
HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surveillance Complex - dfc
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex
======
Permit
I cannot believe we are doing this again. Just because Palantir was asked by
Aaron Barr to use their technology against Greenwald does not mean that they
did. Palantir later confirmed that their technology didn't even have the
ability to do what Aaron Barr was asking.

This is the second smear against Palantir in three days that cites an email
without even showing the email to give you some context. They also don't link
to Palantirs response to these claims.

Please approach this with some level of skepticism.

~~~
glesica
Just as we should approach Palantir itself with a great deal of skepticism...
A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be
terribly trustworthy. I realize this community loves the idea of Palantir and
many people probably know people who are involved. But why should Palantir get
a free pass to go about their business with excessive secrecy in an area that
features massive abuse without the additional scrutiny that must accompany
such behavior?

~~~
Permit

      A company that profits from violence and war really can't be expected to be terribly trustworthy. 
    

Their business does not center around tracking down terrorists. They do all
things "Big Data". That includes finance and tracking the source of E-Coli
outbreaks. The problem is that people like yourself know nothing about the
company, yet still feel qualified to condemn them.

~~~
nazka
Well just to cut the apple in two pieces. Maybe for this point it's the fault
of Palantir. Their business is in the finance, government with secret
projects, and others B2B areas that are far away of any american's ear. For
this reason they didn't manage their public image, and now you have this
exploding in their hands... So at the end, they deserve what they get.

~~~
Permit
Because they don't want to share their business specifics they deserve what
they get?

That sounds an awful lot like "If you've got nothing to hide, you should tell
us what you're doing".

I'm all for transparent governments, but I don't think transparency should be
a requirement of a private company.

~~~
glesica
As far as the company's contracts with the government are concerned, yes,
those should be totally transparent. Otherwise it is stupidly easy for the
government to do an end-run around transparency: just pay a private company to
do your dirty tricks for you.

You can't have it both ways. If private companies are going to provide
important government services, then those companies must accept a certain
measure of public scrutiny and transparency, a much greater measure than an
ordinary private company would need to accept.

If the companies don't like it, then they shouldn't bid on government
contracts. No one is forcing them to do so. And if you don't think the
government should occupy such a large segment of the economy, AWESOME! I'm all
for that! I say dismantle the whole military-security-industrial complex!

~~~
martinlandau
I remember hearing on the talk radio shows about one former NSA guy saying
that to circumvent US laws, they established centers in England and sent all
the data over there to be "interpreted" and "analyzed" \- LOL! I now hear that
Joe Lonsdale, cofounder of Palantir, is now backing Oculus the HMD VR company
everyone is excited about. How far do the tentacles of these people like
Lonsdale, In Q Tel, and others reach?

------
ganeumann
Curious to know where the Ntrepid $2.8 million "sock puppet" tech is spreading
propaganda. I have noticed many of the same irrational comments being made on
articles about Snowden in the MSM and then being voted up more than they seem
to deserve (See, for instance, the comments on any NYTimes article on Snowden.
Not that the NYTimes comment sections are any model of rationality normally.)

I'm biased so maybe I'm seeing things where there isn't anything, but if the
tech was funded, then it's being deployed somewhere. Where other than the MSM
would it make sense to deploy it, and how would the MSM identify sock puppets
if they were targeted?

~~~
LoganCale
I don't have a source to back this up right now, but the claim when the
sockpuppet program first became news was that they were only operating in non-
English communities, e.g. terrorist-affiliated web forums, and that they said
it would be illegal to use domestically, therefore they avoided any English
usage. Whether that's actually true… who knows.

~~~
mindcrime
There's a pretty good article on it here:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-
oper...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-operation-
social-networks)

------
skore
I saw the best minds of my generation write software to surveil and control
the other minds of my generation.

~~~
rayiner
If we are going to attack every company that isn't morally virtuous, then
there won't be much to talk about here on HN. E.g. building products for the
advertising industry might seem less harmful than building products for the
defense/intelligence industries, but how much economic harm is caused by an
industry that preys on cognitive biases to get people to overpay for otherwise
fungible commodity products?

There is also a double standard here, isn't it? Working on Big Data technology
that has applications for spying by the military = evil. Working on search or
data classification technology that has applications to obsoleting workers and
putting them out of a job = not evil?

It's not a productive path to start treading down. Or at the very least,
something about glass houses or "let he who has not sinned cast the first
stone."

~~~
pnathan
It's a very productive path to go down and think hard about. As a community
within society, we have a moral imperative to think about how our actions
affect others.

For _my_ part, I refuse to work on tech that is a 'single-bladed sword'; I'll
work on something that has broad application, but not something with only
'immoral' application.

The crux is where to draw the line of morality. I think that's a reasonable
discussion and worth deeply conversing about; morality is both an individual
and community affecting thing. Both your self and your community need to
consider it.

Rightly divide the words spoken and think about whatsoever is true, just, and
commendable...

~~~
Spearchucker
Morality is a fickle thing. Nobody (that I know of) disputes the good that is
Tor. That very same network that provides anonymous hosting to drug dealers,
paedophiles, and illegal gun sales.

~~~
pnathan
Fickle? Insasmuch as the human heart is...

Anyway, let's tackle (for a thought example) your example. Why should Tor
exist? It's a home to real creeps. (Freenet has the same problem).

What precisely do these services offer that is so compelling that it's better
to let them exist?

Freedom? Privacy? Are those sufficiently compelling? Why so?

I'm sure there are off the cuff answers out there - but maybe we should look
deeper.

------
fixxer
I wonder how much of this news has resulted in an entirely new cohort of
software engineers applying for jobs with these companies? I'd bet the HR
departments at places like Booz are extra busy right now.

~~~
Homunculiheaded
For me it's had an almost opposite effect.

Many people here on HN will probably remember around 2 years ago Steve Yegge
gave a talk essentially saying there was a moral imperative for programmers to
learn statistics and get better at machine learning. The idea was that this
was going to get us beyond cat picture sharing and towards curing cancer and
other social goods. It was a cheesy talk in someways, but it did inspire and I
learned a ton in that area.

I think the new "moral imperative" (take that term with a grain of salt as I'm
not a big believer in moral imperatives) in software is to become an expert in
security for the benefit of the community. To understand and improve the tools
available for people to protect them. Don't just know that Tor, TrueCrypt, etc
exist but understand them to the point where you know how you would start
implementing them yourself.

Personally I always found the security community interesting, and working on
hard problems but it never really interested me. Recently I've been reading as
much as I can. I have a long way to go, but I feel that this is important.

I can read papers on cutting edge research in Machine Learning pretty fluently
now. When it comes to truly understanding the technology around encryption,
anonymity and privacy, I want to get to that point as soon as I can.

~~~
mindcrime
That's been closer to my experience as well. I feel like I have a moral
obligation to use my ability to learn and hack on technology, to help people
protect their privacy. I'm not necessarily going to be implementing anything
new, but at the very least I feel like I should learn Tor, TrueCrypt, I2P,
GPG, etc. at a very deep level, then offer to teach other people, and help
with advocacy and promotion for this stuff.

------
rdudekul
This is scary stuff!

I am flabbergasted to know that Palantir along with Sean Parker and Peter
Theil are involved. I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now. If Palantir is
getting investments/revenues from government, I wonder if Facebook too is
getting some.

~~~
nir
Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the
whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.

~~~
boi_v2
In FB you use your wall to publish the info you want to share openly, the
other important stuff like private chats, online behavior (clicked links,
friends you visit, photos you see, time of login/logout), groups you
participate, GPS locations of places you've been or are and etc are not
supposed to be open to anyone.

~~~
nir
Yes, but experience shows it's FB's interest that you share as much of your
data as possible. It's not going to change, publicizing your data is its whole
business.

------
marze
The sock puppets are most interesting. Would any be posting here?

~~~
mindcrime
I don't know, but it's interesting to ponder how one would detect them if they
were. I'd love to see a project to scrape HN comments and try to auto-detect
the sockpuppet posts.

It's a bit scary though, since a false positive on that could really hurt
someone's reputation... if I wrote something like that, I'd actually be a
little bit reluctant to share it. :-(

~~~
samstave
We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they
have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from
accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response.

Other accounts post pro-government comments again from young accounts.

We ban them pretty quickly. If you look at a users comment history and they
are clearly having an agenda to post - they are either misguided, uninformed
or sock-puppets.

As a mod of a ~large /r/ I wish I could see the IPs of the people posting.
Specifically, if I could see if they are .mil (i.e. Eglin) IPs - so I could
ban the whole range.

~~~
jlgreco
> _We see them, or what we believe to be them on reddit a lot. Typically, they
> have a pro-military agenda - often posting "emotional" military pics from
> accounts that are days old in an attempt to garner a sympathetic response._

So basically the weekly _" Check out my dog! He served with me in
Afghanistan!"_ posts on Reddit from hour-old accounts?

~~~
samstave
Yes, those and the accounts that come in attempting to shut down criticism and
discussion on other topics where their is clearly a national narrative the MSM
is trying to push.

------
cliveowen
An interesting article for sure, but I'm confused about the point the author
wanted to make. Many countries employ so called cyber-weapons, and if you want
a chance to deploy your malware you have to have 0-day exploits. And wherever
there's a demand for high-skilled services, there's someone ready to offer it,
at a price. Also, even if you're an activist trying to unmask some kind of
governmental conspiracy, disseminating credit card codes and threatening FBI
agents isn't going to buy you any sympathy from any court. As to Michael
Hastings's death it's early to make any kind of analysis and, as of now, it's
nothing but wild speculation.

~~~
martinlandau
ted.com/talks/daniel_suarez_the_kill_decision_shouldn_t_belong_to_a_robot.html
Here was Suarez at a recent ted talk mentioning robotic control of lethal
weapons.
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/like-a...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/02/like-
a-swarm-of-lethal-bugs-the-most-terrifying-drone-video-yet/273270/) Here is a
nice video of Drone insects with lethal kill abilities. I know some people at
the pentagon, USAF, etc, am on a base now. These people really do have good
intentions and are trying to do good things I believe. However as Snowden just
said in some interview, part of his "job" was to find and document
infrastructure weaknesses that could be targeted in a Stuxnet kind of way. All
governments certainly have all this data stored, best way to use cyberattacks
to take down a foreign government, etc etc

So think about the future, where the AI's take over, and these NSA types all
over the planet who were just trying to serve thier citizens and thier
governments have all the best ways to destroy mankind and his infrastructure
and other systems stored all over the place, what made sense for various
goverments/technologies controlled by human beings and thier citizens, in the
flick of a switch literally becomes total madness in a world where a cyber AI
can go through these systems and use them against mankind collectively.

it would just be too tempting for the AI not to use it to control or eliminate
us. Folks like Rheingold and annissimov are very worried about this future and
stress trying to make sure these future AI's are very benevolent and
compassionate. LOL! It is for this reason we should have far more transparency
and international agreements to limit this kind of stuff, not to give one
nation state and edge over the other, but to prevent a higher intelligence
from using all the nation states data/technology against all of mankind. I
don't think we stop what is coming in another hundred years or 2. LOL!

------
sheri
"Bonesaw"?? Really? That sounds like a McBain movie from the Simpsons.

~~~
skore
I particularly enjoyed the use of the word "holistic" in the sentence "a
holistic approach to target discovery".

