
Trump’s paid Thiel’s Palantir $1.5B so far to build ICE’s surveillance network - ghobs91
https://thenextweb.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/08/12/study-trumps-paid-peter-thiels-palantir-1-5b-so-far-to-build-ices-mass-surveillance-network/
======
word-reader
Domestic surveillance by ICE of everyone, both citizens and those without
papers, wouldn't even be necessary if either the border was properly
controlled, or if employers were made more liable for employing workers
illegally. But somehow we simultaneously have these billions of dollars in
surveillance, associated chilling effects, the whole police-industrial
complex, and no effect at all on the rate of illegal immigration, which is
higher than it was under the Obama admin by some metrics.

Sometimes it seems like the purpose of these contracts is just to give
taxpayer money to contractors to put a boot on said taxpayers' faces, rather
than whatever is listed.

~~~
dboreham
The whole employment without papers thing is a bit of a mystery to me because:
I am an employer. I was also an immigrant. Based on being those two things I
can't imagine how you get a job without the legal basis to have one[1]. And
yet, very large numbers of people do. I'm guessing there's a whole big story
to how this works, but surely it has to depend on the government at least
turning a blind eye somewhere.

[1]As a non-citizen I had a driver's licence that indicated my immigration
status. I didn't have a US passport. I couldn't buy a gun legally nor could I
vote. As an employer we are required to verify immigration status for anyone
to whom we make a job offer, a task that our HR people take very seriously.

~~~
quxbar
You can buy a fake social in Queens for $50. It's a deliberately flawed system
because fixing it would utterly decimate the pool of cheap labor for the
service sector.

Source: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good-
work...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good-worker-
papers-dont-matter-how-a-trump-construction-crew-has-relied-on-immigrants-
without-legal-
status/2019/08/09/cf59014a-b3ab-11e9-8e94-71a35969e4d8_story.html)

------
rubyn00bie
Shame on Palantir and Thiel for being a part of this; it's still pretty
disgusting to me the sheer lack of moral responsibility at play here.

1\. Insinuating that the tools will ever predict crime or terrorism.

2\. Allowing, fostering, and building tools of mass surveillance without
oversight in secret for no reason other than to surveil.

3\. Aiding in the human rights abuses through enabling ICE and other
organizations which fuel America's concentration camps.

Though this is pretty unsurprising considering he literally wants to consume
the blood of the young: [https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-
wants-to...](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-
inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood) supporting ICE, and trump, is one
helluva way to make sure you have a steady supply of it on your hands.

------
hrdwdmrbl
This is the tech company that really deserves to be beaten up in the media!

~~~
lacker
It’s a “dog bites man” story because the whole point of Palantir is selling
this sort of service. Whereas when Google or Facebook does something “right-
leaning” it’s more fundamentally unusual and thus newsworthy.

------
perfmode
i’m so disappointed that i, early in my career, fell for the palantir koolaid.

~~~
geomark
I know the feeling. For much of my career I drank the koolaid of the military-
industrial complex. Thankfully never worked _directly_ on weapons programs.
But still sad that it took me so long to acknowledge how evil it all was and
leave it.

------
throwawaysea
What’s wrong with enforcing immigration laws effectively?

~~~
pryce
Assuming this is a sincere question, there is already a great deal of
reporting about the harm of (as you put it) "enforcing immigration laws
effectively", and it is staggering to believe you're unaware of it.

Just within the 5 days, over 600 immigrants were taken at their workplace by
ICE in Mississippi, leaving many children stranded and uncared for [1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2019/aug/08/mississippi-...](https://www.theguardian.com/us-
news/2019/aug/08/mississippi-ice-raids-children-video)

------
Scoundreller
So how many months/years until the same technology gets used against a group
PT regrets, and we hear a repentance speech?

------
caseysoftware
This is extreme ignorance, clickbait, or outright deception.

Headline:

 _" Study: Trump’s paid Peter Thiel’s Palantir $1.5B so far to build ICE’s
mass-surveillance network"_

From the actual study:

 _" It has received over $150 million from ICE alone, and has contracts worth
some $1.5 billion with different federal agencies or departments, like the
FBI, Navy, and Census Bureau."_

So the headline is off by 10x but the study also notes that $800M of that
$1.5B is a single contract for the Army. If you remove that single outlier,
Palantir's 2017-2019 contract total doesn't look all that different than the
2014-2016 contract totals. Looking through the contracts themselves (later in
the report), they're from all over the Feds and consistent over time.. other
than the outlier.

There are lots of places and ways to criticize but this doesn't look like one.

------
nostromo
I flagged this because the report [1] directly contradicts the headline.

Heck, the _article itself_ contradicts the headline.

The vast majority of the 1.5B is going to the DOD, not ICE.

According to the report, ICE is getting just 44m of that 1.5b. For comparison,
the IRS gets 31m and the SEC gets 56m.

It really looks like the article was willfully misrepresenting the numbers in
order to get a hot-button social issue into the headline.

[1] [https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-
The-W...](https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-War-
Against-Immigrants_-Trumps-Tech-Tools-Powered-by-Palantir_.pdf)

~~~
tossAfterUsing
It surprises the dickens out of me that the editor would allow such an
obviously mis-understandable title

------
dmix
The "black budget" is probably a monster of waste and graft. We're lucky we
even get to see how much Palantir is getting.

Reminds me of this old article about TARP I was reading recently. They loaned
out $700B to a select few companies, many who were former employers of cabinet
and treasury members. And they weren't even required to tell the public what
they did with it:

> They’d decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the
> bailout money [..] Instead of lending their new cash to struggling
> homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were
> literally sitting on it. [..] From the start, taxpayer money was used to
> subsidize a string of finance mergers, from the Chase-Bear Stearns deal to
> the Wells Fargo­ Wachovia merger to Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill
> Lynch.

> Congress had approved $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgages, but $250
> billion of the money was now shifted to direct capital injections for banks.

Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the
other $696B went to Wall St, even though it only passed congress because it
was sold as helping the home owners:

> In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now
> stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range
> of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less
> instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of
> TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut
> to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has
> been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.

[https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
news/secrets-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-
and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/)

It's always a great time to have friends in government, but even more so in
recent years. Especially the way Trump has only increased spending, just like
Obama and Bush did. Likewise public/private partnerships and investments
directly into private firms have increased in numbers, particularly in
defence.

~~~
jedberg
$636B was actually loaned out, and so far $740B has come back to the Treasury
in interest and principle. The US government _made money_ on TARP.

[https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/](https://projects.propublica.org/bailout/)

~~~
dmix
mhm, everyone posts this reply whenever it comes up now as if that was the
whole point of TARP was to make some money off mega-banks and car companies.

Subsidizing monopolies and financing M&As which further reduce competition is
always a safe bet if your goal is making money. Especially in a down market
when no one else has your special access to cheap capital... you can make a
killing and help your buddies from private school get the bulk of it. Why
doesn't the gov always do that?!

If the public asks questions just show them the sweet 10% interest the
government got back. Who cares about moral hazards, long term stability,
opportunity costs, lack of competition, oversight, and people lying to
congress. We're now $100b richer(?), at least in the short term!

------
mlb_hn
While Trump's undoubtably been helping Palantir, I'm not entirely sure how
much can be attributed to Trump vs. ongoing procurement issues. E.g., the
military's previous analysis software was arguably vaporware [1] and should
have been replaced anyway. If the government doesn't have access to decent
analytical software, it runs around like a headless chicken (e.g. the wars in
the middle east).

When it comes to ICE, it looks like Palantir's just integrating data from
different sources. Surveillance is an issue, so the question seems to be
whether the government should be able to tap into that data in the first
place.

[1] [https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer-
produ...](https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer-product-that-
is-tearing-the-army-intelligence-community-apart-2012-8)

------
symisc_devel
Did anybody here played with Palantir's software stack? If so, how is the
overall experience especially the UI?

~~~
Aperocky
As someone in the software industry, looking at palantirs UI gave me the
feeling that this is a glorified pandas/sklearn/hive shop, certainly less
accomplished than Apache, but enough to dazzle the dinosaurs in government.

------
RoyTyrell
Hard to say if being so pro-Trump was purely a "don't bite the hand that
feeds" or if he had indeed went from some sort of libertarian to having a
halfie for the road to at least a police state, but this probably explains
Thiel's behavior as of late.

