Until that moment, the general sentiment about the government and the internet is that they are too incompetent to do anything about it, companies like Microsoft/Apple/Google/Snapchat are actually secure so lax data/opsec is okay, etc.

Meanwhile, the whole time, communications and tech companies were working hand in hand with the government siphoning up any and all data they could to successfully implement their LifeLog[1] pipe dream.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_LifeLog

> Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.

pretty much everything Snowden released had been documented (with NSA / CIA approval) in the early 80s in James Bamford's book The Puzzle Palace.

the irony of snowden is that the audience ten years ago mostly had not read the book, so echo chambers of shock form about what was re-confirming decades old capabilities, being misused at the time however.

Considering the US military has historically had capabilities a decade ahead of what people publicly knew about, anyone who said it just wasn't possible probably wasn't a serious professional.

Which claims? HN around that time was taking anything and everything and declaring it conclusively proved everything else.

I honestly have no god damn clue what was actually revealed by the Snowden documents - people just say "they revealed things".

The NSA tried to do this during the Snowden leaks!

There were stories like "look at how we stopped this thing using all this data we've been scooping up"... but often the details lead to somewhat underwhelming realities, to say the least.

It might be that this stuff is very useful, but only in very illegal ways.

In addition to terrorist stuff, they are probably passing of bunch of stuff to the military or defense industry to do things like fine tune their radar to cutting edge military secrets.

They can do parallel construction or use "undercover" informants etc.

Cops use those systems to make easy arrests for things like active warrants, stolen vehicles and they feed into systems that keep track of where licensed vehicles are and when.

In a way that's worse, because the systems aren't looking up your car or to target your vehicle for fines, but to look up and target you for arrest.

Same systems can be used to identify, track and arrest undesirables.

The algorithm was sorting punch cards and then putting the cards in different stacks on a table.

We can only hope that the surveillance state is still working with the same algorithm…

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I've generally held this position, but assume a sufficient combination of models could do a lot more than was possible before.

Do you mean false positives? A false negative would be "we checked to see whether Alice was in the country illegally, and the computer said no but the actual answer turned out to be yes".

But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.

That's exactly what I'm saying though. I agree that their intent is manufacturing fear and uncertainty.

What I'm saying is that congress and the public should be holding them to their word and asking where all this Palantir money is going if the stated intent of "targeted operations/individuals" is completely misaligned with operational reality.

They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.

They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.

The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.

The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/

I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)

The evidence goes strongly against your claims.

[Citation needed.]

Which is not much different than how the January 6th people were caught.

As ever xkcd holds true - https://xkcd.com/538/

How exactly am I part of the problem? I vote in every election I'm allowed to vote in, I didn't vote for Trump, I donate to political organizations that support causes I believe in. Because I don't go outside and hold a sign that no one is going to read I'm enabling this? Get off your high horse.

My wife is a Mexican immigrant. She's a citizen now, but that doesn't appear to be something that matters to this organization. There is no way in hell I am going to put her in jeopardy just to go protest.

So are you saying that the first amendment should protect government insiders leaking personal employee info to the public for the purposes of endangering those government employees, and to cause harm to their families? based on subjective opinions on whether the people think the actions of said employees are just or unjust?

That's wild if so. That's quite the precedent to set.

Note: I don't support ice or their actions. nor do i support vigilante justice.

Can't argue with their 110% conviction rate, North Korean tactics work.

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4th amendment???! Osama killed that decades ago… they may as well take it off the books… Once we were OK having our junks touched to go from here to there the 4A effectively ceased to exist.

You only have rights you exercise. Don't let the cops trample on your rights. Though... this does seem to work better for white, rich, older dudes than for other people.

s/searching for/manufacturing

Remember, they're accusing the people they killed of heinous motives for their narrative. They can't find it, so they make it up. Keep filming, y'all.

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the fine nation of law enforcement, which has only colonised the united states for its own good and to bring civilisation to the heathen masses

you're aware that LEO are citizens right? with rights as well?

... that is correct.

Of course, if you're taking up arms to resist/overthrow a government, then you should be entirely anticipating that the government will shoot back. Or shoot first.

If protest is approaching/crossing the line into insurgency, people need to seriously consider that they may be putting their life on the line. It's not a game.

In which case it's no longer relevant because nobody is going to overthrow a government that has nukes, tanks, drones, and chemical weapons using a hunting rifle or a handgun. The idea was cute enough back when the firepower the government had to use against the people was limited to muskets and cannons, but currently the idea of guns being used to overthrow a government with a military like the US is a complete joke.

Today you'll still find a bunch of 2nd amendment supporters insisting against common sense regulations because they need their guns to stop government oppression and tyranny yet you can open youtube right now and find countless examples of government oppression and tyranny and to no surprise those guys aren't using their guns to do a damn thing about any of it. In fact they're usually the ones making excuses for the government and their abuses.

There are reasonable arguments for supporting 2nd amendment and gun ownership but resisting/overthrowing the government is not one of them. That's nothing more than a comforting power fantasy.

The text of the second amendment, as written, would seem to indicate that the premise of the second amendment is to arm "a well-regulated militia" (which was relevant to the government that adopted the second amendment, as it had no standing army).

It was basically crowdsourcing the military. We've been running through all the various problems with that idea ever since, including:

- oops, turns out not enough people volunteer and our whole army got nearly wiped out; maybe we need to pay people to be an army for a living (ca. 1791)

- oops, turns out allowing the public to arm themselves and be their own militia can lead people being their own separate militia factions against the government, I guess we don't want that (e.g. Shay's Rebellion, John Brown and various slave rebellions fighting for freedom)

- oops, turns out part of the army can just decide they're a whole new country's army now, guess we don't want that (the civil war)

- oops, turns out actually everyone having guns means any given individual can just shoot whomever they like (like in hundreds of school shootings and mass shootings)

- oops, turns out we gotta give our police force even bigger guns and tanks and stuff so they won't be scared of random normal people on the street having guns (and look where that's gotten us)

Honestly, the whole thing should've been heavily amended to something more sane back in 1791 when the Legion of the United States (the first standing army) was formed, as they were already punting on the mistaken notion that "a well-regulated militia" was the answer instead of "a professional standing army".

No it isn't -- that's an ignorant myth. Madison was the last person in the world who would have endorsed overthrowing his new government ... the Constitution is quite explicit that that is treason and the penalty is death. The first use of the 2A was Washington putting down the Whiskeytown Rebellion.

[citation needed]

No, it's citizens being armed to steal native land and kill the natives.

Postgres can aggregate many data sources of private data. So can SAP. So what is it about their tech that you think makes it different? SAP is a good comparison.

cell phone cameras work both ways.