alt Hacker News‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid
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When I was 19, an ex-student of my Alma Mater came to give a talk about TDD. While I found the lecture interesting, I vividly remember that a portion of our community rallied against him, attempting to boycott his presence because he worked for Palantir.
At the time, I remember thinking how extreme that seemed, and how I was "sure" nothing is black-and-white and that, certainly, while Palantir had shady connections, for sure it must bring some good to the world and, so, why boycott this poor man? It felt genuinely baffling to me.
While in many ways I consider myself a more balanced person today (precisely thinking less in black-and-white terms), this is a topic where I do not agree. I would not work for Palantir and, were I to travel back in time, I would join the boycott. Heck, given how I was when I was younger, I'd expand on it greatly and try to rally some form of physical protest.
A friend of mine once threw me the argument of "well, the enemy [presumably China] is doing this kind of stuff, so we have to do it, too". This may seem like a compelling argument at first — and it may be so for many — but it can't, to me. It's ethically disgusting. The solution to world with decaying ethics is not to continue contributing to its decay. It erases accountability, it normalizes atrocity, it strips humanity from our very own flesh and blood — it escalates conflict! It. Just. Can't. be.
We must fight this filth.
Why have we all lost the ability to think in a nuanced way? It’s very disturbing to witness, particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people.
It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.
It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.
Etcetera, etcetera.
You don’t HAVE to dedicate yourself to a fully polarized set of beliefs. Nuance is possible. What the hell is causing us to lose our minds like this? Is it really just social media? So frustrating to witness.
To tech leaders and hiring managers at other companies: If you're reading this, please consider publicly stating that your company will interview Palantir engineers who want to exit on moral grounds. Create an explicit off-ramp. Lower the barrier to leaving. Make it a tech industry norm that we offer refuge to engineers trying to do the right thing.
Since it's inception, Palantir has extracted roughly 10 billion usd taxpayer money from the US government. God bless America.
Palantir damage control got to this thread faster than the last one.
Can people bring higher effort posts to this discussion so that this thread doesn't get pulled like the others?
Is there a specific product line that this app is using? What FOIA laws are applicable to its use? What kind of data does this provide? something else?
Only an idiot will think all of this is about "illegals"; this is a whole infrastructure of mass surveillance and "rogue" police. They might be after specific targets now, but once it's fully normalized, you are next. From data collection and aggregation, the invasive surveillance like Flock and Ring, the use of AI and apps, it's being carefully planned and rolled out for such a mission. There should be a platform to track the people who worked on building these technologies and apps. I would never trust or hire someone who has no morals and worked and spent hours making ELITE app or Flock Android systems or similar; these people are the enablers for such surveillance and should be held accountable.
Original 404media article:
https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
Ah yes, beta-tested on Palestinians, how generous of them to ship the polished version to everyone else.
OK, so they've put together a dashboard. I don't like what's happening but this isn't some fearsome tech they're doing.
“Tracking Apps for Thee, but Not for Me”
Much better link with some excellent (and some not so great) discussion already: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46633378
> The Nazis could only dream of having such a capability.
> Imagine working for this company, on this product. Every day, you go into work, in what I assume is a beautiful office with pine furniture and a well-stocked kitchen, and you build software that will help to deport people using what you know are extrajudicial means without due process. You probably have OKRs. There are customer calls with ICE. Every two-week sprint, you take on tasks that help make this engine better.
Ah yes, Schrodinger's Nazi. Simultaneously a fascist paramilitary organization, but also capable of being pushed back by policy and protest.
"Everything I don't like is Nazi" is the lefty playbook and like every other word it's completely lost it's meaning at this point.
These raids are the indiscriminate door to door raids right? There are lots of disturbing reports from these. For example ICE agents showing up at a white family’s door to ask which houses have Asian people living in them. The raids are blatantly unconstitutional (fourth amendment) but also, regardless of laws, they are well beyond the pale in terms of morality. It’s crazy that tech companies are willfully participating in this. Palantir must be treated as a criminal enterprise by the next non-GOP administration, and there should be consequences for everyone there. As someone else said, you don’t get to just say "I was only in charge of transport".
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I have no strong feelings towards palantir. But the ones I do have are mostly negative.
However it seems crazy to me that even the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi. This just feeds extremism because it is extremism in and of itself
Of course it's Palantir.
Sounds like Palantir built a useful piece of software, nice job
The question you have to ask yourself, us this: How do you deport with millions of illegal immigrants? Propose a better system, considering the realities on the ground.
And, no, ignoring their existence is not an option, unless you want "millions" to become "tens of millions" or even more. Note also that mass deportations also happened under Biden and Obama - they just didn't attract the same publicity.
I told somebody that Palantir is building the maid services and rat poison for a post-lower/middle class society. They didn’t believe me. Seeing this is vindicating.
I’ve never worked at Palantir, but once you get past the noisy leadership’s villain virtue signaling, every report I’ve read about the platform itself gives me strong “typical enterprise vendor” vibes. A lackluster software offering that is overhyped to institutional purchasers, then shoved down frontline employees’ throats because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.