This is my understanding of Palantir too: it's a consultancy with a map, a graph database, and some "AI" nonsense. They sell expensive "forward deployed engineers" (aka, consultants) to customize this map and graph database to specific use cases.

I'm not trying to argue Palantir is an ethical company; my views on "company ethics" are nuanced but I wouldn't put them anywhere near my "places I want to work" bucket. But (contrary, perhaps, to their name), they're not some weird deep demonic trove of personal information; that's supplied to them by their customers, which is where change needs to happen.

The fact that there is a demand for fake evil, functioning like fake piety did in the 1600s, is a flaw of difficult-to-encompass proportion. Our culture is totally bankrupt if companies are now pretending to be worse than they're in reality able to be.

Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.

I do not agree at all. The problem is both Palantir AND their customers. You have a choise not to make the tools and you have a chiose not to use the tools.

Governments using Palantir services as a loophole to enable mass surveillance by linking data is the evil part.

> 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 ... focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.

That's how Karp seems to justify these things. Palantir's job is to (in theory) make government better at doing government things. It's up to voters to keep the government in line.

>because the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.

it's not just that. Alexandr Wang from Scale AI once said in a talk that they had to compete against Palantir for a gov contract. Palantir's salesmen have a high closing rate because they sell the software as if it were written by God itself. It's one hell of a sales strategy

You’re missing the point. The villainy and noise is the superpower of the company.

Operating Palantir in the way ICE is illegal, full stop. Just the IRS integration alone makes most users in a position where they are committing felonies.

Basically, there is little difference between what they do and what Enron did. It’s all based on criminality, and instead of strippers and cocaine, they signal with weird faux Orthodox Christianity and crazy behavior. The “orthodox” selection is deliberate as it feels exotic but is not catholic, so the modern evangelical types somehow are ok with it.

the commercial company I worked at had a contract with Palantir - https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220817005178/en/Bet... .

From what I understood they were to read our data and provide some kind of insights. I don't think any of this happened, at least while I was there.

They talk about government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) - it's most likely the reason the company got into this contract, so Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac get some kind of data that they need in their systems.

"Banality of evil." This does seem to be obliquely whitewash the company as it's adjacent to so much of tech. I don't think this exempts them from the hostile intent of their work.

I think its kind of a conspiracy/"Open Secret" that Palantir was funded by the government to side skirt any "Government cannot...." rules. It's not the government breaking privacy regulations, its a private company doing it....just under contract of the government.

Thats the rhetoric on good ole r/WallSteetBets, atleast. Theil and Karp definitely play into this angle as well, but that doesn't really prove anything other than they're hungry for investors

There’s a lot of weird hype around Palantir, and I suspect bots that are propping them up in social media. For example look at how many meaningless comments on Twitter/X or YouTube videos mention Palantir’s “ontology”, whatever that means. Many of these comments literally will just say the word “Ontology” and nothing else, as if it is some mysterious superpower that Palantir has discovered. I suspect it is, as you said, just basic software but from a company that has no moral limits to what their software does.

Palantir also supports folks like CDC's DCIPHER

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cdc-and-palantir-pa...

When it's a government system, your issue is not really with the vendor, your issue is with the policymakers.

Palantir reminds me of IBM 85 years ago, only following requirements and requests from the government, never an accomplice. Extracting shareholder value from human suffering should not be criticised because the effect is one step removed from the engineering and company leadership. Why do the ethical thing when instead you can become rich?

> 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.

Had other policies decisions not led about 12 to 20 million illegals in the US in the first place, there'd be less need for ICE. The complete open borders policies signed by Biden's autopen and the millions who came during these four years comes to mind.

I'll also remind everyone that it's estimated that under Obama 3.1 million illegals were deported.

The question is simple: is the US open to anyone without needing a visa?

And if it's not: how do you deal with tens of millions of illegals?

(I'm not saying Palantir ain't evil: I'm saying ICE does its job)

Yeah, this is no different from IBM setting up punch card tabulating machines to help Nazi Germany track its victims.

In another comment, I referenced Eichmann. A train is not a good thing or a bad thing. A rail car is not a good thing or a bad thing. Having an app that aggregates multiple different data sources and puts them together is not a good thing or a bad thing. It's the morality behind the hands into which we put that tools that matters. The more capable the tool, the more good or evil you can do with it. Maybe we should ask ourselves if this kind of a tool should exist at all, or there should be some level of process before it can be used. But the engineer at Palantir is just as guilty or not guilty in your eyes as the engineer fixing the trains or laying new track.

Why shouldn't I do quite the opposite? I don't want people with a questionable morale who knowingly built those systems work in my company

You could focus on having positive projects for the society, and a good reputation. That works.

I don’t think I ever seen a CV from an ex Pal*ntir employee though. Perhaps they are automatically filtered or working for good morals doesn’t attract them.

It is a de-facto corporate state right now. Everyone in the current government tries to see how much money they can steal.

    I'm so free, I'm so free

    I'm so free, I'm so free

    Feel so good, now, I'm so free

    Oh oh oh, I'm so free

Unfortunately while proselytizing about nuance, the side with the power and the guns is working overtime to make it so there is only one valid set of beliefs, and those beliefs are “American”. This is no longer a symmetric conflict of ideologies, I’m not sure what it’s going to take for people to realize this. A tidal wave of blue in the midterms I think is the only hope a lot of us have left. Maybe if that doesn’t come to fruition, either legitimately or illegitimately, despondent Russian literature will start to resonate much more strongly for us.

> 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.

Yes, that it is a set of things that it is possible one could believe.

That is not an argument for it being a set of things that one ought to believe, as opposed to that ICE has a legal mandate that it isn't actually pursuing, and the mandate which it is pursuing is both intentionally murky, unethical to the extent that evidence suggests what it is, and also pursued by methods that are illegal and inhumane even irrespective of the bad ends that they are directed at.

> 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.

Again, that it is certainly a set of things it is possible to believe, but it seems pretty silly to believe. A queue is at best an undesirable consequences of particular choices about how to manage concerns about quantitative levels of immigration and particular impacts those levels might have, not an ideal to be pursued.

> Nuance is possible.

“X is possible” is not an argument is that X is, factually or morally as appropriate to the shape of the proposition at issue, justified. And an extended argument that sets of beliefs are possible is something people only engage in when they recognize that they are unable to make the case that they are justified, but nevertheless want to suggest that people are bad for failing to adopt them.

> believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.

Honestly, There is no queue for poor people, this is their only way, most of these people aren't even eligible for farm worker temp visa. US has created bureaucracy over the years in such a way that these people can never become legal. They are not skipping the line and taking some tech worker's spot or anything.

The core issue is not that people cannot think with nuance, but that nuance is costly and poorly rewarded.

I blame infiltration by bots slowly shifting the Overton window. Did this site not get "weird" in the last few years?

Not to think to highly of ourselves, I for one am a genuine idiot, but the crowed here likely has more influence than a lot of other online forums. Making it a worthwhile target, especially on the AI front. Plus the site is an easy to integrate into a bots with the minimal website and all.

> particularly on a forum like HN, ostensibly populated by smart people.

Even smart people are capable of hate.

nuance exists plenty it just doesnt float to the top.

by definition, groupthink will get more upvotes than mishmashthink.

> It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate

... "We" (a lot of people, not everyone who posts here) don't believe that. Lots of people disagree with immigration control as a concept period.

The existence of that app is an abomination; the fact tax payer money is being allocated to it is tragicomic. Not spending it and just giving it as tax returns to the population would be so much better than kidnapping people over being born in the wrong place.

Yes, in the sense it's possible to believe the same things about the NSDAP. However, one who believes such things is simply wrong.

Yes yes, shoot mothers in the face in her car.

Grab human beings from their homes and detain them thousands of miles away with no due process.

Send human beings to detention camps in another country NOT the one they are from

Please, people, have some decency and maintain the nuance. We're not barbarians here! Sheesh.

Because the use of ICE and its actions has become so extreme that it can’t be simply “moderated”. The Trump Admin is pushing it to extreme action. So unless that is removed the only possible response is a strong reaction. ICE gutted its own nuance.

Sophisticated and nuanced opinions are an embellishment . A badge worn at cocktail parties .

Cleaning up a mess is 1000x messier than making it .

No one will ever care or remember your sophisticated opinion.

That’s why it may be possible to have nuance but it’s just a peacocks feather

If the government can track illegals who haven't interacted with government for 40 years and track them down to their house, you can imagine how fast they can track a tax paying citizen.

if you go by “morals” every FAANG employee (current and previous) would need to go plumbing school

They put together a dashboard that presents probabilistic information. We already know from several facial recognition cases that some police have a hard time differentiating known facts from probabilistic guesses. We also know that many agents of the agency using this dashboard have relatively little training, and have demonstrated very loose understanding for of fundamental rights (47 days for new recruits currently).

I would be willing to lay a bet worth a significant portion of my net worth that this dashboard will end up being involved in multiple wrongful arrests of innocent people.

Anyone working on these products should ask themselves if they believe in what they build or if they are “just doing what they are told”. If the latter, consider the cohort of people who have previously used that justification.

Sure, they build innocent dashboards in the same way that your name is an innocent Dutch word. Obvious bad faith arguments coming from a troll.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang

This, along with the AI slop and agentic nonsense gutting real work, is exactly why I pivoted my career. The industry feels like it's being driven by chest-thumping, siege-heiling authoritarian inbreds at the top, propped up by tepid company-man shills who clap along and call it innovation while the place rots from the inside. my feed on LinkedIn gives me hives. I've since cancelled my account as well. good riddance. tech is dead and I hope the public doesn't have to yet again bailout some late-stage capitalist bullshit when yet another bubble bursts. /rant

Doesn't your indiscriminate label preclude the involvement of tools like Palantir? Unless you want us to believe that the tooling is worthless. But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.

Let's say a third party was elected and started implementing certain policies. What would they have to do for you to call them fascist? Fascism is an actual thing, after all, so there must be some line that would separate fascism from not-fascism.

That's not what's happening. There wouldn't be the backlash if they were primarily deporting "the worst of the worst", as they promised, using due process. Instead they're targeting everyone, including people here legally and in many cases U.S. citizens, without due process, in the cruelest and most over-the-top way possible.

I have a friend whose parents were just (incorrectly) detained by ICE, and had to pay a $3000 administrative fee to be released.

That _is_ the extremism. It's here.

> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi

It's not just that idea though. Plenty of presidents have done that without pushback. It's that idea combined with:

* Rhetoric dehumanizing the immigrants

* Raiding churches, courts, jobs, etc

* Revoking legal status of immigrants

* Reducing training time for new hires

* Detaining U.S. citizens and threatening them

* Saying it'll help the U.S. citizens, when data shows it doesn't

Even trying to follow the existing law is punishable by exile without trial. You can go to all your legally appointed court dates, follow every rule in the book, and get snatched and deported from the courtroom the next minute.

> the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi

Because that idea consists of harming someone over their birth circumstances, rather than any objective harm they may have done.

My great-grand parents woke one day with status of illegals. Shortly after that they have been included in mass deportations to Poland.

Some people have asked how something like that could happened. Thanks for your comment. Now I can sand them this link as an answer.

People have been deported for decades but the manner in which deportations occur is important. There’s a world of difference between law enforcement and these brownshirts.

1) You don't deport them, you don't ignore them, you document them. Then you let them live their lives. They're people, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.

2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.

You're assuming deportations work, but the evidence doesn't suggest that. Huge numbers of deportations have happened, with some people deported multiple times. Do you feel the problem is solved?

Ultimately, you have to fix the incentives. Fine the people hiring them, making it uneconomical, and you will remove the main incentive for people to enter the US illegally.

Our politicians have simply seemed fairly uninterested in holding business owners accountable.

Since you're only getting blowback, I think taking tough action on immigration was a long time coming. I don't agree with the violent tactics, but exactly those people who couldn't settle on some sensible solution are the ones that fostered the current situation where the (anti-)immigration pendulum swings back hard.

>How do you deport with millions of illegal immigrants?

Make E-verify the federal minimum standard for ALL employers nationwide.

Fine the shit out of all businesses that don't comply. Fine the shit out of employers that hire illegal labor. We know who they are.

You don't deport them, you give them no reason to stay here because there'd be no work for them.

Number of immigrants has been slowly increasing or steady for decades. It's a fantasy that it's a crisis or that there is a risk of tens of millions flooding our shores. We mostly drastically benefit from products downstream from cheap labor while tacitly allowing those who don't get in trouble so we can continue to benefit from this.

We could have "solved" immigration decades ago with enough punative treatment of employers but didn't want to.

If you want to actually stop it you could just ramp up punative treatment of employers over the next 5 years while keeping other policies at Obama or Bush era.

Half the undocumented without us family members would self deport gradually whilst jobs dried up. Offer amnesty to productive people with family roots and no criminal record and you end up with a microscopic undocumented pop.

Meanwhile DSHS is tweeting a pic of an island paradise with the caption America after 100M deportations. There are around 12M undocumented but about 100M non-whites if you have trouble interpreting their meaning or intention.

1. You don't deport millions of undocumented people, you find a way integrate those who are willing to work (most of them) into your society.

2. Obama and Biden didn't get the same level of attention because they weren't being publicly antagonistic and racist, or using deliberately cruel tactics to accomplish their goals. Or breaking the law / violating the constitution to meet their ends.

They didn't attract the same publicity because

* They didn't jack up the budget to a size larger than most countries' militaries

* They didn't target primarily Republican cities and states out of vengeance for how those cities and states voted

* They didn't explicitly target people here legally

* They didn't send bands of masked men house to house to kick in doors without warrants

* They didn't implement Kavanaugh Stops, which makes racial profiling legal

* They didn't implement a "Papers, please" policy

* They didn't crow about their cruelty on social media or make funny memes about immigrant families being destroyed

* They didn't broadcast that agents had "absolute immunity" even if their agents killed people

* They didn't use fascist iconography and phrasing in their press releases and design systems

* They didn't create a situation in which businesses and schools had to shut down because their employees and students were afraid to leave their houses because even though they were U.S. citizens, they had darker colored skin or spoke with an accent

* They didn't try to end birthright citizenship

I mean the list goes on and on. It's not the same at all. That's why they didn't attract the same publicity.

How about we treat people humanely? How about we focus on the criminals and dangerous people first instead of getting people that have pending citizenship appointments. How about we don't grab people from hospitals, schools, and places of worship? How about we try to get citizenship easier access for these folks who are clearly living and contributing successfully to our society? How about we don't have masked thugs grabbing anyone of color off the street?

Its extremely easy to do better than they are. Biden and Obama did in fact do this and successfully. They are not trying to do it well, they are trying to do it cruelly. The cruelty is the point.