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.
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.
In what way? I'm genuinely curious; I would describe an engineer who is provided to build a customer product alongside a customer as either a "contractor" or a "consultant," depending mostly on their employer. A security clearance just changes what customers and products they work for.
Contractor makes sense, consultant is a bit weird because the typical understanding is that a consultant comes in to share knowledge, not build product.
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.
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.
I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
> The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
>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
"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.
> 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.
I mean you can say stuff like that but the reality is they purposefully named themselves after a super villains magical spy apparatus so I'm not inclined to take his word about them being ethically neutral. Like I'm not really sure what they could name themselves after that would be more ominous
The palantirs were made by the elf lord prince Fëanor of Valinor, one of the good guys. The one we see in the film was given to the kings of Gondor and then pilfered by Saruman. (elvish palan 'far', tir 'watch over')
This almost makes it funnier? As if it’s the folly of creators to believe that their creations are by virtue untethered to morals and ethics, and it’s only through their use by amoral or unethical actors that they become so.
This is an incredibly silly thing to say. If someone makes a knife that is terrible at carving wood or cutting food but is the perfect shape for, say, clitorectomies... then maybe that tool is bad and we should probably stop making it.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This is reductionist. Surely you’ve heard of the Torment Nexus?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).
Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.
That's a common misunderstanding. The Palantir never corrupted anyone. They only became dangerous to use once Sauron got his hands on one. You know, that immortal demon god who always uses mind control to get what he wants? If you use a Palantir he’ll notice and start working you over. If he is stronger than you are then he can force your Palantir to show you things of his choosing.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
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.
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.
any opinions on the german WW2 engineer laying neutral tracks toward Auschwitz
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
Yes. It's not, and I agree. There's no bright line that says you're morally culpable or you are not morally culpable for what you do. But all of us should think about our roles in that light. If Palantir uses Git, does that mean new Git contributions are part of what is arguably an ethnic cleansing? I wouldn't be able to sleep at night and work on this project. (I do not work at Palantir).
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Well that's clearly an example of putting the cart before the horse. You should be able to sleep at night so long as you remember that Git isn't what enables Palantir to power an army of federalized brownshirts; it's the people making the tools explicitly for an army of federalized brownshirts with Git that are morally culpable.
Mmmmhhhhhh it depends on what the engineer knows about the realistic uses of the tool. As a sibling comments, fixing the railroads to Auswichz might me morally wrong.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently? So is building a system cataloguing all Jews and socialists in Berlin also a neutral thing? The officer ordering the legal building of large ovens and carpenter doing the bidding are not guilty? The soldier following the rules written by law that he should coral the ”visitors” and ”workers” is doing no good or bad thing because he has instructions and is not taking judgement on his work?
My point was, if you do invent something like Zyklon B, you need to consider its uses. While the gas itself is just a molecule, devoid of morality, not everyone who employs it will be a moral person.
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
>Producing Cyclon B is a doing a neutral thing apparently?
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
Germany has a system today cataloguing all the Jews in Berlin (the address registration includes your religion for the purpose of charging church tax), and everyone I've mentioned this to seems to feel it's neutral.
You're missing the part where they named their train after a iconic artifact of evil famously used to do evil train stuff with for this metaphor to work
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 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?
Sorry, but Palantir doesn’t get off that easy. They know full well how their technology is used. Just because a market exists that doesn’t mean you need to fill it. The tech industry could have taken a moral stand like the chemical industry did with execution drugs.
If you watch any entrepreneur-focused channels, the entire premise of Palantir was "what if we just didn't care about what people think is ethically dubious? What if we went into business in all the places that people have traditionally shied away from for moral reasons?" It's part of Thiel's "Monopoly is good/You want to build the 0 to 1, not jump into a crowded market" mantra.
This is just an inversion of culpability. We know that theres virtually no relationship in our Republic with popularity of an initiative and it's passing into law.
But don't people elect their representatives? oh of course!
If your issue is with policymakers, then it is with the people.
This is also very stupid because - essentially when the government is evil you become skeptical of your neighbors, not 538 people who really control your life.
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
Yeah, I don’t have any evidence for this but it certainly would make sense. It seems likely that the US government was catching wise to the data brokering loophole around the same time as the PayPal mafia was cashing out and Thiel would have been in the right circles to run into any well-connected gov’t types sniffing around for the most morally flexible big names in the valley. But it seems equally likely that Thiel just wanted to continue accumulating wealth and power to pursue his other authoritarian projects and the government had the biggest bag of cash around so he worked backwards from that.
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
> 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)
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.
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.
Hot political movements, at least in this day and age, are usually in support of objectives the hotheads don't even begin to understand in my opinion and the instigators and promoters certainly don't have the interests of the hotheads in mind.
It's easy enough to even take both sides, stir up shit, then be a hero with a clear mandate when whatever side wins. Of course what actually winds up being done with the mandate isn't usually in the interest of the hotheads.
> 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.
> ... "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.
I mean sure but you have to acknowledge that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports. The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
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.
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.
It's been crony capitalism for decades now. Trump has been the only one that the corporations couldn't buy, hence why he's such a thorn in their sides, and by extension the sides of every other federal politician.
OP has the delusion that being rich means you are resistant to corruption by being less likely to pursue riches. That being rich causes one to stop pursuing it.
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.
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.
Palantir came to me multiple times over the years asking me to interview as a senior swe. The temptation was very strong back then. Insane pay package as you can imagine... but I had a really bad feeling about them and always turned them down.
What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
What exactly was my argument? Separate from what they are doing with it, a college grad could pop open PowerBI and build this thing quite easily. DHS gets their data from other agencies, not Palantir. Surely you must recognize that adding to Palantir's mystique as some bad ass tech company only perpetuates its appeal.
It appears that the name kankerlijer is an insult meaning "cancer patient", sort of like how in the US the phrase "fucking cunt" might be used (except without the gendered notion - just in severity).
a lot of dutch curses and insults come from diseases (kanker/cancer and typhus are common). one of a few things i really appreciate about the Dutch language is they really make the most of a relatively small common vocabulary (compared to english).
I don’t think this is true. Palantir are fundamentally a consultancy with a graph database and a map. They sell expensive “forward deployed engineer” consulting services to integrate things with their graph database and map. As far as I know they still don’t broker or share data - the customer provides the data and they provide the database and visualization. Has that changed?
Okay so they have a “graph database” that transforms client data into actionable insights. I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
I'm not trying to make an ethical judgement here; personally, I think there is certainly a reckoning to be had given the role ICE have taken on, and I don't think that "we just make the platform" excuses culpability.
However, my concern with the Palantir conversation (and your comment) is that people are giving them too much credit, essentially: there is a public opinion (stoked by Palantir leadership) that Palantir is some kind of superpowered evil fortress full of data allowing the government to circumvent checks and balances. As far as I can tell, really it's a consultancy with a graph database, and the checks and balances never existed in the first place. These two things are very different problems to solve.
> I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
As an aside, this is a common talking point but has also struck me as odd because this is the foundational legal and ethical argument by which IBM continues to exist today. It's definitely food for thought but it's also not exactly a hot take.
I for one would find it far more acceptable if the people carrying out the deportations would be a little less "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" about it.
“Not listening” is really an incredible framing for trying to flee being detained for obstruction, and in the process hitting and nearly running over a federal agent in your SUV.
The person you are referring to rammed an ICE agent with their vehicle and the agent suffered internal bleeding as a result.
Sorry but there is no scenario where you can strike law enforcement with your car after being repeatedly ordered to exit your vehicle where their wouldn't be a justifiable use of lethal force. Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
Regardless of the exact circumstances of that scenario, there has been no efforts towards even the most token forms of accountability, and your echoing of state propaganda only furthers their success. You are on the wrong side of history with this one. An armed state police force that exists above accountability (except to the executive) is by definition a Geheimestaatspolizei.
So the “ICE agent” presented identification to her showing he was law enforcement? Nope. Oh so he got out of a vehicle marked as ICE? Nope.
Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense.
Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
This is such a bizarre argument because the entire reason the two women were there in the first place is because they thought they were following ICE agents. Both women were part of "ICE Watch", an anti-ICE activist group. They had been following the agents around throughout the day, attempting to disrupt them, which is why the car was parked perpendicular in the street (to block the ICE vehicles) prior to the incident.
So to claim the women didn't know it was Federal law enforcement ordering them to exit the vehicle is baffling to me because that was the entire reason the women were there in the first place.
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
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.
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".
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.
Palantir is directing them to neighborhoods. The doors are being chosen indiscriminately and people are being stopped or detained on the street indiscriminately. So I don’t think those are in conflict.
> But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
That’s certainly your right and choice. But when we’re spending tens of billions a year on harassing immigrants, you should ask if it is better to just spend the money on supporting them instead. Our economy benefits greatly from immigrants.
TIL blind and deaf people can post on forums. Her last words were "It's ok, Im not mad". She received two orders from two agents, one to stay and one to leave. She tried to leave. History will remember you as a fascist and a traitor to your country.
I mean it's pretty clear from the video that she and her wife were quite mad. They had been following ICE to multiple locations that day in an attempt to disrupt them and were blocking the roadway on purpose. Just because somebody says they aren't mad doesn't mean its true...
The person saying "Drive, baby drive" was her wife, not an agent.
She was clearly told 4 times to get out of the car in the seconds leading up to her pressing the accelerator. Can you please timestamp where some other agent told her to leave?
If you believe said women is attempting to attack you with a deadly weapon (an accelerating vehicle that you were struck by in this case) that would fall pretty clearly under justified use of force.
Internal bleeding? Where do you get this nonsense? I keep seeing completely imaginary "facts" parroted about this case and I really want to know where they come from.
So you think there no other way in the world that ice agent would have a bruise? Is there any proof the bruise was from this incident? Did he have any bruises before from any other ice activity?
They are grabbing people day in and day out.
Again, think.
This was the same incident where the administration said they guy was fighting for his life after being struck by the car however:
“Eventually, the agent who shot the motorist approaches the vehicle. Seconds later, he turns back around and tells his colleagues to call 911. Agents blocked several bystanders who attempt to provide medical care, including one who identifies himself as a physician. At the same time, several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”
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.
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.
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.
Would you support deporting people who are criminals? Or have no intention of ever working and just want to live off various welfare programs? Trying to find some common ground here.
Nope. Access to food, water, shelter, and freedom of movement are fundamental human rights. I'm not a proponent of executing useless eaters. If you commit a crime with a prison sentence then you serve that sentence where you committed the crime.
> 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.
I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.
What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
"These people are akin the mold growing upon a rotting city-state economy. They have to be removed." --our poster
"humanity suffers today under Jewish parasitism" --Adolf Hitler
It is this fake injury or mis-assignment of blame for real harm that serves as justification for actual crimes against humanity be they at CEDOT or Dachau
This is disgusting hyperbole. Nazis killed millions of innocent people; a nation enforcing border laws by asking illegals to leave or removing them when they don't is not that.
We sent people who committed no crimes to a foreign concentration camp in a country that they aren't from and have killed several including citizens.
Our present admin holds that it can detain anyone it merely asserts is illegal without trial or any due process and ship them to such camps or hold them domestically indefinitely in fetid slums that if we fill with the millions they want picked up will become death camps due to illness, climate, privation, lack of medical care.
They have variously called for imprisoning and even executing law makers who speak up, shooting protesters, killing them and shutting down journalists who run negative press.
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.
That's where I'm stuck on this. When you have certain cities (or even entire states) saying "we will resist _any_ deportation effort", what choice does a deportation officer have than what they're doing right now?
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.
> focus on the criminals and dangerous people first
That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
If that were true, they'd be showing up with real warrants (super easy if these are convicted felon illegal immigrants as they claim! But of course there are nowhere near as many of those as, say, the "thousands" they claim exist in Minneapolis) and mostly dressing in much more ordinary federal agent clothes and it'd all be boring and uneventful and legal enough that most of what they're doing would hardly even be noticed.
Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.
Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.
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.
> 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.
How is that currently working out for all of Europe? Hint: not well at all.
> 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.
You've made a lot of ambiguous accusations right here. Can you please give specific examples?
The thing is that a certain segment of the population if upset that illegals are being deported at all. So in articles/discussions like this I'm not sure how much of the concern is actually over the technology being used to do so or if the real concern is with the idea of deporting illegals period.
The problem is there is a certain segment of the population suffer from (or have been fed) false dichotomy that either we have open borders and are overrun with criminal immigrants taking all our jobs, or we need a surveillance state that hires masked “Brownshirt” thugs to brutalize its civilian population and who can operate with impunity and immunity. Since people are afraid of the former they try to justify the latter.
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.
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.
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.
Well, at least they're paying those consultants a lot of money, since they're charging a lot for them... right? Right?
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
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.
I see this theory a lot (sometimes to justify their valuation, sometimes as a moral judgement, sometimes as an alarmist concern) but I genuinely don't see how this line of thought works in any of these dimensions. My understanding is that they're consultants building overpriced data processing products. As far as I know there isn't even usually a separate legal entity or some kind of corporate shenanigan at play; my understanding is that they send engineers to the customer to build a product that the customer owns and operates under the customer's identity as the customer. I certainly see how businesses like Flock are a "loophole;" they collect data which is unrestricted due to its "public" nature and provide a giant trove of tools to process it which are controlled only by what amounts to their own internal goodwill. But this isn't my understanding of how Palantir works; as far as I know they never take ownership of the data so it isn't "laundered" from its original form, and is still subject to whatever (possibly inadequate) controls or restrictions were already present on this data.
The big legal loophole is that the government needs a particularized warrant (per the 4th Amendment) to ask for any user data, but if the government buys commercial data, well, there's no warrant needed.
I would also submit that it's possible that sending everything through a giant computer-magic-bullshit-mixer allows you to discriminate on the basis of race while claiming plausible deniability, but SCOTUS has already constructively repealed the 14th Amendment between blessing Kavanaugh stops and the Roberts Court steadily repealing the Voting Rights Act, Bivens claims, etc.
Right; but as far as I know Palantir don't sell commercial data. That's my beef with this whole Palantir conspiracy theory. I am far from pro-Palantir but it really feels like they're working as a shield for the pitchforks in this case.
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
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.
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
This is along the lines of “If I don’t do it, someone else will get paid to, so it might as well be me that gets paid to do it” which I personally find morally abhorrent.
> one of the good guys
Uhhhh...
Feanor drew his sword on his half-brother and threatened to kill him because he was paranoid Fingolfin was trying to usurp his power. He compelled all of his sons to swear an oath to slay any man, elf or being in possession of the silmarils (which led to subsequent needless bloodshed).
Then he ordered and carried out the mass-murder of relatively unarmed Teleri in order to rob them of their ships.
Such actions does not a good guy make.
Worse, that spy apparatus inherently corrupts its users.
When Denethor used Gondor’s Palantir he saw orc armies marching and pillaging, foundaries forging weapons, Southrons marching north with Oliphants, corsairs raiding the coast, wildmen pillaging Rohan, etc, etc. Sauron never let him see allies coming to his aid, or his own troops winning battles.
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.
EDIT: sorry, that was glib. However I want to make the argument that the argument of doing "neutral" physical work is not absolutely morally absolving.
But the point is also that maybe we should take one step back and think about the morality of the people we put in decision making roles. The technology is morally neutral, but the intention is not. And helping to realize that intention is not. And sometimes the things we build can be used in horrible ways unless we also think about safeguarding their use.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is my very real fear that a lot of information has been aggregated into Palantir and other applications and is usable with no restraint. And that even if you just run the build system, across hundreds of apps, you might be culpable as well.
Eichmann knew what he was doing and, in any case, forcing dozens of thousands of people to move with less than a week's notice does not soynd quite "amoral".
In the case of Palantir, should we allow the federal government to combine databases (which may have been hoovered up by DOGE and held in a private sector company that isn't subject to FOIA)? Should there be judicial review, like for FISA warrants before you can field an application? Should we allow the government to buy that kind of app in the first place? I don't give Palantir a free pass.
But it's not the engineer at Palantir that decides to send poorly vetted and trained people into a home, fully stoked, believing your have complete immunity, and full of anabolic steroids, and praying any of the occupants shows an iota of resistance. 79 million voters chose this. This is the morality of the people employing the tool.
A thing clearly has no intention and it's impossible for us to know every possible use for a product. But at some level we need to feel responsible for what we create, we need to feel responsible for our choices, and we need to see the responsibility others have because of their choices.
Without searching for references, it's my understanding that Fritz Haber developed this decades before the war, in conjunction with making synthetic fertilizer. It was later used for the purpose you referenced.
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.
But don't people elect their representatives? oh of course!
If your issue is with policymakers, then it is with the people.
This is also very stupid because - essentially when the government is evil you become skeptical of your neighbors, not 538 people who really control your life.
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
If next I hear he’s planning to build a fabulous underwater city in international waters, I won’t be surprised. He enjoys his biblical themes, perhaps he can name it Rapture.
Idk...any and every of these companies fielding government contracts with a name from LOTR seem off to me. Palantir, Anduril, Erebor....
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)
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.
It's easy enough to even take both sides, stir up shit, then be a hero with a clear mandate when whatever side wins. Of course what actually winds up being done with the mandate isn't usually in the interest of the hotheads.
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.
... "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.
I mean sure but you have to acknowledge that is an extremely fringe belief that basically no one in the USA supports. The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
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
Hasn't he accepted donations from many mega corporations? My assumption is that a corporation wont donate money, without the expectation of ROI.
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?
https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...
https://archive.ph/wa32f
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.
What a huge relief. One of my best moments of foresight.
Didn't know so caching this here for others.
However, my concern with the Palantir conversation (and your comment) is that people are giving them too much credit, essentially: there is a public opinion (stoked by Palantir leadership) that Palantir is some kind of superpowered evil fortress full of data allowing the government to circumvent checks and balances. As far as I can tell, really it's a consultancy with a graph database, and the checks and balances never existed in the first place. These two things are very different problems to solve.
> I guess IBM didn’t tell the nazis who to kill either, they just sold them the punchcards so they could round them up.
As an aside, this is a common talking point but has also struck me as odd because this is the foundational legal and ethical argument by which IBM continues to exist today. It's definitely food for thought but it's also not exactly a hot take.
These are LEGAL immigrants who have done it the right way being denied. That is worthy of protest.
Could you please explain what deportation process you would find acceptable?
Sorry but there is no scenario where you can strike law enforcement with your car after being repeatedly ordered to exit your vehicle where their wouldn't be a justifiable use of lethal force. Trying to frame it as "shoot U.S. civilians in the face for not listening" is extremely disingenuous.
Do you want to live in a country where an unidentified masked individual with a gun can say “im a fed”, stop a car and force someone out without proper ID? That’s what you’re in support of. I’d say one would have a right to self defense.
Also internal bleeding was literally just a bruise, like the internal bleeding I get from walking into the corner of my coffee table.
So to claim the women didn't know it was Federal law enforcement ordering them to exit the vehicle is baffling to me because that was the entire reason the women were there in the first place.
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
Because that idea consists of harming someone over their birth circumstances, rather than any objective harm they may have done.
I find it nonsensical to dismiss an anti-ICE argument because of one word.
> But then again, I find most of the anti-ICE arguments to be nonsensical.
That’s certainly your right and choice. But when we’re spending tens of billions a year on harassing immigrants, you should ask if it is better to just spend the money on supporting them instead. Our economy benefits greatly from immigrants.
Just because you are nice to the oppressors, doesn't mean they won't come for you too.
The person saying "Drive, baby drive" was her wife, not an agent.
She was clearly told 4 times to get out of the car in the seconds leading up to her pressing the accelerator. Can you please timestamp where some other agent told her to leave?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkOjILx3dO0
Possib
You are working so hard to build and manufacture the narrative that fits in your mind, to the point where it can justify the actions of the officer.
There is no justification for shooting a woman point blank in the face, and you know it.
Internal bleeding = a bruise
They are grabbing people day in and day out.
Again, think.
This was the same incident where the administration said they guy was fighting for his life after being struck by the car however:
“Eventually, the agent who shot the motorist approaches the vehicle. Seconds later, he turns back around and tells his colleagues to call 911. Agents blocked several bystanders who attempt to provide medical care, including one who identifies himself as a physician. At the same time, several agents, including the agent who opened fire, get in their vehicles and drive off, apparently altering the active crime scene.”
Think for yourself.
No. Wheels were turned away from the gestapo, gestapo was not hurt, gestapo is lying about injuries.
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.
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.
2) Check those stats a bit more closely. The vast majority of "deportations" were people turned away at the border.
I don't think that's a policy that would get majoritarian support in the US. The only people who can and should get deported are those who are not already not authorized to be here. If you don't deport them, it's functionally equivalent to an open-borders policy. Do you want more MAGA? Because open-borders is how you get more MAGA.
What you're proposing is also roughly analogous to a policy of not evicting squatters. If someone breaks into your house and decides to start living in one of your bedrooms, are you going to want them out or give them a key? The squatter is a person too, not a mold outgrowth that needs culling.
"These people are akin the mold growing upon a rotting city-state economy. They have to be removed." --our poster
"humanity suffers today under Jewish parasitism" --Adolf Hitler
It is this fake injury or mis-assignment of blame for real harm that serves as justification for actual crimes against humanity be they at CEDOT or Dachau
Immigrants aren't hurting us by existing.
Our present admin holds that it can detain anyone it merely asserts is illegal without trial or any due process and ship them to such camps or hold them domestically indefinitely in fetid slums that if we fill with the millions they want picked up will become death camps due to illness, climate, privation, lack of medical care.
They have variously called for imprisoning and even executing law makers who speak up, shooting protesters, killing them and shutting down journalists who run negative press.
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.
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.
That's what they say they are doing? Every time I read about them arresting somebody who was "just picking their kids up from school", it turns out to be some professional agitator who was trying to get arrested in exchange for a photo op.
Going several thousand(!) strong into a US city and rolling around town in paramilitary convoys questioning people who don't "look American", to... "support fraud investigations" apparently, LOL, WTF... among other things, is why they're a hot topic right now. If they were doing what they claim to be doing, this would all be boring stuff.
Frankly I don't feel like I should be having to explain why guys in SUVs wearing plate carriers and comically overloaded with blinged out Call of Duty gear driving around a US city and sometimes jumping out literally going "papers, please" to people who "look foreign", all while universally masking up to hide their identities, is extremely fucking bad, to the point that I think that language is way too mild, but here we are I guess.
You're clearly not reading enough and are a part of the problem if you believe what you're saying to be true.
Over the Holidays they even increased the exit bonus to $3000: https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/12/22/increased-incentives-dhs...
Yet another reason why I find the haphazard comparisons to Nazi Germany/Gestapo so farcical.
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.
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.
How is that currently working out for all of Europe? Hint: not well at all.
> 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.
You've made a lot of ambiguous accusations right here. Can you please give specific examples?