There are very few leaders ever who are straight up storybook style evil. Almost all of them were/are deranged people who convinced enough people of their ostensibly good vision to begin executing it.
No one came to power because they wanted to turn society into burning rumble while they ate babies during daily random execution time. It's all nuance and complication.
Thiel on the whole is just providing technology that can be used for good or evil. The decision to deport pro palestinian protesters is down to Trump who was chosen by the American voters.
Because it's only evil when your opposition/competition is doing it. You're always the hero in your own story and for you the actions are justified because you're doing it "for good". The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hitler was also a fan of works of art with themes of peace and harmony.
The world, at the highest levels of competition and leadership, doesn't run on morals, it runs on unscrupulous force, conquest and domination. See: the human history for the past infinity years. Those who tried to maintain peace on morals instead of force, got eliminated form the gene pool. People should remember this more often.
> See: the human history for the past infinity years. Those who ran on morals instead of force, got eliminated form the gene pool. People should remember this more often.
Fortunately not so; some time around 50-100kya, humans rapidly became a whole lot nicer to each other.
Thiel and Karp have both said in various places that western civilization is worth saving and that it's better that we develop this power than enemies of the West, and I'm not going to lie, I'm inclined to agree with them.
Do you really think Putin, Xi and Khamenei are better stewards of the world than the West?
The West's introspective nature is good and all, but sometimes we unwittingly forget that there is actual evil in the world, and it's much worse than saying mean things on Twitter, or putting facts above feelings.
Students in Iran literally die protesting the regime, meanwhile students here who live a life of luxury and don't know what actual oppression is "protest"/simp for the Iranians (or one of their various proxies)...
And it is forgotten that people will do evil under the auspices of “western ideals” and power unchecked leads to an erosion of those ideals.
Reminder - Iran offered support after 9/11 but instead we rebuffed them and called them part of the axis of evil just because. Right at a time when they were really modernizing again but our jingoistic attitudes entrenched the autocrats further.
They agreed to a nuclear deal that we tore up just because.
We overthrew their government.
We have presidential candidates singing “bomb bomb bomb Iran” for fun.
The reason we have a bad relationship with Iran and a large reason why they have bad leaders is because the US has made it so.
This is a very strange argument. I don’t have a problem in principle with a country developing a security apparatus. It’s how they use it, is the issue. The current US regime doesn’t feel like a particularly custodian of Western, liberal democracy
Thiel has explicitly advocated for the abolition of democracy and is funding contemporary efforts to do so. What privileges our students enjoy only exist because he hasn’t succeeded yet. You pose a false choice between authoritarian regimes. Claiming that Iranian protesters have it worse so we shouldn’t protect the free speech rights of our students is similarly disingenuous. It divides people using guilt around relative privilege rather than directing our efforts to solidarity in fighting the ruling class, of which Thiel is a part.
That's a bit of a strawman argument, no? The options are not only become a tyrant or let Putin rule the world. There's many and more clever options. I think we can demand much better from the people in power.
Also, that rhetoric of The West vs the world is a bit lazy. Things are more complex, even recent events prove The West is not a unified block where everyone thinks the same way.
What power, specifically? Overwhelming surveillance of citizens? Whining that people attending universities in the US protested things?
Why on earth would anyone think Khomeini (who, of course, has been dead for 24 years) would ever have any say over the West?
You’re deeply afraid of a very strange bogeyman. It seems odd to pretend that Peter Thiel also fears dead men in politically/economically/socially irrelevant countries.
Help me make sense of this as an old timer because I’m lost
Everything described in the thread has been going on since the Patriot Act was signed in 2001.
As early as 2010, I was able to look up ANY IMEI/IMSI combo in Proton and see all links to other IMEI/SI collected worldwide.
By 2013 I could query those in Palantir on a Secret or SCI level depending on who held the data which would also aggregate and provide to me OSINT, LE reports or other data associated with those id
What’s new here?
Is it just that more people know about it now?
All the stuff I described above was public information as to both “capabilities” and used as casus belli for warrants (US) or kinetic actions (OCONUS).
Nothing has changed except the standard for denial of entry has been broadened here. There's a long history of denying entry to people for what their views are, this isn't new at all. You can just do a search and find examples of white supremacists, and imams and Islamic scholars, as well as probably other groups being denied entry to not only the US but it happens in Europe too and it goes back across administrations. So in other words, it's not just under the current administration where your political views could get you denied entry to the US.
What's new is they've started using all of that more aggressively to detain people who objectively, without the shadow of a doubt, have done nothing wrong but somehow displease the party.
Generally, in my lifetime (at 37 years old now), wide political awareness starting around 2004, Patriot Act / mass government data conversation was more about "This can be abused!", the most concrete story I had ever even close to the topic was by my junior year english teacher (17 years old) relaying that someone told her someone googled "how do terrorists make a bomb" and the FBI paid them a visit. Here, I'm a bit stunned to see we're investing in screening and detaining visitors if they seem to hold an opinion that doesn't imply any sort of violent threat.
Unlikely, but the person may have looked into it further. Agriculture stores that sell stuff like ammonium nitrate are all participants in counter terror programs.
What's new here is that Peter Thiel is a libertarian who wants to destroy democracies because he's a christian lunatic who believes in armageddon and the anti-christ and sees democracies and multi-national organizations like the UN and the EU as tsaid anti-christ. This is not a joke, even though I wish it was because it sounds so ridiculous. Palantir is not our friend. And they probably WILL read my comment.
A thought experiment I have been having asks if we should instead open it up to the public.
For some reason I have been fixated on license plate readers (probably not a bad parallel to Palantir?). Plenty of people on HN justifiably decry license plate readers due to their violation of our privacy (to be sure there's an argument to made though since you are technically "in public" when driving — your privacy protections might be on shaky legal grounds).
But if license plate readers are already a reality (we know they are), why should only private actors have that data? This would make sense if we completely trusted those private actors, of course.
The opposite could be a public, open-source license plate reader that caught on (people using dash cams + open software) — the data sent to a collective, public database. (Perhaps the software strips out personal license plates — only logging tags of official or government vehicles?).
My first reaction is the degree to which that could be abused by ... stalkers? Truly a bad thing. But then I ask myself to what degree the private license plate readers are perhaps "being abused" (or will be more and more) and we don't even know about it.
As I say, a thought experiment that I find myself seeing merits both for and against.
I once had a firepit conversation with the Floc coordinator of a small US city's PD. A big part of the value he saw in Floc was being able to query the data within some window (maybe 30 days?) then no longer being responsible for it. If the government had the data, then they'd need to respond to FOIAs for the data. Not only would that be an administrative cost, but it would also show the public how invasive the mass surveillance is. He clearly was not concerned about civil rights, he just wanted the convictions.
He was also proud of paying more for some kind of exclusive license to the data, that Floc wasn't going to sell his surveillance data to other entities. I never really believed that.
I'm not sure if you consider governments and police to be private actors?
I spoke with a sophisticated ANPR city-wide tracking vendor recently at a conference. From their video showing the system following vehicles in real-time, with detailed movement tracking, speed measurement, lane position, estimating model, age, demographic etc. when they couldn't see the registration plate, from all sorts of vantage points, it looked to me like they would know where basically everyone who drives is at all times as they moved around.
So, as a privacy advocate, I asked them about tracking and knowing where every driver is all the time, and they assured me: "It's ok. We send all this data immediatel;y to the police. The police are responsible for keeping the data safe. They only use it when they decide it's appropriate."
I was there interested in privacy and traffic monitoring, but there was almost nobody to speak with who seemed to think about privacy, except in a checkbox sort of way, e.g. "when you're in public there's no legal right to privacy" and "our systems are fully compliant with data protection".
It is a crime to stalk people. When we catch people doing it, we should stop them.
I was taught many, many times growing up in the U.S. that people had a right to privacy, to free speech, to being considered innocent until proven guilty.
When governmental organizations police the speech of individuals for things that are critical of the regime, we lose our right to free speech.
When they download the contents of your phone when you travel, you lose the right to privacy.
When people are denied a writ of habeas corpus, when they are trafficked to countries that are not from and have never been to, we are considered guilty unless we have people "on the outside" who are capable of fighting for our return.
They aren't even trying to make an argument for this, outside of the cult of personality of the current regime, the belief that He can do no wrong. If you "both-sides" this you allow the trends to continue.
> to be sure there's an argument to made though since you are technically "in public" when driving — your privacy protections might be on shaky legal grounds
I'm curious to hear this argument. When I'm walking around a city, I'm in public as well. But I don't have to tell everybody who I am, and I would find facial recognition cameras spread around the city as a privacy violation.
Open what up? This event isn't about finding some needle in a hackstack, but about power structures using unaccountable "AI" to create chilling effects on the freedom of speech. The public having a go-to list of journalists who committed wrongspeak about Israel wouldn't particularly change much, beyond facilitating the extension of this authoritarian dynamic into the corporate world in a uniform way.
What's with the title? It says "Journalists ..." (plural) when so far as I can tell it's the story of one journalist. While I'm sure there's at least one other journalist wary of traveling to the US, that's not the story at hand, and HN guidelines prohibit editorializing of titles.
If anything, I think the title severely understates what happened here. It's not journalists "wary" of traveling to the US, it's a journalist literally getting deported for writing about a protest movement.
"Every" thread? I can't say that matches with my experience, or is even remotely close. Most posts I see are properly titled and as a result don't have anyone complaining about it. Can you link to some recent examples? Or is a little stretching of the truth justified in comments as well?
I just had some otherwise nice-sounding recruiter pings from Palantir-adjacent companies. I couldn’t do it. I found another role that’s everything I wanted and I can look at myself in the mirror.
That’s a thing, to be sure, but there’s also the very strong possibility of becoming institutionalized and rationalizing the stuff you’re working on in the mean time.
I think that the time may come in the near future where "proper" white collar Americans will have an obligation to flagrantly violate new laws and be arrested on purpose in order to create a critical mass of people who both have experienced the excesses of the regime and also are motivated enough to do something about it. This would have to be paired with colossally well-funded lawsuits, as during the Civil Rights movement.
Closely related to this, I have been continually frustrated with the insistence of the left wing that it borders on immoral to take a job as a soldier, police officer, prison guard, or bailiff, and that there's no reason to raise any of their pay. That leaves the various armed forces around the country staffed with individuals who feel very little opposition to rote authoritarianism, corruption, and rule-by-force. There are relatively few individuals working in day-to-day policing or intelligence work that spend a lot of time thinking about the duty of agents of the state to follow its laws.
> Closely related to this, I have been continually frustrated with the insistence of the left wing that it borders on immoral to take a job as a soldier, police officer, prison guard, or bailiff, and that there's no reason to raise any of their pay.
I've been thinking a lot about this same thing. I've seen a marked rise in the number of complaints about how "everyone in law enforcement is MAGA" and the like, and can't help but think: "this is what you wanted, right?"
There have been a lot of people trying really hard to make law enforcement (and adjacent roles) entirely unpalatable, and it appears they've been largely successful! I think what they failed to take into account is that they were only making those roles unpalatable tothose who already think like them in other ways, and forgot that there are a lot of people out there with fundamentally different beliefs who are not dissuaded by ACAB-adjacent arguments. Or, worse yet, are actively attracted to the way the role is being portrayed!
So in the end, it seems like they achieved their goals, but perhaps overlooked how those goals might have some unintended consequences.
I never really understood the argument, either. If you think policing is rife with prejudice and abuse of power, why are you trying to demonize the whole job? Why wouldn't you be signing up for it, instead? After all, if you think it's being done wrong, the best way to right that wrong is by doing it yourself and setting a better example.
I think the fact that people prefer to publicly demonize an entire thing, instead of doing the hard work of making it right, is one of the most insidious features of modern social media.
Absolute wild take. Do you think every police department in the US oppresses minorities and infringes on civil rights or something?
>just as it was immoral to become a european camp guard in the forties
Even for the Allies? Given the prior sentence, I can't tell whether you're trying to allude to Nazi concentration camp guards, or actually think all camp guards are immoral.
This guy thought deleting his posts would make a difference... but he's sure it's Palantir.
They've been doing this using all sorts of social media OSINT tools for a decade or more. Okay, he's annoyed but that's not a license to make stuff up.
The US is just following the European example of "responsibly" moderating speech [1], instead of blindly sticking to the 1st amendment, as they were so often called to [2].
Yes, I would expect the government to blindly stick to the founding document of the country. I would also expect the government to go through the amendment process to change that document if it was found wanting given changes in society over time.
It’s far easier to pay lip service to the document while doing whatever you want. This is common with authoritarian regimes. From the PRC’s constitution:
> Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Does that say Camus had his phone seized? He was denied being allowed to come and speak, not to visit as a journalist, which also strikes me a fairly different case (whatever you think of his positions, or whether they should be debated or silenced). It seems unlikely to me that a journalist who'd written flattering things about the AFD would be treated so badly trying to visit Germany?
Palantir's role or non-role aside, the idea that we're even looking into whether people wrote about a student protest is absurd. The "combating antisemitism" cover story for all of this is incredibly cynical.
They were looking in my spam folder and giving me a hard time for what they ‘found’ there, absolutely bonkers
Was this in customs? Are you an American? Just curious.
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It shows how quickly the far left abandons its charity cases once it finds greener pastures. Remember all the "end ___ hate" campaigns? Not when there's a new group to manipulate for votes.
Cynical? No my friend, it's what authoritarian dictatorships such as Russia and the US have been doing for years, it's their default! [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disinformation_in_the_Russian_...
All it takes is a quick observation that the literal swastika swinging Nazis are all on Trump’s side to see the truth.
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It’s terrifying that anyone would not only accept forbidding travel to critics, but also thinks it’s normal. From de Toqueville and Dickens to de Beauvoir to Žižek, the US used to welcome and embrace criticism.
Have we really become as thin-skinned as North Korea?
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Under a normal administration that actually would be unexpected, yes.
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I can't imagine how insecure and fragile a country must be to be afraid of checks notes opinions on substack.
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Does anyone anywhere qualify in this if your understanding? What does it mean to live here and not have an effect on on US politics? Can we use this same rationale to deny folks with dual citizenship office if they seek it?
Do you think journalists don't have sides and don't have effects on politics?
Riddle me this: why do you think journalism is protected in this country if it is definitionally politically inert?
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Freedom of speech is not a right bestowed on citizens but an encumbrance on the government. They cannot set policy based on protected speech.
Nor is there any definition of journalist that precludes having a point of view.
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The title does not do the content justice. Since Snowden it's been known to the entire world, even outside of HN, that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.
What has changed is that now they're actually using this to a degree that even China generally does not do. If a German had written a comment in support of the Hong Kong protests on Facebook at some point in time, they're extremely unlikely to get denied entry to China over this, despite them almost certainly having even stronger capabilities and databases to easily find this out.
> that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.
This is an important point.
The Bush admin established systems to surveil ~everyone in the US (not suspected of a crime) in bulk. Bulk surveillance is the well known, core component of systems intended to harm people (in bulk).
This got a pass from Bush supporters (inc me at first). It got little-to-no strong pushback elsewhere.
The Obama admin massively expanded Bush era surveillance systems. This got a pass from nearly everyone (excepting a period after the Edward Snowden revelations).
Not holding a reasonable PotUS accountable - this gifts power to the unreasonable ones that follow.
> The Obama admin massively expanded Bush era surveillance systems. This got a pass from nearly everyone.
Obama's first campaign ran on him opposing warrantless wiretapping and blanket immunity for telecoms. He also unequivocally condemned torture, promised to revise/sunset the Patriot Act, copperfasten Roe v Wade 'Day 1', etc...
But virtually all the Democrats I knew didn't give a single shit when he 180'd on all of that in his first few months. Still blows my mind a bit to this day; a marvel of mass brainwashing.
Now we're at the point where Democrats can arm and enable a literal holocaust inflicted on some of the world's poorest and most beautiful people, then get on a high horse when someone suggests voting for a non-genocidal party.
The ratchet effect is beyond extreme; and quite obvious for observant people with an outside perspective. Yet somehow Americans still seem to have hope that voting Dem hard enough will fix things. I wish I knew what it would take to inflict a sense of morality on the country.
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Snowden showed that the tools were available to intelligence agencies operating under questionable rules. Now the coordination of those agencies is led by a Russian agent, and poorly trained keystone cops have access, courtesy of Palantir.
Also note that the IRS and Social Security data is protected and access is a serious crime. So the responsible Feds are long fired or resigned.
> Also note that the IRS and Social Security data is protected and access is a serious crime. So the responsible Feds are long fired or resigned.
The access was given to Palantir. Your statement is dismissive in a way that suggests this dangerous situation no longer exists.
Are you asserting that Palantir no longer has access to this data?
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Palantir.
Valar Ventures.
Mithril Capital.
Lembas LLC.
It’s remarkable to me how someone like Thiel could be such a fan of Lord of the Rings, with its central themes of the corrupting influence of unchecked power and good triumphing over evil and evil’s will to control and dominate—then decide to become Gollum.
Mr. Thiel identifies as Sauron, thank you very much.
1000 points have been deducted from your Palantir AI Social Credit Score™
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Hmm why not rather opportunistic Saruman? Serve whoever brings money, fuck the plebs and some naive higher principles
In all of these types of stories, "evil" rules for long enough that makes it appealing for those with the same views. Sometimes, it's generations before "good" overcomes. Plus, each one of the "evil" leaders feel like they are special and different. It's easy to understand why. You just need to be able to see it yourself.
There are no evil people, media (books, TV, movies) have plainly evil people so the story is easily digestible and appealing to the masses. But it is completely incorrect framing of how the world actually is.
In reality "evil" people almost always want to genuinely make the world a better place, and they are fighting "ignorant" people who are dragging society down by not conforming to their golden vision. And then "evil" becomes largely a function of who you ask. It's the opposition that labels them evil, not society on the whole.
There are very few leaders ever who are straight up storybook style evil. Almost all of them were/are deranged people who convinced enough people of their ostensibly good vision to begin executing it.
No one came to power because they wanted to turn society into burning rumble while they ate babies during daily random execution time. It's all nuance and complication.
> There are no evil people [....] In reality "evil" people almost always want to genuinely make the world a better place
I would have to disagree here...lots of historical examples of criminal gangs, privateers, etc seeking to simply do harm.
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Thiel on the whole is just providing technology that can be used for good or evil. The decision to deport pro palestinian protesters is down to Trump who was chosen by the American voters.
Because it's only evil when your opposition/competition is doing it. You're always the hero in your own story and for you the actions are justified because you're doing it "for good". The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Hitler was also a fan of works of art with themes of peace and harmony.
The world, at the highest levels of competition and leadership, doesn't run on morals, it runs on unscrupulous force, conquest and domination. See: the human history for the past infinity years. Those who tried to maintain peace on morals instead of force, got eliminated form the gene pool. People should remember this more often.
> See: the human history for the past infinity years. Those who ran on morals instead of force, got eliminated form the gene pool. People should remember this more often.
Fortunately not so; some time around 50-100kya, humans rapidly became a whole lot nicer to each other.
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Thiel and Karp have both said in various places that western civilization is worth saving and that it's better that we develop this power than enemies of the West, and I'm not going to lie, I'm inclined to agree with them.
Do you really think Putin, Xi and Khamenei are better stewards of the world than the West?
The West's introspective nature is good and all, but sometimes we unwittingly forget that there is actual evil in the world, and it's much worse than saying mean things on Twitter, or putting facts above feelings.
Students in Iran literally die protesting the regime, meanwhile students here who live a life of luxury and don't know what actual oppression is "protest"/simp for the Iranians (or one of their various proxies)...
And it is forgotten that people will do evil under the auspices of “western ideals” and power unchecked leads to an erosion of those ideals.
Reminder - Iran offered support after 9/11 but instead we rebuffed them and called them part of the axis of evil just because. Right at a time when they were really modernizing again but our jingoistic attitudes entrenched the autocrats further.
They agreed to a nuclear deal that we tore up just because.
We overthrew their government.
We have presidential candidates singing “bomb bomb bomb Iran” for fun.
The reason we have a bad relationship with Iran and a large reason why they have bad leaders is because the US has made it so.
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This is a very strange argument. I don’t have a problem in principle with a country developing a security apparatus. It’s how they use it, is the issue. The current US regime doesn’t feel like a particularly custodian of Western, liberal democracy
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Thiel has explicitly advocated for the abolition of democracy and is funding contemporary efforts to do so. What privileges our students enjoy only exist because he hasn’t succeeded yet. You pose a false choice between authoritarian regimes. Claiming that Iranian protesters have it worse so we shouldn’t protect the free speech rights of our students is similarly disingenuous. It divides people using guilt around relative privilege rather than directing our efforts to solidarity in fighting the ruling class, of which Thiel is a part.
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I categorically do not wish to live in a West perverted by Thiel and Karp’s grotesque ideology.
So far, the signs are that Trump is likely a worse steward than Xi. He just hasn't had the ability to properly fulfill his wishes.
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That's a bit of a strawman argument, no? The options are not only become a tyrant or let Putin rule the world. There's many and more clever options. I think we can demand much better from the people in power.
Also, that rhetoric of The West vs the world is a bit lazy. Things are more complex, even recent events prove The West is not a unified block where everyone thinks the same way.
What power, specifically? Overwhelming surveillance of citizens? Whining that people attending universities in the US protested things?
Why on earth would anyone think Khomeini (who, of course, has been dead for 24 years) would ever have any say over the West?
You’re deeply afraid of a very strange bogeyman. It seems odd to pretend that Peter Thiel also fears dead men in politically/economically/socially irrelevant countries.
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> Do you really think Putin, Xi and Khomeini are better stewards of the world than the West?
I'm sure they're saying the same things about the West.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/355/607/670
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Help me make sense of this as an old timer because I’m lost
Everything described in the thread has been going on since the Patriot Act was signed in 2001.
As early as 2010, I was able to look up ANY IMEI/IMSI combo in Proton and see all links to other IMEI/SI collected worldwide.
By 2013 I could query those in Palantir on a Secret or SCI level depending on who held the data which would also aggregate and provide to me OSINT, LE reports or other data associated with those id
What’s new here?
Is it just that more people know about it now?
All the stuff I described above was public information as to both “capabilities” and used as casus belli for warrants (US) or kinetic actions (OCONUS).
They've had these authoritarian toys for a while, but they've been careful to use them more subtly in the past.
This administration is, as with everything else, discarding the "norms" based restraint that previously applied to their use.
Fully disagree. This was entirely what snowden was trying to make public and he was a broken record on precisely what I described above.
Everything I wrote can be validated that it was available for the world to see by 2013.
From my point of view, wheter this is new or not is secondary. What happened is very bad and it is important to talk about it.
Nothing has changed except the standard for denial of entry has been broadened here. There's a long history of denying entry to people for what their views are, this isn't new at all. You can just do a search and find examples of white supremacists, and imams and Islamic scholars, as well as probably other groups being denied entry to not only the US but it happens in Europe too and it goes back across administrations. So in other words, it's not just under the current administration where your political views could get you denied entry to the US.
> As early as 2010, I was able to look up ANY IMEI/IMSI combo in Proton
Did you mean PRISM? When I think of Proton, I think of a genuine effort to assist people in maintaining security.
No, this:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISSCROSS/PROTON
What's new is they've started using all of that more aggressively to detain people who objectively, without the shadow of a doubt, have done nothing wrong but somehow displease the party.
Retrieval and association is orders of magnitude better
“Lost in the noise” no more
Generally, in my lifetime (at 37 years old now), wide political awareness starting around 2004, Patriot Act / mass government data conversation was more about "This can be abused!", the most concrete story I had ever even close to the topic was by my junior year english teacher (17 years old) relaying that someone told her someone googled "how do terrorists make a bomb" and the FBI paid them a visit. Here, I'm a bit stunned to see we're investing in screening and detaining visitors if they seem to hold an opinion that doesn't imply any sort of violent threat.
Unlikely, but the person may have looked into it further. Agriculture stores that sell stuff like ammonium nitrate are all participants in counter terror programs.
The real danger isn't the capability or even them collecting the information.
The danger is when the fascists take charge and start abusing it.
And the new thing here is just that.
What's new here is that Peter Thiel is a libertarian who wants to destroy democracies because he's a christian lunatic who believes in armageddon and the anti-christ and sees democracies and multi-national organizations like the UN and the EU as tsaid anti-christ. This is not a joke, even though I wish it was because it sounds so ridiculous. Palantir is not our friend. And they probably WILL read my comment.
> he's a lunatic
ftfy
A thought experiment I have been having asks if we should instead open it up to the public.
For some reason I have been fixated on license plate readers (probably not a bad parallel to Palantir?). Plenty of people on HN justifiably decry license plate readers due to their violation of our privacy (to be sure there's an argument to made though since you are technically "in public" when driving — your privacy protections might be on shaky legal grounds).
But if license plate readers are already a reality (we know they are), why should only private actors have that data? This would make sense if we completely trusted those private actors, of course.
The opposite could be a public, open-source license plate reader that caught on (people using dash cams + open software) — the data sent to a collective, public database. (Perhaps the software strips out personal license plates — only logging tags of official or government vehicles?).
My first reaction is the degree to which that could be abused by ... stalkers? Truly a bad thing. But then I ask myself to what degree the private license plate readers are perhaps "being abused" (or will be more and more) and we don't even know about it.
As I say, a thought experiment that I find myself seeing merits both for and against.
I once had a firepit conversation with the Floc coordinator of a small US city's PD. A big part of the value he saw in Floc was being able to query the data within some window (maybe 30 days?) then no longer being responsible for it. If the government had the data, then they'd need to respond to FOIAs for the data. Not only would that be an administrative cost, but it would also show the public how invasive the mass surveillance is. He clearly was not concerned about civil rights, he just wanted the convictions.
He was also proud of paying more for some kind of exclusive license to the data, that Floc wasn't going to sell his surveillance data to other entities. I never really believed that.
> If the government had the data, then they'd need to respond to FOIAs for the data.
Respond to, yes. Disclose, not necessarily. I believe ALPR data are exempt from disclosure in some - perhaps many, and maybe even most - states.
> why should only private actors have that data?
I'm not sure if you consider governments and police to be private actors?
I spoke with a sophisticated ANPR city-wide tracking vendor recently at a conference. From their video showing the system following vehicles in real-time, with detailed movement tracking, speed measurement, lane position, estimating model, age, demographic etc. when they couldn't see the registration plate, from all sorts of vantage points, it looked to me like they would know where basically everyone who drives is at all times as they moved around.
So, as a privacy advocate, I asked them about tracking and knowing where every driver is all the time, and they assured me: "It's ok. We send all this data immediatel;y to the police. The police are responsible for keeping the data safe. They only use it when they decide it's appropriate."
I was there interested in privacy and traffic monitoring, but there was almost nobody to speak with who seemed to think about privacy, except in a checkbox sort of way, e.g. "when you're in public there's no legal right to privacy" and "our systems are fully compliant with data protection".
It is a crime to stalk people. When we catch people doing it, we should stop them.
I was taught many, many times growing up in the U.S. that people had a right to privacy, to free speech, to being considered innocent until proven guilty.
When governmental organizations police the speech of individuals for things that are critical of the regime, we lose our right to free speech.
When they download the contents of your phone when you travel, you lose the right to privacy.
When people are denied a writ of habeas corpus, when they are trafficked to countries that are not from and have never been to, we are considered guilty unless we have people "on the outside" who are capable of fighting for our return.
They aren't even trying to make an argument for this, outside of the cult of personality of the current regime, the belief that He can do no wrong. If you "both-sides" this you allow the trends to continue.
Agree, I would prefer this were not even a thing.
> to be sure there's an argument to made though since you are technically "in public" when driving — your privacy protections might be on shaky legal grounds
I'm curious to hear this argument. When I'm walking around a city, I'm in public as well. But I don't have to tell everybody who I am, and I would find facial recognition cameras spread around the city as a privacy violation.
That's a good point. I am only going on the "expectation of privacy" clause — but perhaps that's only applied to (audible) conversations.
Open what up? This event isn't about finding some needle in a hackstack, but about power structures using unaccountable "AI" to create chilling effects on the freedom of speech. The public having a go-to list of journalists who committed wrongspeak about Israel wouldn't particularly change much, beyond facilitating the extension of this authoritarian dynamic into the corporate world in a uniform way.
see the novel kiln people and the transparent society essays by David Brin
Biggest abuse would be home burglars. Pick a juicy target, wait till all vehicles are away and strike.
What's with the title? It says "Journalists ..." (plural) when so far as I can tell it's the story of one journalist. While I'm sure there's at least one other journalist wary of traveling to the US, that's not the story at hand, and HN guidelines prohibit editorializing of titles.
I am not actually sure they are a journalist, but more a blogger? Happy to be proven wrong
Reading the blog, he seems more like an activist.
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Every thread getting littered with these hall monitor complaints about titles is worse than clickbait could ever be.
If anything, I think the title severely understates what happened here. It's not journalists "wary" of traveling to the US, it's a journalist literally getting deported for writing about a protest movement.
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"Every" thread? I can't say that matches with my experience, or is even remotely close. Most posts I see are properly titled and as a result don't have anyone complaining about it. Can you link to some recent examples? Or is a little stretching of the truth justified in comments as well?
I just had some otherwise nice-sounding recruiter pings from Palantir-adjacent companies. I couldn’t do it. I found another role that’s everything I wanted and I can look at myself in the mirror.
On the other hand, you could aim for becoming a mole or whistleblower.
That’s a thing, to be sure, but there’s also the very strong possibility of becoming institutionalized and rationalizing the stuff you’re working on in the mean time.
You mean you are worried about personally causing harm in that job? Or you are worried about saving face?
The former. I don’t want to work on things that make the world worse in ways I care about.
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I think that the time may come in the near future where "proper" white collar Americans will have an obligation to flagrantly violate new laws and be arrested on purpose in order to create a critical mass of people who both have experienced the excesses of the regime and also are motivated enough to do something about it. This would have to be paired with colossally well-funded lawsuits, as during the Civil Rights movement.
Closely related to this, I have been continually frustrated with the insistence of the left wing that it borders on immoral to take a job as a soldier, police officer, prison guard, or bailiff, and that there's no reason to raise any of their pay. That leaves the various armed forces around the country staffed with individuals who feel very little opposition to rote authoritarianism, corruption, and rule-by-force. There are relatively few individuals working in day-to-day policing or intelligence work that spend a lot of time thinking about the duty of agents of the state to follow its laws.
> Closely related to this, I have been continually frustrated with the insistence of the left wing that it borders on immoral to take a job as a soldier, police officer, prison guard, or bailiff, and that there's no reason to raise any of their pay.
I've been thinking a lot about this same thing. I've seen a marked rise in the number of complaints about how "everyone in law enforcement is MAGA" and the like, and can't help but think: "this is what you wanted, right?"
There have been a lot of people trying really hard to make law enforcement (and adjacent roles) entirely unpalatable, and it appears they've been largely successful! I think what they failed to take into account is that they were only making those roles unpalatable tothose who already think like them in other ways, and forgot that there are a lot of people out there with fundamentally different beliefs who are not dissuaded by ACAB-adjacent arguments. Or, worse yet, are actively attracted to the way the role is being portrayed!
So in the end, it seems like they achieved their goals, but perhaps overlooked how those goals might have some unintended consequences.
I never really understood the argument, either. If you think policing is rife with prejudice and abuse of power, why are you trying to demonize the whole job? Why wouldn't you be signing up for it, instead? After all, if you think it's being done wrong, the best way to right that wrong is by doing it yourself and setting a better example.
I think the fact that people prefer to publicly demonize an entire thing, instead of doing the hard work of making it right, is one of the most insidious features of modern social media.
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>And yes, it's immoral to become a cop
Absolute wild take. Do you think every police department in the US oppresses minorities and infringes on civil rights or something?
>just as it was immoral to become a european camp guard in the forties
Even for the Allies? Given the prior sentence, I can't tell whether you're trying to allude to Nazi concentration camp guards, or actually think all camp guards are immoral.
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This guy thought deleting his posts would make a difference... but he's sure it's Palantir.
They've been doing this using all sorts of social media OSINT tools for a decade or more. Okay, he's annoyed but that's not a license to make stuff up.
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The US is just following the European example of "responsibly" moderating speech [1], instead of blindly sticking to the 1st amendment, as they were so often called to [2].
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/renaud-camus-banned-migration-vi...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/what-eu...
Yes, I would expect the government to blindly stick to the founding document of the country. I would also expect the government to go through the amendment process to change that document if it was found wanting given changes in society over time.
It’s far easier to pay lip service to the document while doing whatever you want. This is common with authoritarian regimes. From the PRC’s constitution:
> Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.
Does that say Camus had his phone seized? He was denied being allowed to come and speak, not to visit as a journalist, which also strikes me a fairly different case (whatever you think of his positions, or whether they should be debated or silenced). It seems unlikely to me that a journalist who'd written flattering things about the AFD would be treated so badly trying to visit Germany?
> Does that say Camus had his phone seized?
I'm confused where this question is coming from. Do cases have to be exactly the same to draw parallels?
> It seems unlikely to me that a journalist who'd written flattering things about the AFD would be treated so badly trying to visit Germany?
Germany is a bad example, as they're deporting and planning to even revoke citizenship based on speech:
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/14/germany-orders-depo...
https://theintercept.com/2025/03/31/germany-gaza-protesters-...
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-could-withdraw-citizenship-due...
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