@anoym - There isn’t something inherently bad about working for law enforcement or national security agencies as long as what you’re doing cannot be used now or in the future unethically. But too be honest I think this is a ‘don’t hate the player’ type things, if palantir didn’t exist, another company would take its place - privacy legislation is the only thing that prevents it, not relying on ethics of the masses.

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lan321 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> legislation is the only thing that prevents it

I strongly agree. There's even the argument to be made that if no legislation exists, even if you're anti X, you might get incentivized to build a company for X just so it's not a fan of X at the helm of the top company for X.

Blaming it on the employees is pointless. It's the law that should dictate what's allowed and what isn't and if the lawmaking or enforcement isn't working you probably want some "good" people in those companies.

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account42 8 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Laws are a reflection of the collective ethics of the masses, or at least they should be in a democracy.

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IhateAI 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

All Law enforcement and Nat Sec of the United States is inherently unethical, or at minimum tied to ethically questionabke tactics. We have the highest incarceration rates in the world, death penalties ect. Our Military isnt exactly ethical in its missions, pretty much since WW2

You're basically saying "There isnt anything inherently wrong about working for the 4th Reich"

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fauchletenerum 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a childishly simplistic view of the world

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cess11 12 hours ago | parent [-]

What complexity is it you'd like to add?

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golem14 11 hours ago | parent [-]

For instance, the local cops checking in on grandma, or those checking in on a troubled child are really not the bad guys. You WANT them when you need them.

Not all LEOs are brown shirts, In my experience, few are, but they give the lot a bad rap.

Treating LEOs uniformly as evil is just counterproductive

	▲	donkeybeer 9 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes but I don't have a definitive map of who are the good ones, so we must treat it as a life or death situation and suitably defend ourselves in an interaction with any of them.
	▲	cess11 11 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Why would I want cops doing that instead of social workers or teachers doing it? No one becomes a cop because they want to be nice and help vulnerable people. Some might say they did but that is some coping technique. Being a cop involves exerting violence towards people who are vulnerable and desperate, and to become one you have to be fine with this. Some would say that this alone is enough to deem a person ethically dubious. Even if one would accept the premise that society requires some degree of organised violence towards its members, one would also have to handle the question of accountability. Reasonably this violence should be accountable in relation to the victims of it, and police institutions inherently are not. I think that we should also note that the other person above used "childishly" to denote something negative, apparently they don't think of kids as the light of the world and childish as something fun and inspiring. This is something that makes me quite suspicious of their morals.

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hsbauauvhabzb 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

No, I’m not ‘basically’ saying that. Stop putting words in my mouth.