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?
people think Palantir makes a lot of money. did Palantir make a lot of money? No. Accenture Federal Services, Leidos Defense Civil IT & Services, Booz Allen Hamilton Gov Consulting & Cyber, General Dynamics Technologies, SAIC, and CACI combined made $61.9b in 2024, compared to all of Palantir which made $2.9b. so if you just look at some IT and defense companies' gov IT sales segments - we're not even including Raytheon or Lockheed Martin or Boeing where calculating such a thing is complex - Palantir's revenue looks very, very small.
people think Palantir makes vanilla "consultants" and “typical enterprise vendor vibes" products. does the thing that Palantir make work? we're talking about it! I think the reason we don't talk about Raytheon's version of this app is that Raytheon's (or Accenture's or...) version doesn't work haha
Anyone in disagreement needs to read about Palintr and what has intentionally been said about it
The line blurs when you consider Thiel's personal motivations (e.g. Project 2025) and investments/involvement in the current administration.
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....
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.
On of their strengths is the ability of thiel to raise lots of money, and win huge gov contracts by convincing everyone that what he built is magic. it is not.
palantir is regular enterprise software. morally, they are vilains for sure, but their superpower is being excellent at marketing themselves.
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.
If you couldn't go backwards Palantir wouldn't have a market. So, I would consider that a loophole.
Do they? I don't think they even do this, either.
I have really strong knowledge of this from ~10 years ago and weak knowledge from more recently. I'm happy to be proven wrong but my understanding is that they don't sell any data at all, but rather just consulting services for processing data someone already has.
One of those consulting services is probably recommending vendors to supply more data, but as far as I know Palantir literally do not have a first-party data warehouse at all.
1. They provide tech that is used to select targets for drone strikes and apparently also for targeting violent attacks on US civilians. I don't know too much about how the algorithm works but simply outsourcing decisions about who lives or dies to opaque algorithms is creepy. It also allows the people behind the operations to avoid personal responsibility for mistakes by blaming the mistakes on the software. It also could enable people to just not think about it and thus avoid the moral question entirely. It's an abstract concern but it is a legitimate one, IMO.
2. I don't know if this is 100% confirmed but we have heard reports that Elon Musk and DOGE collected every piece of government data that they could get their hands, across various government departments and databases. These databases were previously islands that served one specific purpose and didn't necessarily connect to all the other government databases from other departments. It's suspected that palantir software (perhaps along with Grok) is being used to link all of these databases together and cross reference data that was previously not available for law enforcement or immigration purposes. This could enable a lot of potential abuse and probably isn't being subjected to any kind of court or congressional oversight.
I certainly think that Palantir has ethical issues; as I stated in my parent comment, it wouldn't be high on my list of choices for places to work.
But, when it comes to things like (2), this is a failure of regulation and oversight and needs to be treated as such. Note that this doesn't make Palantir "right" (building a platform to do things that are probably bad is still bad), but there's no reason anyone with basic data warehousing skills couldn't have done this before or after.
Essentially, I think people give Palantir specifically too much credit and in turn ignore the fundamental issues they're worried about. Panic over "dismantle Palantir" or even the next step, "dismantle corporate data warehousing" is misguided and wouldn't address the issues at hand; worry about government data fusion needs to be directed towards government data fusion, and worry about computers making targeting decisions needs to be directed at computers making targeting decisions.
See also: Parallel Construction (i.e. evidence tampering) and most of the times a "drug-sniffing" dog is called to "test" something the police already want to search.
On a somewhat related note, it always bothers me that the discussion is about whether it’s appropriate for the government to buy this sort of data as opposed to whether it is appropriate for anyone to sell, or for that matter collect, that data.
I would prefer if neither the government nor any data brokers or advertisers had this data.
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.
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.
I mean, that's worse.
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.
If the conclusion of a meme is ridiculous, it stands to reason that the claim it makes is similarly so. Memes are not substantial enough to be considered as evidence or proof of moral pronouncements any more than other popularly-invoked and contextless aphorisms are.
> I also don’t see the connection to its reference being an attack on character.
The character attack comes from the implied framing of the invention of the so-called "torment nexus" as the direct product of a person or people exhibiting moral failure through action or inaction. What that particular moral failure is or whether it is a moral failure one at all isn't even given a cursory examination by those crying torment nexus.
I have unfortunately lived long enough to see my passion cross this line.
> There's a certain beyond which you don't build things because it's evident that society can't be trusted with it.
Where does one draw the line and under what conditions? Reasonable minds can differ on the definition of foreseeable.
After all, Some of the most beneficial inventions to mankind have also aided its worst tendencies. For instance, the 20th and 21st centuries as we know them wouldn't exist without the combustion engine. Simultaneously, it's this same device that has significantly contributed to the pollution of the air.
Secondly, how does one mean to stop society or any individual from learning and building on new ideas in the Information age? Is such a thing even possible?
You’re bringing in something that’s (vaguely and poorly, for no one knows what it actually could be) defined as something that fits the narrative and present it: “see, if we think up a tool that’s inherently evil by definition of it, it cannot be neutral”. We might, but could such tool actually exist?
(And before we joke about building it, we can think up of its polar opposite too, something unquestionably good that just cannot be evil in the slightest. Again, I suspect, no such thing can exist in reality.)
If we agree that there exists at least one thing theoretically whose invention would be unequivocally evil - without a morsel of moral justification, then surely there exists a moral spectrum on which all inventions lie, and the inventors (and builders) are not absolved of their sins by virtue of not having actually used their inventions. Maybe you disagree that even in the case of the Torment Nexus the inventor has no moral reckoning (yikes). Maybe you disagree that it’s a spectrum, and rather binary: Torment Nexus immoral, everything else moral (weird).
That’s why I invoked the Torment Nexus.
My issue is that your use of the phrase "exists ... theoretically" quietly steps across the boundary between ideal (where anything is possible), and real (where only some things are possible).
In other words, I think that Torment Nexus doesn't exist. Only its idea does, and I don't see how that's possibly sufficient. Kinda like faster-than-light travel - it would change a lot of things - but only it if would be a real thing. AFAIK to best of our understanding it's not. Even though the idea surely exists.
I rather think that it's the meme of Torment Nexus is the actual thought-stopper, because exploring what it could possibly be is what the meme warns one about.
Another point of the Torment Nexus is that it’s dark humor that science fiction writers especially will ideate something in their writing, and spend great lengths discussing the inevitable harm it unleashes, only to wait a few years and watch as someone actually builds the thing they basically warned everyone about. It’s a placeholder for “thing so bad that I don’t actually want to describe it lest some psychopath actually builds it.”
Yes, people choose to make it and people choose to use it. But, like... stop those people, right?
Only way to repurpose that tool is to destroy part if the tool and replace parts. It is now a different tool.
I say intention of the tool design dictates if the tool is "neutral". That hammer analogy is tool simplistic to the tools we can now create and are attempting to create.
One can't just ignore that kind of subtext...
This is about the morality and judgment of any person who'd consciously choose to found "One-Ring Controls" (ORC inc.) selling the "Ringraith 3000" that spies on employees and punishes them for not working hard enough.
"Don't criticize me for my branding because fictional crystal-balls and rings are just objects" is not a credible defense.
Frankly the name is amazingly great branding. It makes the customers think, even if only subconsciously, that they have bought a literal crystal ball. That’s genius marketing. Once you’ve got your customers thinking magically about your product you can bamboozle them until the end of time.
> 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.
But I think that Feanor’s character is irrelevant. An evil person could create a tool that ends up being useful for good purposes. Tools are neutral; they don’t inherit the character of their creator or their user.
that it takes following the... (charitably) uncommon view that Fëanor was a "good guy" in spite of being a psychopathic thieving mass murderer to excuse the actions of Palantir (the company) should be an indicator that they're Bad, Actually.
While I agree with your assessment of Fëanor I don't think anything in Tolkien's texts indicate that there were nefarious intents for palantiri creation.
Yet.
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.
Baking a roll of bread is not immoral. Baking bread as part of a contract to feed the gestapo, is.
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".
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.
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.
A gun has the intent of projecting violence at a distance. No matter if it is used within the frame of the law or not.
A vaccine has the intention of protection against disease. No matter if it is used within or outside the law.
A fence contains the intent of separating things.
A system built to deeply and widely track and catalogue and eavesdrop on people has the intention of being intrusive.
The purpose of a system is what is does. If a system does help the violent actions towards civilians and citizens then that is the purpose of what the engineers at Palantir built.
(I also think I was a bit too confrontational in my earlier reply, sorry about that)
And I am not going to single out the Americans here lots of people in my country made money on the Atlantik wall.
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.
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
What happens when there's a bug in the software? Would that mean God is fallible after all? Could this be the plot line of Dogma++?
of course when shit actually hits the fan you'll still wait 4 days for a response
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.
Of course, in contrast to piety all fake evil is also real evil.
I mean, yeah - it’s “he’s not hurting the right people” turned into a product or enterprise and then sold specifically to people who really like that message, and which employs people who desperately want to be in charge of hurting those people as much as possible.
It doesn’t even have the plausible deniability of being a social media company.
"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"
I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.
I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.
One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.
If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.
What you wrote here was accurate:
> the vendor is good at navigating the sales and compliance labyrinth to secure deals.
The main advantage they had over other platforms was really granular permissioning, which execs love the idea of and always scores great on box-ticking exercises.
You know who's collecting all this data the gov is shoving on Palantir's platform? Flock (YC S17) - of this very platform everyone in this thread is currently commenting on and boosting engagement of. Having most of these comments on news.ycombinator.com is peak irony.
Isn't this the banality of evil in action?
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 freeI 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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
> ICE has a clear and ethical mandate
It doesn't, given the current administration. It's somewhat questionable in general, given that being in the country illegally isn't a felony (or criminal) in itself. We have local law enforcement that can handle cases of illegal actions, regardless of immigration status, and actual crimes can and do lead to deportation.
The vast majority of people being targeted, via mandate, are not criminals. The mandate of the current administration also includes protestors, regardless of citizenship status.
So, no, that person didn't cover the points, and your neutrality here is also written in a way that backs up that person, so that's also somewhat questionable.
... "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.
The immigrants are just an excuse for the fascist goons in the street.
Trump won the election mostly on a strong anti-immigration policy this is the popular will of the people.
Clearly is it not a belief that no one in the USA supports, as seem in the discourse against ICE and immigration contrl.
> The debate is on "how" it's being done not that we shouldn't have immigration control.
Not necessarily, no. "The debate" is too vague to elaborate in favor or against what you're saying.
But yes, there are people against immigration control period, and period in favor of reforms to make immigration easier for workers, not harder. But propaganda will keep putting workers against each other, instead of companies lobbying against workers.
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
by definition, groupthink will get more upvotes than mishmashthink.
Even smart people are capable of hate.
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.
Or how are people fleeing from prosecution, looking for a better life, or just feeling like living somewhere else exactly hurting you? It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required.
If you're thinking about jobs, skilled workers immigrating will compete with you much more than less-privileged people. And "we cannot pay for them" is BS made up the system as well. It is possible to pay for social security for everyone, but not if all profits go to shareholders of course.
People forgot this once Maduro was noped
>It's really a human right to move to another place, without reason required
Bhutan, Barcelona
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.
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.
I have no idea what you're trying to say here.
Both of them are right: unless there's a civil war or moderate president (which probably needs ranked choice voting) the most probable scenario is that one of the 2 extremes succeeds.
I also miss the old HN btw and wish that there wouldn't be any right/left politics, just the old classic libertarian property/privacy/opennes right debates, but it looks like those days are gone.
What world do you live in where you would expect equally extreme behavior from a democrat president?
It would probably help if Trump didn't fantasize about this publicly all the time
> the right thinks that if they don't keep their power now, the left will take it and keep it using immigrants
The left will "take it" by being elected, if they are in fact elected. That's the extremist threat the right is worried about?
What does "keep it using immigrants" mean?
I don't know of any other country that would allow it, but I know other countries where people in power used other ,,tricks'' to increase the chance of being reelected
As an example in in late 2024 in California Governor Newsom signed SB 1174, which explicitly prohibits local governments (like cities or counties) from passing their own laws to require voter ID.
It's all or nothing.
That said, if some ex-Palantir worker was somehow working for UNICEF – to take an extreme example – it would be a little awkward unless they had denounced their old company in a fairly public manner.
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.
We don't fund out national parks with advertisements. We don't fund our libraries with advertisements. We could create the same structures for the internet as well, where crucial internet resources are protected and stewarded. They don't necessarily need to be in the hands of ad companies.
Sure, I will not deny that having things be "free" (and paying for them in other ways) has been a huge boon from one perspective, but we can also evolve to put "free" things in different places. Because things are never free. Advertisements are funding mass surveillance. They are encroaching our civil liberties and normalizing it. There is a total cost to things that extens beyond money. What we don't pay out of pocket we pay as a society.
Ironically the best solution for this is for websites to start de-anonymizing users to the extent necessary to block fake accounts from polluting the airwaves.
At the time, I remember thinking how extreme that seemed, and how I was "sure" nothing is black-and-white and that, certainly, while Palantir had shady connections, for sure it must bring some good to the world and, so, why boycott this poor man? It felt genuinely baffling to me.
While in many ways I consider myself a more balanced person today (precisely thinking less in black-and-white terms), this is a topic where I do not agree. I would not work for Palantir and, were I to travel back in time, I would join the boycott. Heck, given how I was when I was younger, I'd expand on it greatly and try to rally some form of physical protest.
A friend of mine once threw me the argument of "well, the enemy [presumably China] is doing this kind of stuff, so we have to do it, too". This may seem like a compelling argument at first — and it may be so for many — but it can't, to me. It's ethically disgusting. The solution to world with decaying ethics is not to continue contributing to its decay. It erases accountability, it normalizes atrocity, it strips humanity from our very own flesh and blood — it escalates conflict! It. Just. Can't. be.
We must fight this filth.