> then governments use this data, but can wash their hands of it saying "we didn't collect it"

These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms.

This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it.

So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.

Yes, retroactively manufactured cause for a warrant to find only the information you want.

Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it.

It has happened before and it will happen again.

The ironic thing is that palantir has been operationalizating data gathered by the NSA and reselling as "ai targeting" to another country's military. But yes usually the loophole goes the other way.

Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.

"Allow us to use your data to improve our service." ...by selling your data to improve our service's profitability.

...plus Trump is now threatening the EU with tarrifs unless they water down their data protection rules.

> The article says the data was 'surveilled' by Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and HHS in the performance of Medicare/Medicaid claims

Does this imply that undocumented aliens subject to deportation have been making claims on Medicare/Medicaid monies?

> Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public

Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.

Dear God, he likened it to Nazi Germany... I've never seen this before... my hands are smacking together right now.

> People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews

What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?

> Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way

Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe...

I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.

Mostly agree, but I think people didn't put up resistance (at least partly) because a certain amount of wealth is needed to life freely.

If you worry about paying rent or buying food you likely don't care if some abstract entity knows to what kind of videos you jerk off.

> I was predicting all this

You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address.

> This is a devil's bargain

Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?

I really haven't found this to be true at all; corporations are just as dysfunctional or worse.

It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.

The private sector is only "more competent" at a certain size. Google, Microsoft, Meta - they're all largely inefficient and only effective as it pertains to the dollars they spend in lobbying. All of these companies are largely wasteful with respect to the money they spend on executives and initiatives that go against their own customers. They mirror the USG more and more year over year.

I've worked at both disfunctional & functional large companies, a very disfunctional start up, and a very well run public sector research organization. The deciding factor in each case was the quality of management.

A well behaved market is much more efficient than a government, but there’s no real difference in efficiency between a random corporation and a random government - you really need a diversity of sellers and buyers, privatizing into a monsopony or monopoly is reliably disastrous. Sorry, I know this is off topic but the conflation between “markets are efficient” and “private enterprises are efficient” is so frustrating from both sides.

Corporations are not disallowed to have a single master database. Government databases are at least in some cases firewalled off each other by law.

Structurally it’s about incentives not competency.

The private sector is good at being a wealth extraction machine, that's all. The other things it does are merely incidental to that. As Cory Doctorow has point out, the private sector is now in its enshittification phase. I'd point out that this is likely because the marginal wealth extraction of improving things is lower than the marginal wealth extraction of enshittfying things: making mature products better is harder than making mature products worse. Capitalism rewards no morality; it rewards wealth extraction.

The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.

Why would non state actors be any less scary?

Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.

I heard a law professor on NPR a few nights back saying how, at the executive level, the rule of law is dead and has been for some time. They cited Jan 6 but recognised how politically divisive that example was, so also gave the failure to enforce the TikTok ban as a less partisan example.

If you take your hands off the wheel you can go a surprisingly long time before you crash. This hands-free period will have to come to an end at some point.

Selectively ... Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

If we are to learn from the brutal Soviet sanctioned forced deportations of the Baltic nations following world war 2, then justice will come but it will take time.

Once the Baltic nations gained independence they tried everyone involved in the administration of those orders, which took place without trial or oversight and often resulted in the replacement families being deported if the actual tagets could not be found.

Ofc Stalin or any of the power brokers at the time were long dead, so instead it was a parade of lower level admin workers, all who were elderly in their 80s or 90s and who at that time were young, simply doing the bidding of their employers.

The lesson: don't be a bag holder for people who will die before you leaving you to hold the responsibility for their crimes.

it's been quite clear for about 50 years now

It's pretty clear for decades. When exactly did some higher up in the US gov end up in jail for ordering eg. mass killings abroad, or colluding with others that engaged in mass crimes like initiating wars and conflicts.

US will not lock up a single asshole who helps kill thousands of people abroad (not even inconvenience them with a simple court appearance to have to justify themselves), but it sure can lock up thousands on flimsiest justifications like FTA in court because of whatever, or technical parole violations, or driving on suspended license, basically for failures to navigate bureaucracy while poor.

I'll believe in rule of law when at least shits who materially support mass killings of children will start getting locked up. But alas, no. No such thing.

Until then it's all just bullshit that normal people have to submit to, and ruling class gets to excuse itself from with endless lawyering, exceptions, and nonsense, while it's clear they're still just scum psychos doing scum psycho things.

> Power of the executive is bestowed upon... one person

This is the unitary executive theory. It’s a novel Constitutional theory that even this SCOTUS seems reluctant to honestly embrace.

Key part of what you wrote: "as to the identity and location of aliens" - so whatever claim they have to access health information applies to aliens. The big question is: are they harvesting citizens' health records illegally as part of this effort, and if so, when do those responsible see jail time?

It's right there in the article, there are specific federal laws authorizing them to make specific information available - for example, they can make any record kept about the identity or location of aliens available. Right, that's a specific limitation on what they can share, even the HHS spokesperson made clear they don't share information on US citizens and permanent lawful residents. But then the article goes on to reveal that ICE has all the personal data of every person receiving Medicaid.

If the law says you can share aliens information, but not Americans information, and then you do share Americans information I think you're probably breaking the law, and at the very least there should be a process to find out what the basis is for you doing it. Normally these things would be decided by a court.

HHS is broader than CMMS. Someone who was formerly legal could now be illegal. But more prominently, Miller and Noem have focused on illegally deporting pending asylum cases to juice their numbers. Those folks may show up in HHS (and IRS) data.

If you go to an emergency room at a hospital which accepts Medicare (so, essentially all of them), you will be screened, and if in danger, medically stabilized (modulo difficult pregnancies in some states with anti-abortion laws, unfortunately).

I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.

Great question. I thought that only citizens could access public healthcare benefits.

Which doesn’t quite say those data weren’t shared.

> Please stop using the word alien to refer to humans

It’s the legally-correct term.

For what it’s worth, I’m a naturalized American. When I was doing my citizenship paperwork, I found the term fun. The word doesn’t dehumanize. Murdering people does.

You should still practice minimization of PII, also known as Data Minimization. Especially in the EU, where it's the law (GDPR).

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.

> 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.

"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

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.

They almost exclusively hire fresh grads who need money more than ethics, and it shows in everything they do.

Whoa, that's the story! I don't see that referenced in the 404media story, do you have a link/summary for that?

No, and you can tell how much this vexes particular individuals and institutions because the only kind of attack they can bring against him is character assassination, the tool of last resort.

Many Americans benefit from illegal immigration, it would kill the middle class in many places if illegal immigrants just went away all of a sudden. States like Texas can hardly survive without it, basically all politicians know this.

> They apply to people who are here illegally?

Yes. That’s how we lawfully deport them. You can’t run out and start serial killing illegal immigrants and then claim you aren’t a murderer.

> interesting that Obama was able to be against illegal immigration without a ton of pushback. Why was that?

He got tons of pushback from the left. He was just able to weather his party’s fringe in ways Republicans have not.

For the same reason Nixon was able to establish OSHA without a ton of pushback.

Team sports basically. And when you point out double standards, you got slammed as some "both sides" guy from the other team pretending to be a centrist.

Yes but at least in places like Venezuela and Philippines it can be bought cheap enough the common man might be able to access it.

It's almost worse in the USA because the corruption is only accessible to those in quasi-oligarchical roles. There's some point at which increased corruption actually becomes more egalitarian (though obviously, not as egalitarian as zero corruption).

"We've tried nothing and are out of ideas."

Sounds like Americans are in general fine with all of it. Voting patterns hold. General sentiment still remains aligned with the status quo. There does not seem like there are any consequences for the representatives to not represent the people.

It’s an easy conclusion to come to if your only view of the US comes from moderated online spaces and the news media.

Well if ICE deports illegal immigrants, and you're anti-ICE, then you do want those illegal immigrants? Or how is this supposed to work?

Sometimes you have to give it up, sometimes not, which is why it's a heuristic and not a firm rule.