Comment by tomaytotomato
6 hours ago
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.
I'm saying we have absolutely no concrete statistical data, and in the press we have many cases where law enforcement has been deliberately negligent in order to deport people who were here legally. We can actually see them deliberately trying to avoid doing the things you would do if you wanted to establish the people you were trying to deport were here illegally. So it's fair to say, until we have some evidence that these people were here illegally the sensible thing to do is to assume they are innocent.
It's also kind of a problem to say "Oh well, we've got no concrete data, let's continue to let them deport whoever they like and shoot anyone who gets in the way".
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.
Something I see often in technical circles (and I'm not accusing you) is the manufacturing of consent for ghoulish behaviour by describing it in a reductive way. I think there's a bias to consider sophisticated violations of civil rights as more nefarious than mundane ones.
"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.
> would produce anything more than a CSV file with a few hundred rows in it
The U.S. government almost certainly has intimate health data on every Briton as a result of these deals.
Palantir holds over £1B in contracts with the UK government, some of them of an undisclosed nature. Must be some impressive CSV.
They've been in there for some time. Just ask Wes Streeting.
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.
Exactly like any other big tech (Google, Microsoft, etc) or consulting (McKinsey, Deloitte, etc) company!
There really isn't anything special about Palantir the company. They have disrupted consulting on marketing alone (all this forward-deployed stuff is more fluff than anything) which is not unheard of, and continue to receive all this bad press due to their clientele and the kind of data they're processing. Government departments, military. They are happy to take credit for all the "conniving" allegations because it makes them look like they have a plan, and anybody with purchasing power involving with them knows it corresponds very little to the company operationally, i.e. what the company does.
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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?
Added.