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.
> then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"
These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms.
This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it.
So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.
Yes, retroactively manufactured cause for a warrant to find only the information you want.
Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it.
The ironic thing is that palantir has been operationalizating data gathered by the NSA and reselling as "ai targeting" to another country's military. But yes usually the loophole goes the other way.
Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.
The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.
> 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.
I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way.
I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.
The article says the data was 'surveilled' by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and HHS in the performance of Medicare/Medicaid claims, with that surveillance fed to Palentir.
Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public and then unleashed by the state to private entity.
> Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public
Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.
The acting as if there is a clearly demarcated distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors seems mostly like a 20th or 19th century atavism. The only substantive difference today seems to be that the former actor is more restrained by political input (in functioning democracies at least) and the latter is less so. But in terms of who has authority over how people live their lives and the level of totalizing control over communication and commerce it’s more like overlapping and competing fiefdoms than the “state = coercive power” and “private sector = market power” dichotomy people often try to imply.
Cambridge Analytica was the blueprint, unfortunately, and not a deterrent. Much like movies ands television shows attempted to warn viewers of the dangers of robotic and automated militaries.
The EU said ‘hold my mead,’ and built the literal Skynet from the terminator movies. Has the same damn job too, coordinate, communicate, control.
Humanity doesn’t learn from its past because it is too focused on its future. Unfortunately for us, war… war never changes.
Starting way back in the early 2000s I was predicting all this and was consistently called nuts and paranoid.
In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative.
The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care.
We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast."
This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.
The private sector is only "more competent" at a certain size. Google, Microsoft, Meta - they're all largely inefficient and only effective as it pertains to the dollars they spend in lobbying. All of these companies are largely wasteful with respect to the money they spend on executives and initiatives that go against their own customers. They mirror the USG more and more year over year.
I've worked at both disfunctional & functional large companies, a very disfunctional start up, and a very well run public sector research organization. The deciding factor in each case was the quality of management.
A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.
The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction.
The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.
Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.
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.
I heard a law professor on NPR a few nights back saying how, at the executive level, the rule of law is dead and has been for some time. They cited Jan 6 but recognised how politically divisive that example was, so also gave the failure to enforce the TikTok ban as a less partisan example.
If you take your hands off the wheel you can go a surprisingly long time before you crash. This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point.
Selectively ... Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
If we are to learn from the brutal Soviet sanctioned forced deportations of the Baltic nations following world war 2, then justice will come but it will take time.
Once the Baltic nations gained independence they tried everyone involved in the administration of those orders, which took place without trial or oversight and often resulted in the replacement families being deported if the actual tagets could not be found.
Ofc Stalin or any of the power brokers at the time were long dead, so instead it was a parade of lower level admin workers, all who were elderly in their 80s or 90s and who at that time were young, simply doing the bidding of their employers.
The lesson: don't be a bag holder for people who will die before you leaving you to hold the responsibility for their crimes.
It's pretty clear for decades. When exactly did some higher up in the US gov end up in jail for ordering eg. mass killings abroad, or colluding with others that engaged in mass crimes like initiating wars and conflicts.
US will not lock up a single asshole who helps kill thousands of people abroad (not even inconvenience them with a simple court appearance to have to justify themselves), but it sure can lock up thousands on flimsiest justifications like FTA in court because of whatever, or technical parole violations, or driving on suspended license, basically for failures to navigate bureaucracy while poor.
I'll believe in rule of law when at least shits who materially support mass killings of children will start getting locked up. But alas, no. No such thing.
Until then it's all just bullshit that normal people have to submit to, and ruling class gets to excuse itself from with endless lawyering, exceptions, and nonsense, while it's clear they're still just scum psychos doing scum psycho things.
> But, as Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.
> I'm reading this correctly, they're just straight up violating the law
HHS says “under the Immigration and Nationality Act, ‘any information in any records kept by any department or agency of the government as to the identity and location of aliens in the US shall be made available to’ immigration authorities.” If that’s true, they’re following the law.
Key part of what you wrote: "as to the identity and location of aliens" - so whatever claim they have to access health information applies to aliens. The big question is: are they harvesting citizens' health records illegally as part of this effort, and if so, when do those responsible see jail time?
I'm open to either conclusion, but what law / right do you think is being violated?
As a general rule, the first amendment protects the right to say, e.g. "John Doe lives at 123 Main St." John may not like that people know that, but that doesn't generally limit other peoples' right to speak freely.
It's right there in the article, there are specific federal laws authorizing them to make specific information available - for example, they can make any record kept about the identity or location of aliens available. Right, that's a specific limitation on what they can share, even the HHS spokesperson made clear they don't share information on US citizens and permanent lawful residents. But then the article goes on to reveal that ICE has all the personal data of every person receiving Medicaid.
If the law says you can share aliens information, but not Americans information, and then you do share Americans information I think you're probably breaking the law, and at the very least there should be a process to find out what the basis is for you doing it. Normally these things would be decided by a court.
HHS is broader than CMMS. Someone who was formerly legal could now be illegal. But more prominently, Miller and Noem have focused on illegally deporting pending asylum cases to juice their numbers. Those folks may show up in HHS (and IRS) data.
If you go to an emergency room at a hospital which accepts Medicare (so, essentially all of them), you will be screened, and if in danger, medically stabilized (modulo difficult pregnancies in some states with anti-abortion laws, unfortunately).
I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.
Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans.
It's dehumanizing and it leads to a path where you can justify humiliating, torturing, and murdering other humans. Which is already happening with ICE.
> Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans
It’s the legally-correct term.
For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.
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.
> every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well
I’m confused by this shoehorning.
This article is about actual, not potential, abuse. It involves healthcare data the government owns being used in a novel and disturbing way. The only nexus to the private sector is in Palantir, but they aren’t bringing the data, just some analytic tools.
This. And when you start to think about how pervasive this is it's very likely that organizations like BCA and DHS are leveraging big tech with respect to location data of targets like students. I'm appalled at the lack of concern districts have levied against these organizations with respect to protecting their students. I wouldn't be surprised to see leaked memos between Palantir / Flock / Google / Microsoft / TikTok / Meta in the future.
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?
Are they effective? Do you have data on the number of people they've correctly identified vs false-positives. In fact, do you have any evidence they're even trying to limit false positives?
The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that in a majority of cases (or something approaching that) the targets of these raids are not subject to lawful deportation?
I would be curious to have data / information showing that.
Palantir's mission is to exactly solve the problem you're describing: break through data siloes to get better information. Core of the platform are data pipelines that can move data from any silo into the palantir data lake, where it can be analysed. Their forward engineering project approach probably enables them to bypass the organisational boundaries between departments. Their top-down selling approach ensures management assists bypassing organisational boundaries.
> break through data siloes to get better information
This is the pitch of every consulting company ever.
In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.
UK government departments are slow and hostile to change, so I am skeptical that Palantir being parachuted in, would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it.
From what I've read is that they are not a product company. But they rather have a zoo of solutions. And they are hired by governments desperate to improve their IT, probably after the n-th issue going public. I highly doubt this would be legal in many states but who will (and can) check this anyway?
Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...
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).
I get that - the question is why CMS would have addresses for undocumented immigrants at all (assuming for the moment it is only undocumented that they are looking for). Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, so how and why would CMS have their names and addresses?
No, and you can tell how much this vexes particular individuals and institutions because the only kind of attack they can bring against him is character assassination, the tool of last resort.
You would think that if you genuinely wanted to curb illegal immigration, then this would be the way to do it. People come here for money. Take away the money and they will no longer come.
Hell, you would probably have bipartisan support for nationwide crackdowns on employers who are employing anyone here illegally. They are undercutting American employees and dodging taxes. Who wouldn't be for that kind of law enforcement?
Instead we get unaccountable masked men with guns murdering citizens and terrorizing an entire populace. Imagine if an "ICE raid" meant a team of accountants showed up at a business and gave them a hefty fine for employing anyone here illegally. It seems like that would be much more effective, which makes me genuinely wonder if the demonstration of strength through cruelty that we currently have hasn't been the goal all along.
Many Americans benefit from illegal immigration, it would kill the middle class in many places if illegal immigrants just went away all of a sudden. States like Texas can hardly survive without it, basically all politicians know this.
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
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.
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.
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.
Team sports basically. And when you point out double standards, you got slammed as some "both sides" guy from the other team pretending to be a centrist.
Has anyone calculated a hazard score for apprehension for illegal immigrants with a violent criminal conviction? As in, with dragnet deportation, are the violent ones also being picked up? Or are they actually safer today than they were a few years ago given Noem and Miller are more interested in making TikTok videos than pursuing hard-to-get criminals?
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...
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.
Do you hear how this reads? It reads like you're not going to take warnings about the dangers of government power seriously because the people espousing them are trying to use government power dangerously themselves.
If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.
> Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.
Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.
Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):
Yes but at least in places like Venezuela and Philippines it can be bought cheap enough the common man might be able to access it.
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).
The hypocrisy of the conservatives aside, the Democrats also end up doing nothing meaningful to thwart any of it when they are in power. The higher ranks of Democrats are almost as conservative as the Republicans. Palantir is not a post-2024 phenomenon. The data was always collected. They are just being brazen now.
Sounds like Americans are in general fine with all of it. Voting patterns hold. General sentiment still remains aligned with the status quo. There does not seem like there are any consequences for the representatives to not represent the people.
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.
If you want to go fishing, the Mojave Desert is not the place you should be going. If they want to go after illegal immigrants go to where they actually live and work.
I live in Wyoming. ICE came through once, their helicopters woke up a bunch of folks’ pets, the governor told them to stop and they haven’t been back since. This is absolutely about establishing a corps of brown shirts. Not deporting illegal immigrants.
Any use or benefit obtained via the state apparatus should be viewed from the lens it will be wielded by the most bad faith, hostile actor possible as leverage against you.
> Any use or benefit obtained via the state apparatus should be viewed from the lens it will be wielded
This is nonsense. Given the same tendency is shared by large private organisations, this is throwing one’s hands up with extra steps.
Regulations and laws work. The fact that a section of the INA seems to compel pretty ridiculous amounts of inter-departmental data sharing is the issue.
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.
What is the heuristic though? Not giving "normal data" still makes you an outlier, yes, probably they are not very smart, but at some point someone will say "let's round up people that gave us too few data, they are suspicious".
I bet that if all conspiracy theorists will be more worried that their neighbors become crazy and would try to do something positive about it (talk to them, befriend them, influence them, etc.) the outcome might be better for everybody.
Related HN thread:
ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117
Details:
ICE using Palantir tool that feeds on Medicaid data - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46756117 - Jan 2026 (941 comments – 18 hours)
strange removing the one that was in the top spot.
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.
And then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"
> then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"
These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms.
This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it.
So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.
Yes, retroactively manufactured cause for a warrant to find only the information you want.
Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it.
It has happened before and it will happen again.
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The ironic thing is that palantir has been operationalizating data gathered by the NSA and reselling as "ai targeting" to another country's military. But yes usually the loophole goes the other way.
Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.
"Allow us to use your data to improve our service." ...by selling your data to improve our service's profitability.
The EU has mostly done a good job of reining in private data collection. But unfortunately even tech-savvy people often don't see the big picture and just complain about cookie banners and other instances of malicious compliance by the companies who now can't collect and sell your data without significant financial risk.
...plus Trump is now threatening the EU with tarrifs unless they water down their data protection rules.
> 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.
I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way.
Until it did.
> People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews
What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?
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> Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way
Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe...
I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.
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Dear God, he likened it to Nazi Germany... I've never seen this before... my hands are smacking together right now.
The article says the data was 'surveilled' by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and HHS in the performance of Medicare/Medicaid claims, with that surveillance fed to Palentir.
Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public and then unleashed by the state to private entity.
> The article says the data was 'surveilled' by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and HHS in the performance of Medicare/Medicaid claims
Does this imply that undocumented aliens subject to deportation have been making claims on Medicare/Medicaid monies?
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> Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public
Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.
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Snowden should have been the warning shot.
The acting as if there is a clearly demarcated distinction between the “public” and “private” sectors seems mostly like a 20th or 19th century atavism. The only substantive difference today seems to be that the former actor is more restrained by political input (in functioning democracies at least) and the latter is less so. But in terms of who has authority over how people live their lives and the level of totalizing control over communication and commerce it’s more like overlapping and competing fiefdoms than the “state = coercive power” and “private sector = market power” dichotomy people often try to imply.
Cambridge Analytica was the blueprint, unfortunately, and not a deterrent. Much like movies ands television shows attempted to warn viewers of the dangers of robotic and automated militaries.
The EU said ‘hold my mead,’ and built the literal Skynet from the terminator movies. Has the same damn job too, coordinate, communicate, control.
Humanity doesn’t learn from its past because it is too focused on its future. Unfortunately for us, war… war never changes.
Starting way back in the early 2000s I was predicting all this and was consistently called nuts and paranoid.
In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative.
The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care.
We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast."
This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.
Mostly agree, but I think people didn't put up resistance (at least partly) because a certain amount of wealth is needed to life freely.
If you worry about paying rent or buying food you likely don't care if some abstract entity knows to what kind of videos you jerk off.
> I was predicting all this
You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address.
> This is a devil's bargain
Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?
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> Private surveillance is so much more scary than regular government surveillance because ...
... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.
I really haven't found this to be true at all; corporations are just as dysfunctional or worse.
It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.
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The private sector is only "more competent" at a certain size. Google, Microsoft, Meta - they're all largely inefficient and only effective as it pertains to the dollars they spend in lobbying. All of these companies are largely wasteful with respect to the money they spend on executives and initiatives that go against their own customers. They mirror the USG more and more year over year.
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I've worked at both disfunctional & functional large companies, a very disfunctional start up, and a very well run public sector research organization. The deciding factor in each case was the quality of management.
A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.
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Corporations are not disallowed to have a single master database. Government databases are at least in some cases firewalled off each other by law.
Structurally it’s about incentives not competency.
The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has pointed out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction.
The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.
I don't really mind private surveillance. It's when the data gets sold or otherwise obtained by state powers that it gets scary.
Why would non state actors be any less scary?
Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.
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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.
It has become quite clear in recent months that the the rule of law will not be enforced on the federal government or their allies.
I heard a law professor on NPR a few nights back saying how, at the executive level, the rule of law is dead and has been for some time. They cited Jan 6 but recognised how politically divisive that example was, so also gave the failure to enforce the TikTok ban as a less partisan example.
If you take your hands off the wheel you can go a surprisingly long time before you crash. This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point.
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Selectively ... Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
If we are to learn from the brutal Soviet sanctioned forced deportations of the Baltic nations following world war 2, then justice will come but it will take time.
Once the Baltic nations gained independence they tried everyone involved in the administration of those orders, which took place without trial or oversight and often resulted in the replacement families being deported if the actual tagets could not be found.
Ofc Stalin or any of the power brokers at the time were long dead, so instead it was a parade of lower level admin workers, all who were elderly in their 80s or 90s and who at that time were young, simply doing the bidding of their employers.
The lesson: don't be a bag holder for people who will die before you leaving you to hold the responsibility for their crimes.
it's been quite clear for about 50 years now
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It's pretty clear for decades. When exactly did some higher up in the US gov end up in jail for ordering eg. mass killings abroad, or colluding with others that engaged in mass crimes like initiating wars and conflicts.
US will not lock up a single asshole who helps kill thousands of people abroad (not even inconvenience them with a simple court appearance to have to justify themselves), but it sure can lock up thousands on flimsiest justifications like FTA in court because of whatever, or technical parole violations, or driving on suspended license, basically for failures to navigate bureaucracy while poor.
I'll believe in rule of law when at least shits who materially support mass killings of children will start getting locked up. But alas, no. No such thing.
Until then it's all just bullshit that normal people have to submit to, and ruling class gets to excuse itself from with endless lawyering, exceptions, and nonsense, while it's clear they're still just scum psychos doing scum psycho things.
Yeah, power to execute laws is given to the executive branch. Power of the executive is bestowed upon... one person.
From https://archive.is/E6zXj :
> But, as Chayes studied the graft of the Karzai government, she concluded that it was anything but benign. Many in the political élite were not merely stealing reconstruction money but expropriating farmland from other Afghans. Warlords could hoodwink U.S. special forces into dispatching their adversaries by feeding the Americans intelligence tips about supposed Taliban ties. Many of those who made money from the largesse of the international community enjoyed a sideline in the drug trade. Afghanistan is often described as a “failed state,” but, in light of the outright thievery on display, Chayes began to reassess the problem. This wasn’t a situation in which the Afghan government was earnestly trying, but failing, to serve its people. The government was actually succeeding, albeit at “another objective altogether”—the enrichment of its own members.
> Power of the executive is bestowed upon... one person
This is the unitary executive theory. It’s a novel Constitutional theory that even this SCOTUS seems reluctant to honestly embrace.
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> I'm reading this correctly, they're just straight up violating the law
HHS says “under the Immigration and Nationality Act, ‘any information in any records kept by any department or agency of the government as to the identity and location of aliens in the US shall be made available to’ immigration authorities.” If that’s true, they’re following the law.
Key part of what you wrote: "as to the identity and location of aliens" - so whatever claim they have to access health information applies to aliens. The big question is: are they harvesting citizens' health records illegally as part of this effort, and if so, when do those responsible see jail time?
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I'm open to either conclusion, but what law / right do you think is being violated?
As a general rule, the first amendment protects the right to say, e.g. "John Doe lives at 123 Main St." John may not like that people know that, but that doesn't generally limit other peoples' right to speak freely.
It's right there in the article, there are specific federal laws authorizing them to make specific information available - for example, they can make any record kept about the identity or location of aliens available. Right, that's a specific limitation on what they can share, even the HHS spokesperson made clear they don't share information on US citizens and permanent lawful residents. But then the article goes on to reveal that ICE has all the personal data of every person receiving Medicaid.
If the law says you can share aliens information, but not Americans information, and then you do share Americans information I think you're probably breaking the law, and at the very least there should be a process to find out what the basis is for you doing it. Normally these things would be decided by a court.
I thought undocumented migrants weren’t allowed to use Medicare or Medicaid. How is that data useful to track them down, then?
HHS is broader than CMMS. Someone who was formerly legal could now be illegal. But more prominently, Miller and Noem have focused on illegally deporting pending asylum cases to juice their numbers. Those folks may show up in HHS (and IRS) data.
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If you go to an emergency room at a hospital which accepts Medicare (so, essentially all of them), you will be screened, and if in danger, medically stabilized (modulo difficult pregnancies in some states with anti-abortion laws, unfortunately).
I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.
Great question. I thought that only citizens could access public healthcare benefits.
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"If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you're going to get a ticket". - Warren Buffet
'Show me the man, I’ll find you the crime'. - Lavrentiy Beria (Stalin secret police)
You are not reading this right.
> There is no data sharing agreement between CMS and DHS on “US citizens and lawful permanent residents,” they added.
Which doesn’t quite say those data weren’t shared.
> if there were any mechanism to investigate and prosecute it.
If only there was an independent Judikative or something idk...
Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans.
It's dehumanizing and it leads to a path where you can justify humiliating, torturing, and murdering other humans. Which is already happening with ICE.
> Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans
It’s the legally-correct term.
For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.
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Where did you read they're sharing everyone's information?
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.
> every bit of data collected through a google-analytic, doubleclick, etc. link can potentially be abused for this as well
I’m confused by this shoehorning.
This article is about actual, not potential, abuse. It involves healthcare data the government owns being used in a novel and disturbing way. The only nexus to the private sector is in Palantir, but they aren’t bringing the data, just some analytic tools.
You should still practice minimization of PII, also known as Data Minimization. Especially in the EU, where it's the law (GDPR).
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This. And when you start to think about how pervasive this is it's very likely that organizations like BCA and DHS are leveraging big tech with respect to location data of targets like students. I'm appalled at the lack of concern districts have levied against these organizations with respect to protecting their students. I wouldn't be surprised to see leaked memos between Palantir / Flock / Google / Microsoft / TikTok / Meta in the future.
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?
Are they effective? Do you have data on the number of people they've correctly identified vs false-positives. In fact, do you have any evidence they're even trying to limit false positives?
The reason they are able to very efficiently send a dozen ICE agents to a random persons home to hold them at gun point until they can prove their immigration status is because the goal is to send ICE agents around holding people at gun point and they're happy if they happen to also get it right sometimes.
If I understand correctly, you're saying that in a majority of cases (or something approaching that) the targets of these raids are not subject to lawful deportation?
I would be curious to have data / information showing that.
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Palantir's mission is to exactly solve the problem you're describing: break through data siloes to get better information. Core of the platform are data pipelines that can move data from any silo into the palantir data lake, where it can be analysed. Their forward engineering project approach probably enables them to bypass the organisational boundaries between departments. Their top-down selling approach ensures management assists bypassing organisational boundaries.
> break through data siloes to get better information
This is the pitch of every consulting company ever.
In this case, Palantir is doing VLOOKUP on healthcare records to get suspects’ addresses. They then put that in a standalone app because you can’t charge buttloads of money for a simple query.
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"structured data transfers" yeah I've done those, difference is it wasn't to build fascDB or extract public monies at grossly over-inflated rates
You do know that Palantir is now in the UK and getting access to data through the same "health" channels, don't you ? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56590249
UK government departments are slow and hostile to change, so I am skeptical that Palantir being parachuted in, would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it.
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It is easy to be "effective" when you get paid to circumvent any check and balances
From what I've read is that they are not a product company. But they rather have a zoo of solutions. And they are hired by governments desperate to improve their IT, probably after the n-th issue going public. I highly doubt this would be legal in many states but who will (and can) check this anyway?
Of course it's tempting to throw everything into one huge database. But Jesus, this is like interns writing the Software...
They almost exclusively hire fresh grads who need money more than ethics, and it shows in everything they do.
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who say they are effective? They just have contacts.
It's the privatization of what started as an intelligence program.
Recommended watching (The REAL Story Behind Palantir's Dystopian Pre-Crime Takeover (w/ Whitney Webb)):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3DFZFoJC5s
> How are Palantir so effective?
What are you using to conclude their effectiveness?
It appears Palantir “brings up a dossier on each person, and provides a ‘confidence score’ on the person’s current address” [1]. That’s like VLOOKUP.
On effectiveness, Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did with a tenth of the budget.
[1] https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
Whoa, that's the story! I don't see that referenced in the 404media story, do you have a link/summary for that?
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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).
* ?
> What is not clear to me from the article is what data they are getting from CMS
They’re literally just pulling up addresses (404 Media). Replace Palantir with McKinsey and making an app for VLOOKUP makes more sense.
I get that - the question is why CMS would have addresses for undocumented immigrants at all (assuming for the moment it is only undocumented that they are looking for). Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, so how and why would CMS have their names and addresses?
The older one gets, the more one agrees with rms.
Has he been markedly wrong about any of these positions that he's staked out over the years, from closed hardware to mobile security?
No, and you can tell how much this vexes particular individuals and institutions because the only kind of attack they can bring against him is character assassination, the tool of last resort.
Amazing the hoops that people will jump through to not enact strong employer penalties.
You would think that if you genuinely wanted to curb illegal immigration, then this would be the way to do it. People come here for money. Take away the money and they will no longer come.
Hell, you would probably have bipartisan support for nationwide crackdowns on employers who are employing anyone here illegally. They are undercutting American employees and dodging taxes. Who wouldn't be for that kind of law enforcement?
Instead we get unaccountable masked men with guns murdering citizens and terrorizing an entire populace. Imagine if an "ICE raid" meant a team of accountants showed up at a business and gave them a hefty fine for employing anyone here illegally. It seems like that would be much more effective, which makes me genuinely wonder if the demonstration of strength through cruelty that we currently have hasn't been the goal all along.
the "uniparty" benefits from illegal immigration so I guess that's why it's a nonstarter.
Many Americans benefit from illegal immigration, it would kill the middle class in many places if illegal immigrants just went away all of a sudden. States like Texas can hardly survive without it, basically all politicians know this.
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
Impeach. Remove.
Laws and protections do not just apply for citizens. They apply anyone in the United States.
They apply to people who are here illegally? Every county on earth has a border and doesn't allow people to cross unregulated.
> They apply to people who are here illegally?
Yes. That’s how we lawfully deport them. You can’t run out and start serial killing illegal immigrants and then claim you aren’t a murderer.
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.
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.
Even more reason to lie on the race box in medical records
They aren't targeting people for their race.
Isn't this the company that NVIDIA is proudly partnering with?
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.)
I have read the Obama era numbers are inflated because they counted turn aways at the border.
It’s also a little interesting that Obama was able to be against illegal immigration without a ton of pushback. Why was that?
> interesting that Obama was able to be against illegal immigration without a ton of pushback. Why was that?
He got tons of pushback from the left. He was just able to weather his party’s fringe in ways Republicans have not.
For the same reason Nixon was able to establish OSHA without a ton of pushback.
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Team sports basically. And when you point out double standards, you got slammed as some "both sides" guy from the other team pretending to be a centrist.
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Has anyone calculated a hazard score for apprehension for illegal immigrants with a violent criminal conviction? As in, with dragnet deportation, are the violent ones also being picked up? Or are they actually safer today than they were a few years ago given Noem and Miller are more interested in making TikTok videos than pursuing hard-to-get criminals?
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...
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.
Do you purchase unilever products? Nike shoes? Etc, etc, etc.
Not to be flippant, but morals are variable.
Two of my kids are into investing, and some of their choices are 'morally indefensible', to me.
We've had the discussions since they were old enough to be taught 'right' from wrong.
Their aims are to increase the money they have, not to make anyone feel better, or judge others' choices.
....OK who signed a data sharing agreement without having the thought "who am I sharing the data with" when they were at the doctors?
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.
Do you hear how this reads? It reads like you're not going to take warnings about the dangers of government power seriously because the people espousing them are trying to use government power dangerously themselves.
If you can't see the irony in that, that their warnings are twice as important if the pool of potential abusers if government power is twice as big, then nobody's really losing anything when you opt out of engaging these people.
> Anyone espousing these ideas will not be taken seriously by me going forward.
Just because they're hypocrites does not make them wrong. Remember it was the GOP that passed the PATRIOT Act, and people were warning about that from the very beginning.
Though they've been arguing in bad faith on any number of topics (and have been for decades):
* https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/03/arguing-with-z...
* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018
Bear in mind that corruption is politically agnostic. If there are no checks and balances, any government can be bought.
Yes but at least in places like Venezuela and Philippines it can be bought cheap enough the common man might be able to access it.
It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).
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The hypocrisy of the conservatives aside, the Democrats also end up doing nothing meaningful to thwart any of it when they are in power. The higher ranks of Democrats are almost as conservative as the Republicans. Palantir is not a post-2024 phenomenon. The data was always collected. They are just being brazen now.
Elon Musk did the biggest data heist of all times.
I’m not sure I’d even call it that.
It was obvious and happened in broad daylight in front of everyone. But much the ICE assaults, there isn’t much Americans can really do about it.
"We've tried nothing and are out of ideas."
Sounds like Americans are in general fine with all of it. Voting patterns hold. General sentiment still remains aligned with the status quo. There does not seem like there are any consequences for the representatives to not represent the people.
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Doesn’t appear to be related.
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/
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
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> Illegal immigrants must be deported.
There are literally 20x more illegal immigrants in Texas as compared to Minnesota:
* https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
* https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
There are 12x more in Florida:
* https://www.migrationpolicy.org/data/unauthorized-immigrant-...
If you want to go fishing, the Mojave Desert is not the place you should be going. If they want to go after illegal immigrants go to where they actually live and work.
* https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-unauthorized-immigra...
(Hint: this is not about illegal immigration.)
I live in Wyoming. ICE came through once, their helicopters woke up a bunch of folks’ pets, the governor told them to stop and they haven’t been back since. This is absolutely about establishing a corps of brown shirts. Not deporting illegal immigrants.
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How many rights are you personally willing to give up so that people can be deported?
People have been deported as long as I've been alive.
I haven't lost any of my rights yet. Certainly not in the past month. All the mechanisms to deport people were already there.
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nice throwaway account, coward.
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Straw man.
Trump is deporting fewer people than Obama did, and Obama wasn’t blowing Saudi Arabia’s military budget every year on his numbers.
> If you can't accept this fact, You have the problem.
Maybe learn grammar before giving grand politic lessons.
If that is all you can bring forth, you loose. "I call you stupid if you dont agree with me" is such a cheap shot, doesn't deserve any sympathy.
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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
It’s not just a simple case it’s an extremely contentious issue the country is deeply divided on based on location and political leanings.
> since it's clear as day most people want them in?
Not sure how you concluded this. Particularly for unskilled labour.
It’s an easy conclusion to come to if your only view of the US comes from moderated online spaces and the news media.
Well if ICE deports illegal immigrants, and you're anti-ICE, then you do want those illegal immigrants? Or how is this supposed to work?
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Shameful
Any use or benefit obtained via the state apparatus should be viewed from the lens it will be wielded by the most bad faith, hostile actor possible as leverage against you.
> Any use or benefit obtained via the state apparatus should be viewed from the lens it will be wielded
This is nonsense. Given the same tendency is shared by large private organisations, this is throwing one’s hands up with extra steps.
Regulations and laws work. The fact that a section of the INA seems to compel pretty ridiculous amounts of inter-departmental data sharing is the issue.
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.
> it's still a good heuristic when it comes to giving your PII to the government
The heuristic is to not participate in modern medicine?
Sometimes you have to give it up, sometimes not, which is why it's a heuristic and not a firm rule.
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What is the heuristic though? Not giving "normal data" still makes you an outlier, yes, probably they are not very smart, but at some point someone will say "let's round up people that gave us too few data, they are suspicious".
I bet that if all conspiracy theorists will be more worried that their neighbors become crazy and would try to do something positive about it (talk to them, befriend them, influence them, etc.) the outcome might be better for everybody.