
Activist investors to pressure privately held Palantir on human rights - anigbrowl
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-investors/activist-investors-to-pressure-privately-held-palantir-on-human-rights-idUSKBN1XW1XH
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core-questions
Fascinating.

Recently, we saw similar action when Seth Vargo, activist programmer at large
and former Chef employee, damaged the Chef community by making his free, open
source cookbooks unavailable for a period of time in protest for Chef making a
deal with ICE to provide services. Chef had to cancel this deal, which
probably in turn massively damaged the finances of an already-hurting company
that had contributed significantly to the overall open source effort.

Because Vargo disagreed with ICE for political reasons, he damaged ICE in a
miniscule way by denying them the ability to purchase Chef's services. No
doubt ICE barely feels this and can pivot to some other config management
solution, but Chef is hurt, and that's the point - not just because this is
what Vargo had power to accomplish, but because hurting the organizations that
even consider dealing with ICE is the precedent these folks want to set.

Vargo is clearly only one of many people who are involved in this effort, if

> The Investor Alliance for Human Rights, which claims more than 150
> institutional members representing $4 trillion in managed assets

is trying to crush Palantir for dealing with them.

Is this legal? It seems like it adds up to an attempt to make a denial of
service attack against a government body so as to effectively ruin their
ability to procure services from the market. It's not a long shot to suggest
that the goal is to stop the ability of ICE to function reasonably at all.

Whether you agree or not with what ICE is doing, it's a valid question to ask
whether interest groups should be allowed to deliberately interfere with the
ability of a legitimate government agency to purchase things. If this scales
up beyond software projects, and it may already have done so - both with
direct efforts and with self-censorship - the organization itself could
actually begin to suffer at large.

So, who is this group?

[https://investorsforhumanrights.org/about](https://investorsforhumanrights.org/about)

> The Investor Alliance is supported by the Open Society Foundations, Humanity
> United, the Freedom Fund, and anonymous donors.

Ahh, the OSF, which is George Soros.

~~~
anigbrowl
_If this scales up beyond software projects, and it may already have done so -
both with direct efforts and with self-censorship - the organization itself
could actually begin to suffer at large._

That's the goal, yes.

 _Ahh, the OSF, which is George Soros._

And what about it? The OSF throws out tons of grants. I've never applied for
one or worked with an organization that received such financing, but this
seems no different to me from a conservative organization getting a donation
from some wealthy financier like Robert Mercer or whatever foundation the
Kochs run. Most of the anti-immigration 'think tanks' like FAIR, CIS and so on
are part of a dense cross-financing networking that's supported by the estate
of Elizabeth Scaife, a scion of a Pennsylvania banking family.

