
Palantir is using War on Terror tools to track American citizens - pdog
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/
======
opportune
I'm much less concerned with Palantir being used internally by corporations to
detect information leaks (although in practice this also means it will be used
to quash whistleblowers), since that's at least a viable use for their
technology. And it's good that Palantir is pivoting towards less invasive
applications of their technology such as supply chain tracking.

But the article touches on the biggest issue with Palantir, which is that they
seem to be completely fine with allowing law enforcement agencies to use their
software for parallel construction, which is in my opinion a pretty egregious
violation of the 4th amendment. Although it may be constitutional for police
departments to purchase data from e.g. Facebook or some data broker, even
local police departments are known to employ dragnet-style surveillance
through things like Stingray devices. Of course we have a number of three-
letter agencies, also Palantir customers, who don't even need to pretend that
they're following the 4th amendment.

Since Palantir is essentially enabling the construction of all the tools
required for a complete surveillance state, and actively using their tools for
that purpose for financial gain, I think that makes them one of the least
ethical companies in tech. I certainly wouldn't be able to live with myself if
I knew I was writing software with the explicit purpose of being able to track
down rebels in Yemen, catch illegal immigrants, and violate the constitutional
rights of millions of Americans.

~~~
jonnybgood
Can you expand on exactly how Palantir is used for parellel construction?

~~~
opportune
Law enforcement uses dragnet warrantless surveillance to gather data (such as
who is calling whom, who is in physical proximity with whom). That data is
loaded into Palantir's software.

Law enforcement uses that data to acquire admissible evidence of the
perpetrators' crimes. This is the crucial step, because although the original
evidence couldn't be admissible in court due to its collection without a
warrant, it _can_ be used to acquire more evidence. If the warrantless
surveillance includes information such as the time and place of where you plan
to commit a crime, law enforcement can stop you for a random check on the way
there, giving them actual evidence for prosecution. Now that evidence can be
used in court, even though the only way law enforcement were able to acquire
it was through unconstitutional practices.

The thing about Palantir is that it needs big data to work. Police departments
don't just have random chunks of data lying around containing large numbers of
connections between large numbers of people - they might have something like
that for something like suspected criminal gangs, but that wouldn't be enough
data to make Palantir's software worthwhile. So acquiring the data necessary
to use Palantir's software requires mass data collection. Some of their mass
data collection techniques may not require a warrant, such as using license
plate captures, but some does, such as who you're calling.

So does Palantir perform warrantless surveillance themselves? To my knowledge,
no. But when they sell their software to law enforcement agencies, they must
know that the only way their customer could get bang for their buck is through
mass surveillance. In my opinion, the person willingly and knowingly selling
tools for oppressive purposes holds a lot of blame for the actual oppression
that occurs as a result.

~~~
RedTennisRacket
You raise several good points, but a few clarifications here:

\- In our software that we deploy to police departments, generally the origin
of any piece of information is tracked, as well as when it was entered and by
who. The intention with this is to prevent this (and other) kinds of abuse.
Malicious users can still abuse the system and do a parallel construction e.g.
outside of our system or maybe in a way that the two actions (finding non-
admissible data and finding admissible data) seem unrelated, but at that point
they would be spending quite a bit of time and criminal energy on this. I
don't think this would happen commonly for a variety of practical reasons (but
ultimately there's no way to completely prevent it).

Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement (in the various
shapes and forms it comes in) is a force for good and prevents many bad things
from happening every single day, is at the heart of the palantir philosophy.
If you fundamentally think the government is evil, palantir would probably not
be the workplace for you. But once you see all of the bad things LE can
prevent thanks to our software, it becomes pretty easy to believe in, even if
individual bad actors exist (and always will), like racist cops, cops that
abuse their power, etc.

\- If the organization is acquiring warrantless surveillance, then this
generally means that there is the legislative base for them to acquire the
data in the first place. What this looks like varies from country to country,
some countries are much stricter with the regulations than others. So for
instance in some countries it is not allowed to get information from a
suspects public facebook profile, whereas in other countries this is
considered A-OK. Especially in europe these things have recently become much
more strict with GDPR (and similar rules that apply to government entities).
You'd think that be a downside to palantir (less data = less value?) but
actually it's a big business opportunity, because our software is the only
thing available that is even remotely close in this space to having enough
access control 'finesse' that it can enable organizations to be compliant to
this law. So this is an area (and competitive advantage) we are investing a
lot into -- and typically organizations go from 'completely non-compliant'
when we arrive there (e.g. never even deleting data like license plates that
are supposed to be deleted after 3 months etc, audit-logging any searches
investigators do, limiting search scope, ...) to being fairly or even fully
compliant.

Now my personal opinion is that everyone should be able to enjoy great privacy
and control over their PII just like citizens of the EU do, so if you live
e.g. in the US other another country where the law is lax, you should consider
taking political action to change the situation.

Of course we never endorse or support any workflows that are in any way
unconstitutional, and we have terminated relationships before with very big
government agencies when we had doubt about whether our tools would be used
for unlawful purposes.

\- The "big data" thing is a bit of a misunderstanding I think -- we have "big
data" tools too, but usually these are not of interest to local law
enforcement. If you check out our youtube channel you will find some
(atrociously old!) videos of the tool that's popular in LLE
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMv3TBxulu4)
for instance). This tool is in fact often used with just hand-entered
information -- analysts create objects (e.g. persons, links between them) in
their investigation. So the data really isn't that big and mostly hand-
curated, and the tool works fine without mass data collection (better than
with, perhaps). Most of what local law enforcement does with 'big data' tools
is to generate reports like crime statistics.

"Police departments don't just have random chunks of data lying around
containing large numbers of connections between large numbers of people" \--
actually, they really do! Any police department of any size that has existed
for a while will have a database with millions of convictions, suspects,
court-cases etc in them. Usually on some crufty mainframe or in some crufty
old SQL database that contains a lot of terribly inconsistent data (dead
links, data duplication, etc.) Also sometimes some of this data is shared
between countries, states etc. You can find some videos on youtube of our CEO
talking about the challenges of data integration and such.

Ultimately of course there is a general statistical trend (belief?) that 'more
data is better', because if there is more and more complete data, you have a
bigger chance of finding that connection between e.g. a terrorist and some
billionaire who might be funding said terrorists, etc. At least up until a
point (at which the data probably becomes just too noisy/hard to deal with,
because every individual piece of information carries very little meaning. At
least the NSA seems to subscribe to this belief according to their public
statements, and I'd think if anyone knows about this stuff, it's them) and
assuming you have the necessary CPU power and talent (data scientists) to
actually do something useful with this data. Local law enforcement orgs like
police generally lack the latter. In police departments, most users are only
sophisticated enough to run searches for things like names, SSN, number plates
etc, really.

\- We generally know a lot about how our software is used at most of our
installations, and almost always actively take steps to prevent abuse
(auditing etc). Most government organizations will not let us see things like
what their analysts exactly searched for (because that is obviously sensitive
information) but we do a lot of work to help organizations prevent abuse and
insider threats at a higher level. As mentioned above, we have taken action in
the past in situations where we suspected abuse. It's on a case-by-case basis,
of course -- imagine if there is e.g. one analyst abusing the system, then
that analyst getting fired/reprimanded would probably be sufficient action
(obviously this is not in our responsibility), but if we suspect systematic
abuse or we see signs of repeated abuse without repercussions, then we might
pull out completely.

~~~
specialist
Thank you for participating here.

 _" Ultimately trust in the government and that law enforcement ... is a force
for good and prevents many bad things from happening every single day, is at
the heart of the palantir philosophy."_

Trust is built on transparency, accountability, responsibility.

Can I make FOIA requests to Palantir?

~~~
RedTennisRacket
FOIAs are not made to companies, they are made to government entities. But
yes, of course you can make FOIA requests to government entities we work with
(the law guarantees you this privilege), and about the work we do with them --
reporters do this all the time.

In some of the more liberal countries the things we do with the government are
even part of public record and you can find contracts and services we provide
them etc documented online without having to do any kind of request.

~~~
specialist
How do I determine everything Palantir knows about me, and all the ways
they've used and shared that data?

~~~
fishcakes
That is like asking everything Oracle or Postgresql knows about you. It
doesn't make sense.

Palantir is _software_ deployed for specific customers. The customers then use
Palantir against their data and publicly available data.

~~~
specialist
Thank you for the clarification. I had always assumed Palantir, like their
competitors (Seisent, ChoicePoint, etc), did both services and software.

------
dangerlibrary
> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services uses Palantir to detect
> Medicare fraud.

Having worked in this field, I can say that this is hilarious overkill. The
vast majority (in dollar terms) of Medicare/Medicaid fraud is drug companies
misreporting their Average Market Price (AMP), the critical variable in how
much they get paid. In 2012, Glaxo settled(!) a small bundle of cases, some of
which I worked on, for three billion dollars [0].

You don't need police-state surveillance of individuals, you need visibility
into company transaction records.

[0] [https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-
guilty-...](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/glaxosmithkline-plead-guilty-and-
pay-3-billion-resolve-fraud-allegations-and-failure-report)

~~~
creaghpatr
Medicare fraud is estimated to be around $60B per year or 10% of the whole
budget. So if Palantir can decrease that rate by 1 or 2% then it's tough to
call that overkill

[http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/medicare-funds-
totaling-60-bi...](http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/medicare-funds-
totaling-60-billion-improperly-paid-report/story?id=32604330)

>Going even further back, in 1998, a Senate investigation into Medicare fraud
found $6 million in payments to a “business” whose fake address would have
been smack in the middle of the Miami Airport.

>The report released today shows no improvement, but investigators say it is
not that hard to fix the problem.

>ABC News went to one of the locations listed in the report that was on
Chicago’s Southside next to a porn shop, with no doctor’s office evident,
where Medicare sent nearly $600,000 using an ineligible mailbox shop location
as a billing address until 2013.

Seems like exactly the kind of problem Palantir can solve to the advantage of
taxpayers.

~~~
stef25
These things could be fixed by simple address verification. Amazing they have
to wait for something like Palantir.

~~~
Anderkent
This is like someone saying web search could be solved by a simple database
lookup.

------
thestephen
> The LAPD uses Palantir’s Gotham product for Operation Laser, a program to
> identify and deter people likely to commit crimes. Information from rap
> sheets, parole reports, police interviews, and other sources is fed into the
> system to generate a list of people the department defines as chronic
> offenders [...] The list is distributed to patrolmen, with orders to monitor
> and stop the pre-crime suspects as often as possible, using excuses such as
> jaywalking or fix-it tickets.

This is pretty much everything I was afraid of when it comes to this field -
big data "prediction" being used to predispose people into crime, and by
extension, algorithmic racism.

~~~
zo1
For all we know, keeping a closer eye on previous criminals deters them from
repeating their crimes. This strikes me as a very benign way of preventing a
crime from happening in the first place. Rather than letting it happen,
creating a victim and perpetrator, and then having to punish the latter yet
again.

At the very least, this should give them the impression that policing is much
higher than it actually is. Sounds like a good deterrent to me.

~~~
archerface
There is a lot of problems with this strategy when introduced into the real
world; the chaotic vortex that it is.

The data can be wrong. This could be easily fixed if law enforcement agencies
had to actually verify that the data was correct, but in practice this seems
to rarely occur.

When people are told by a group that they are a thing, repeatedly, they
eventually accept that they are that thing. If the cops keep harassing you for
being a gangbanger when you have never been one your whole, you just happen to
be associated with a few individuals who are, you eventually just move towards
that group. Why not? The powers that be already think you are one and they
treat you like one, which causes other people to treat you like one, so why
not just be one?

You also need to consider the idea of enforcing crime that hasn't happened
yet. That defeats the whole point of law enforcement. It is meant as a
reactionary force, not an offensive force. Policing someone who has the
_potential_ for crime assumes that they will do it again, which makes it so
your essentially treating them as guilty for something they haven't done yet.
From my perspective, that seems to defeat the purpose of our legal system.

Anyway, I think I will end my rant here...

------
prepend
This isn’t Palantir, this is the companies who buy Palantir software.

The data from JPMorganChase isn’t visibile to Palantir as an organization, but
to the bank.

This headline is weird and as accurate as “Microsoft knows everything about
you” because the bank uses SQL Server. Or “the Python developers” because
python and pandas is used to link a bunch of data together.

Since this is Bloomberg, I would expect them to know the difference between
software and data services. Google gets your data when you use them (except
for enterprise), most other products don’t.

Cynically, this seems like oppo PR against Thiel. How could you prove this
suspicion?

~~~
jawns
Is it really the case that data does not cross boundaries among Palantir
clients? And that the algorithms used by any given client are only informed by
the data that client provides?

~~~
creaghpatr
Unless proven otherwise, then that is hearsay.

~~~
prepend
Good point, but this is the risk for every cloud hosted software. So every AWS
and azure product has this suspicion that’s impossible or extremely difficult
to remove.

If you’re really paranoid, then all non-OSS software.

So again, why is Palantir more worrisome than Salesforce?

------
eptcyka
Whilst the article may not have any surprising information for the regular
hacker news reader, it may come as a surprise that a non-insurance, non-
government business holds more private data about an individual than Facebook
does, especially since most individuals will not recall ever interacting with
said company. I think it is beneficial if more people become aware of this.

~~~
jonnybgood
> it may come as a surprise that a non-insurance, non-government business
> holds more private data about an individual than Facebook does

Where in the article is that stated?

~~~
drcongo
In the title?

~~~
jonnybgood
It’s clickbait. It doesn’t state it or give a citation for it anywhere in the
actual article.

~~~
drcongo
Yeah, but you edited your post to specify "in the article" after I'd posted.
At the point of my reply, it was correct.

------
ideophobia
I used to be intelligence analyst that utilized Palantir on a daily basis. Ask
me anything.

~~~
opportune
To what extent are searches/queries/data-accesses performed by analysts logged
and audited? Were there actual and official repercussions for looking at the
data of family members and romantic interests?

~~~
ideophobia
From what I recall all activity is logged. We also had numerous external
databases/tools that were essentially API connections to reduce the number of
separate logins we'd have to do, and each of those databases had their own
audit mechanisms. Long before we ever had Palantir in my department, we did
have an employee who had misused a database for personal reasons. They were
initially terminated but that was undone upon appeal. They were reprimanded
either way and lost access to various tools/databases going forward for a long
time. I know of many stories of police, for example, getting fired for abusing
the NCIC databases for personal gain. Sadly it often falls on the agencies to
self-police these issues, and most don't have anyone dedicated to this effort.
So it really falls on the first line supervisors, of which some are great
about it and some couldn't be bothered. I am of the opinion that all security,
intelligence, and LE agencies should have an internal team solely focused on
audit & review actions for internal abuse/misuse/privacy concerns, but that is
a minority opinion from my experience.

~~~
narag
_From what I recall all activity is logged._

My apologies in advance to offtopic haters. But this is too good to overlook.
Did anybody else notice how this question relates to the origin of the name?

------
binarymax
This isn't surprising. In fact it was expected. This company was born out of
the Total Information Awareness mandate by GWB shortly after 9/11\. Total
Information Awareness means monitoring of everyone and everything. They got
contracts and funding and grew to the original vision set in motion 15 years
ago.

------
ckastner
> Aided by as many as 120 “forward-deployed engineers”

This term popping up again made me curious. To my surprise, that's not just
some overloaded nickname (what's cooler than styling yourself with a military
or martial arts term, right?), that's what they are actually called:

[https://www.palantir.com/careers/teams/forward-deployed-
soft...](https://www.palantir.com/careers/teams/forward-deployed-software-
engineers)

~~~
jakelazaroff
What's the difference between a normal software engineer and a "forward-
deployed" software engineer, though? It sounds to me like that's just their
military-flavored version of "rockstar developer" or "code ninja".

~~~
droidist2
Well... simply put, a forward deployed engineer is on the front lines of
totally crushing it

------
jondiggsit
I’ve always thought - I don’t care if the NSA is spying on US citizens because
their job is national security. The problem is when those tools trickle down.
All of a sudden you have a local cop with too much time on their hands spying
on you. But if you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to
hide, right? Isn’t that how the saying goes?

~~~
GyYZTfWBfQw
> But if you’re not doing anything wrong, you shouldn’t have anything to hide,
> right? Isn’t that how the saying goes?

The problem is that "wrong" can be anything arbitrary, and what's not "wrong"
today, it can be "wrong" tomorrow, however arbitrary it is. Somewhere it is
wrong (illegal) to call someone a "n*zi", even online.

Also anyone who tells me that they have nothing to hide, I ask for their
password. For some reason they don't give me their password. Interesting, huh?

~~~
spdionis
Nothing to hide from the law != nothing to hide from you.

~~~
GyYZTfWBfQw
Law? These are people who have access to your data, how am I, a stranger, any
different from any other stranger who have access to your data? Would it be OK
if I indirectly obtained your password and use it to access your data or
something?

Mind you, I was speaking in general about people who claim they don't care
about their privacy, or about these companies collecting their personal data,
or having a history of their private messages, etc.

How can you not care about them saving your conversations in plain text, but
then suddenly care about it when I ask you to show it to me? The only
difference seems to be that I'm actively, personally, directly asking you for
it, but ultimately it would be the same outcome.

~~~
spdionis
> Mind you, I was speaking in general about people who claim they don't care
> about their privacy

We are talking in a thread about NSA having your data vs other companies
having your data.

------
EGreg
Let’s suppose you have an actual solution, like a free open source platform
that is used by millions of people and took you 7 years and half a million
dollars to build, because you saw the problems coming back in 2011? A platform
with 5 million users in 110 countries?

It seems the press of today won’t really care about solutions, but only
highlighting a scandal. Am I wrong? What would one do to get them to write a
story about actual solutions like solid.mit.edu or ours:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

Press kit? News conference? Some kinda weird publicity stunt?

Serious question.

------
occamrazor
And they sell GPDR compliance solutions:
[https://www.palantir.com/solutions/gdpr/](https://www.palantir.com/solutions/gdpr/)

Oh, the irony!

~~~
prepend
Is it though? It’s pretty hard for companies with lots of diverse data on
their users to comply. Finding it all and deleting it is pretty hard. The hope
I had was that companies wouldn’t track it at all. I fear that only companies
that afford stuff like Palantir will collect it, because they can comply and
show evidence of complying.

------
flyingcircus3
When a company is named after the crystal ball an evil wizard uses to spy on
his enemies in The Lord of The Rings, and that company's founder was the first
large investor in Facebook, and that same founder is able to fund company
ending lawsuits against media outlets, headlines like this are akin to "water
is wet"

------
sevensor
After September 11, thre was a big push for "Visual Analytics," which is
basically rebranded statistics plus visual data mining tools. There's a report
called _Illuminating the Path_ that lays out the research agenda. I read it in
grad school when my advisor was trying to tag everything under the sun as
Visual Analytics in an attempt to get access to the Visual Analytics money
pot. (We didn't.) It's creepy to see it come back around, fully realized by
Palantir.

------
avs733
Ignoring the enormous argument over whether what I am about to say is legal in
the US/America's particularly constructed law...

Is it time to consider whether companies who's primary business is the
collection, summation, synthesis, and re purposing of information should be
defacto illegal?

Its not that having the government do this is meaningfully better, but I'm
convinced that is a better overall path. The public seem more afraid and more
willing to engage in a more serious discussion over ethics. At the very least,
it would enable the public to have more oversight over how such data is
collected, stored, embargoed (or not), and used. The level of abstraction and
fuzzing that is allowed by allowing a non-governmental entity like Palantir or
Facebook to have (whether as a collector or aggregator) the data and
governments be only a user seems too difficult to regulate and even have a
transparent discussion about because claims of national security and secrecy
are nested within claims of trade secret and intellectual property in ways
that create a moat around effective oversight.

So seriously...if we made this business model illegal, what do we lose? What
exceptions would need to exist?

~~~
ng12
> Is it time to consider whether companies who's primary business is the
> collection, summation, synthesis, and re purposing of information should be
> defacto illegal?

You mean IBM/SAP/Oracle?

~~~
avs733
I don't think it is unreasonable within what I said to differentiate the
industry that supports data collection and archiving as a broad process (e.g.,
those you describe) with those that seek and intent specifically to collect
and operationalize data about people without fully informed consent.

~~~
ng12
Palantir does not do data collection in that sense. They're much closer to IBM
than you realize.

~~~
fourthark
Especially if you consider IBM's systems for tracking the Holocaust and
Apartheid. Special purpose people-tracking systems.

------
snowwrestler
> Cavicchia was in charge of forensic investigations at the bank. Through
> Palantir, he gained administrative access to a full range of corporate
> security databases that had previously required separate authorizations and
> a specific business justification to use. He had unprecedented access to
> everything, all at once, all the time, on one analytic platform. He was a
> one-man National Security Agency, surrounded by the Palantir engineers, each
> one costing the bank as much as $3,000 a day.

I've long thought that the "secret sauce" of Palantir is just that signing a
Palantir contract gives executives a reason and excuse to pull together data
that had never before been indexed against each other.

I mean, if you take any old dumb BI platform and give it access to data that
people have not previously connected, you're going to get new insights.

Someone once described Palantir as a data mapping consultancy that marketed
itself as a software platform.

------
amelius
Why isn't there a privacy watchdog that constantly monitors these kind of
companies?

I also expect this watchdog to test for data leakage from one site/company to
another (e.g. by taking on the role of customer).

They should do this on a frequent basis.

Without this, companies seem to be free to do whatever they want.

~~~
justherefortart
Hahahaha

This is how the fucking government gets around the Bill of Rights, primarily
the 4th. When it's outsourced, you have no rights. Parallel construction needs
to be the next addition to the 4th or it's own amendment.

------
anigbrowl
Sort of off-topic, but I have a need for a graph/relationship oriented
database like this (on a relatively tiny scale) and am having a hard time
choosing between the many alternatives. Open source is a must, but otherwise
I'm primarily interested in ease of use and visualization compatibility - I
want to focus on my problem domain, rather than writing a lot of code or
hacking for its own sake. Right now looking at Neo4j and GraphDB, would
welcome other suggestions.

Thanks in advance!

------
clavalle
I think I heard the maxim once "If it can be abused, it will be abused."

We need to start getting ahead of worst-case scenarios and to hell with people
that think that approach is paranoid.

------
2close4comfort
Wouldn't be interesting if all the Facebook data being collected is really to
feed info to Palantir...with a layer of deniability and they get data on
billions.

------
everdev
This was a huge debate when the Patriot act was passed, that US citizens would
get caught up in surveillance.

It seems common in history that during war time, a country aggressively
pursues it's own population for spies or sympathizers for the enemy. It send
also common that the country goes overboard so as not to let anyone through
the cracks and a lot of innocent people get swept up in the process.

------
beaconstudios
Why does the media seem to be publishing so many "well duh" tier articles
about various companies at the moment? "Big data company collects big data",
"company known for monetising private data collects private data", "political
consulting company profiles voters and tries to affect vote".

No shit?

~~~
empath75
I know this might be a surprise to you, but not everyone knows everything that
you do.

~~~
beaconstudios
I'm not exactly tapping my own research here. Palantir is a big data/spying
company, what do you expect from them? Facebook asks you for lots of private
data and it's clearly obvious that when you post data on Facebook, Facebook
gets that data. So what's the shock that they hold this private data? The only
surprising aspect of the current Facebook drama is that they apparently mine
your phone for additional data but that's not the main focus of the outcry.
Why are people surprised that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy,
did political research and affected a voter outreach strategy? None of this
requires any real background knowledge, and yet the outcry seems extremely
disproportionate to the revelations at hand. It seems like the Snowden reports
all over again, where the world was up in arms that an intelligence agency was
collecting intelligence.

~~~
JorgeGT
Most of the people knows nothing about all these things, until the media picks
up the story. They at most believe Palantir is a Skype stone for elves and
that Facebook makes money just running ads just like printed newspaper TV
stations and radios run ads on very basic criteria (i.e. different ads during
a soap opera than during an action movie), but they're not aware of the depth
of analysis FB et al. perform.

Example from other field: aircraft passengers have breathed compressor bleed
air since jet engines were introduced in the 60s, everyone in the industry
knows this is how it works, and yet it wasn't until last year, when major
publishers such as Fortune [1], The Guardian [2], Bloomberg [3], The Telegraph
[4] etc. happened to simultaneously run this issue, that lot of the general
public learned about it for the first time, most of them having assumed that
cabin air was taken directly from the atmosphere.

\---

[1] [http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/dangerous-cabin-fumes-
planes/](http://fortune.com/2017/08/09/dangerous-cabin-fumes-planes/)

[2] [https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/19/sick-crew-
to...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/aug/19/sick-crew-toxic-air-
planes-frequent-flyers-ill)

[3]
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/airline-w...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-08-08/airline-
workers-warn-of-dangerous-fumes-onboard)

[4] [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/world-health-
organis...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/world-health-organisation-
report-toxic-cabin-air/)

~~~
beaconstudios
the thing is, articles about how facebook collects private data and analyses
it have been running pretty much non-stop for the last few years. I would
totally understand the reaction if that hadn't been the case.

------
common_
Pop Quiz: Which two companies had their first office at 101 University Avenue
in Palo Alto?

The answer says quite a lot, I think.

~~~
drcongo
I've found Piazza's Fine Foods Inc and PhysioTouch Inc. Not sure what I'm
supposed to take away from this answer though.

~~~
gberger
Facebook

------
diskandar27
this is kind of scary and sad when powerful technology is being misused
...probably it is better to live in China ??? ..the government openly
monitoring its citizen instead of spying on them

~~~
pmlnr
Definitely not, although that specific aspect - you _know_ you're being
watched - makes life different, in some way, simpler. The rules are obvious,
however, if they change, you might find yourself in a much worse situation,
than in the West - for now.

~~~
gnode
> you _know_ you're being watched - makes life different, in some way,
> simpler.

Arguably, what happens when people are aware of surveillance is one of the
worst parts of it. Following the Snowden revelations, there were noticeable
chilling effects:

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/27/new-s...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/04/27/new-
study-snowdens-disclosures-about-nsa-spying-had-a-scary-effect-on-free-
speech/?utm_term=.824c5af75415)

------
shmerl
So it's a double play on the name now. I.e. it's in the hands of Sauron?

------
billhendricksjr
Given Thiel’s purported views on privacy, the hypocrisy is overwhelming.

------
ajeet_dhaliwal
My main takeaway is that the corporations don't have the funds to waste on
this and don't see the ROI (given how many large companies listed in the
article stopped using Palantir) whereas the government does. Peter Thiel being
a libertarian is clearly aware of the scale of government wastage and decides
to go in for the win.

------
amelius
How can we build a case against them, and sue them? EFF?

------
dmitriid
> As shown in the privacy breaches at Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, the
> pressure to monetize data at tech companies is ceaseless

Says Bloomberg, and includes Facebook code on their pages

------
mdekkers
_" the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the
franchise to women [...] have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’
into an oxymoron."_

That guy is a nice piece of work.

------
otakucode
Does anyone else remember a time when paranoia was considered a mental illness
rather than a virtue? Or am I imagining that?

------
return1
i find the peter thiel conspiracy-theoretic spiderweb in the article
ridiculous (i believe you could make a similar one for any well known vc). I
wonder however why he invests in these companies. i mean centralizing
intelligence seems a very anti-libertarian thing to do.

------
chinathrow
I can't wait that EU citizen will hit them hard after May 25th.

~~~
paulie_a
I think palantir is CIA related... They probably are not going to worry about
pesky international regulations

~~~
sschueller
That's what sanctions are for. But I highly doubt the EU will ever sanction
the US as they are so dependant on them.

~~~
noir_lord
EU has more people and an equivalent sized economy.

The EU could stand up to the US if they felt it mattered.

Other than defence partnerships the EU is no more dependent on the US than the
US is on the EU.

It's a two way street.

Unless you think the US would be happy to walk a way from the largest single
market in the world (by GDP).

~~~
briandear
Except the EU isn’t a country. Poland doesn’t have the same incentives that
Greece might, as an example.

~~~
noir_lord
Except trade deals and regulations are negotiated/implemented top down.

So the EU has teeth if the US pushed it too far.

It's hard to get the EU to agree on a lot of things but something sufficient
to make the EU consider punishing the US would likely be important enough they
would agree.

------
ataturk
My biggest issue with former military people is that their skills don't easily
translate into any other fields and that their mindset is usually heavily
canted towards statism, which is a big problem when you combine the kinds of
surveillance technology we have with needing to turn a profit. It makes
anything East Germany did look like they were underachievers.

------
klunger
Culture flows from the top. Peter Thiel apparently views women's suffrage and
poor people as "tough for libertarians [like him]". Can we talk about, well,
how problematic it is that a company that has information on just about
everyone (and all the power this yields) is lead by someone like this?

> As Thiel’s wealth has grown, he’s gotten more strident. In a 2009 essay for
> the Cato Institute, he railed against taxes, ­government, women, poor
> people, and society’s acquiescence to the inevitability of death. (Thiel
> doesn’t accept death as inexorable.) He wrote that he’d reached some radical
> conclusions: “Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and
> democracy are compatible.” The 1920s was the last time one could feel
> “genuinely optimistic” about American democracy, he said; since then, “the
> vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to
> women—two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians—have
> rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

------
technologia
Is this really surprising? Palantir's value comes from its data not that god
awful interface it has.

~~~
danso
Really? Because others have frequently claimed the opposite -- that it is a
visualization company with the insight to focus on lucrative government
contracts.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674460](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674460)

~~~
technologia
I'm just speaking from my interactions with their platform during my time as a
govie. I don't disagree with what you are saying, they definitely capitalized
on gov contracts in this space; I should have been clearer with my statement.
For groups that know their data well, they tend to push for custom features
from Palantir in lieu of developers resulting in some crap shoot interfaces.

