Comment by fodmap
4 days ago
I do agree blocking Palantir is a good move but the Spanish government is doing it for the wrong reason. Spain is storing all sort of data on Chinese servers, including their Intelligence, and Judicial wiretaps.
https://www.politico.eu/article/spain-huawei-contract-judici...
That is rather disturbing but this had me lol:
> Spain is “making a big mistake,” said Bart Groothuis [...] “Spain is now dependent on the country with the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program directed against us.”
I highly doubt he's naive enough to believe the "against us" qualifier exempts the operator of the largest and most sophisticated offensive espionage program ever.
espionage is a lot less bad than conquering by force.
the US properly fucked up by very publicly declaring intent to conquer greenland and canada
Right now you either give it to China or to the US.
China is not publicly threatening to invade the EU.
I think the EU needs to produce this themselves but right now they don’t and they don’t have any large, trustworthy allies.
so.. hand over your data to china to spite orange man. yes excellent move.
It’s not spite it’s just logical - US/Israel are a known bad actor.
China is also probably bad, but currently there’s no evidence they’re as bad as US/Israel
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You are literally wrong, the data is stored in Spain on their servers and managed by their government. The risk as stated by EU and US is allowing Chineese nationals to *enter* the data storage facilities (direct quote from the article you shared).
Yes, it's still bad but they are not as stupid to just have their servers located in China for this.
The Spanish public overwhelmingly trusts China over the US, so from their perspective, this is not necessarily a bad move.
Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.
It makes no sense at all to trust either.
>Obviously, the best move would be to keep the data in Europe instead.
While 80% of Europe is subservient to the US?
Or just keep it in Spain? It's not exactly a developing nation. Can they simply not build a server and find people willing to take care of it?
Ghana can host their own IT infra. Why not Spain?
As opposed to what? American servers with Isreali backdoors?
How about Spanish servers?
I will never understand this helplessness that comes from these European countries. They are choosing to be dependent on foreign powers.
It's expensive to home-grow your own solutions and if you try transitioning too many services at once the cost will be outrageous and you'll probably open other security holes. I am glad Spain is taking this step and I hope they continue this trend - but outright refusing to use any software built abroad requires a massive investment in domestic tech. That investment would likely pay economic dividends but it is a cost that needs to be measured against other investments Spain needs to make and in Spain's case resilience against global warming is especially important.
You know, we all thought you were allies. But you tricked us well.
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They deliver part of hardware but the data itself is hosted in Spain and operated by the interior ministry.
still not the worst of reasons.
would be better to be on spanish servers, but decoupling from american tech remains a public good, especially if using american tech bans american competitors
If the data is encrypted before the upload I see no problem
Huawei is the complete data custodian. They are the ones doing the encrypting.
Maybe Spain has people on the inside (of Huawei.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvest_now,_decrypt_later
Can’t form a COMINTERN if the US is watching.
So? And other countries are storing their data in the US, not covered by gdpr
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did you hit up wikipedia? the controversies section would be a start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir#Controversies
This section is hilariously hostile towards Palantir.
"Wired wrote that some people think Palantir "maintains a giant, centralized database of information collected from all of its clients", which is untrue."
'some people' is a classic weasel word[0] used to prop up the writer's opinion. This sentence is even funnier because it initially appears to state that Palantir has a centralized DB of clients data, only to finish with "...which is untrue." If the claim is untrue, why lead the section paragraph with it unless you're intending to smear or mislead? If I were to end sentences with "...which is untrue" I could write any number of things on Wikipedia.
It's as though I wrote "A YN user wrote that 'john_strinlai works for the CCP and uses ChatGPT to write all his posts', which is untrue."
I'll keep reading but rhetorical chicanery like this colours my interpretation of the article in general.
EDIT the section goes on: "[We can't pin anything specific on Palantir here]; still it is generally accepted that abuses by governments and data management failures can happen." What does that have to do with Palantir? "data management failures can happen" why is this in the section on "Palantir:Controversy"? This article is not good.
EDIT 2: This section is just comedy gold... 'Palantir "remains open to the critique of potentially being an accessory to acts of deportation, imprisonment, and racism through its contracts".' Open to critiques of potentially being an accessory to "racism?" What is this, the Future Crimes unit from Minority Report? This "future crimes" accusation is especially ironic in relation to the critiques of Palantir itself!
So I haven't read this whole section (it's quite long) but if this is the nature of the "smoking guns" I don't think much of it. Potentially maybe doing something according to 'some people...' this shouldn't hold water for any rational person.
If someone objects to Palantir for working with ICE I understand that, and if that's the nature of Spain's objections they should just say so.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_word
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Well the CEO doing a public speaking tour where he sounds like a complete lunatic probably isn't helping...https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gjkj7975po
I think in general people are a bit distrusting of a tech firm headed by billionaires with deep political ties that sells AI driven surveillance state technology to governments
Whom should we buy surveillance software from then? Vegan art society?
It's like saying we shouldn't buy guns from gun makers and tickle our enemies with rose petals instead.
Feels like Kremlin bots are having a field day here.
> I can't figure out what the specific objection to Palantir is.
You have to be trolling, a single online search tells you how the company CEO is the textbook definition of technofascism. Take a look at his manifesto if you don’t know
So the objections to Palantir are political? I know nothing about Spanish politics so I assume that makes sense in the Spanish political context. This helps explain why I can't find a specific concrete concern, it sounds more vibes-based. Thank you!
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What is this in reference to? Karp has said that US tech companies should be more willing to work with military and intelligence agencies. By that standard, though, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Booz Allen Hamilton, heck even Microsoft are all supporters of "technofascism".
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That's ridiculous. All he espouses is that all of this stuff is going to happen and so you might was well do it right (with Palantir).
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