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.
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?
Palantir, like all too many firms creating innovative software, went to where the demand for innovative software was: preventing terrorist attacks.
New, large scale software never gets adopted in the private sector, because the suits that run them are too myopic to think technology can solve core issues that have never been solved with technology before. They only invest in improving the technology they already have in the segments of the business which are already automated.
Oracle sold its first relational database to the United States Air Force. Nobody else thought they needed it at the time.
Palantir actually offers a very general purpose toolset, but it is the intelligence agencies which were the first to have a giant pile of money and a problem that never goes away.
That's fine, I'm not saying Palantir is poorly run, just that we should be suspicious of their actions. Money is a powerful motivator, especially big money. Even the strongest principles can collapse under the weight of enough zeroes. My point is that Palantir deserves scrutiny, just like everyone else who profits from bad things happening or threatening to happen, and just like everyone else who is entrusted with great power.
That's slightly disingenuous, though I don't think you did it intentionally.
Oracle was the name of the software database Larry Ellison, Bob Miner and Ed Oats created, named after the CIA project they all worked on together [1]. Imagine a world where Edward Snowden got excited about the NSA surveillance, and dorked out on it. That's these guys. Products of the government, who found a way to sell products to the government.
Palantir smells a lot like the same sort of beast, I think. Just my opinion, though.
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.
That's great, but it's more likely a publicity play than a notable source of revenue.
"Early investments came in the form of $2 million from the CIA's venture arm In-Q-Tel." They've been catering to the defense industry from the beginning. That's not inherently bad, and there's no reason to skirt around the issue.
One of Palantir's cofounders was recently interviewed (http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3052). He reminisced about pitching the product to two defense industry suits who actually high-fived each other at the end of his presentation. That was when he knew he had made it.
> Their business does not center around tracking down terrorists. They do all things "Big Data".
The company is a defense contractor. Yes, they've successfully commercialized their technology for law enforcement, bank fraud detection, disaster recovery, and whatnot, but you'd be silly to think that intelligence (and "tracking down terrorists") is not central to their business. They were funded by the CIA's VC firm.
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.
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!
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?
Yes they deserve it especially as you said because they made the choice to ignore everyman. And now you have all this story with their name on it, and all the war, government and secrecy effects around that. How people can't be at least frustrated or even more feeling themselves fooled with a total absence of marketing by Palantir?
I am not saying it's like "If you've got nothing to hide, you should tell us what you're doing". I am saying that you have to be able to manage the public image of your company even if it is a private company. Or things like that will happen and it will be hard to restore your reputation over people you ignored.
It's all about the communication, public image, reputation... There are even companies dedicated to do that for you. I don't know for instance they should use the same idea behind their website: a company of high quality dedicated to BigData, and advertise that in every public media with nothing related to war, secrecy or others things... Just a company providing high value products to who you want.
I think GP's point wasn't that their secrecy makes them deserve negative public opinion, rather that a policy of secrecy in general makes it rather difficult to believably deny allegations of questionable behavior -- that secrecy is a double-edged sword.
Also, I don't think it's entirely fair to construct a black-and-white dichotomy between government and private company. Companies working on government contracts are by definition somewhere between the two, so perhaps it's fair to demand transparency somewhere in between? I don't know where to draw those lines, I'm just trying to point out that there isn't, logically, much room for absolute arguments about private vs public on this particular topic.
"Our products are built for real analysis with a focus on security, scalability, ease of use and collaboration. They are broadly deployed in the intelligence, defense, law enforcement and financial communities, and are spreading rapidly by word of mouth into applications in other industries and realms of impact."
2 of the 4 named industries sound like "terrorist hunters" and 3 of the 4 are not generic big data. None of them are e-coli outbreaks.
Palantir is easy to condemn because from their own messaging to third party analysis, every angle you look at them they look like a boilerplate "evil company" on par with Blackwater/XE/whatever they're called now.
Glassbox reviews and interview reviews are absurd and eye opening, tangles with RICO law and unethical business partners seem the norm, and on and on and on. Other than some nice looking tech, they're public image is one of "mercenary nerds for hire".
I agree with you, but am mildly surprised you haven't been slammed with down votes. Obviously I have pre-judged the audience incorrectly. Violence and war ---> profit. And this is a system used by a fair few companies. Just looking round the room here and I see a few. GE, Siemens and Philips all stoop to this from memory, and I haven't even got off my chair.
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?
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.
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."
You are correct, I would include advertising in a strongly questionable moral territory.
I think having the question "Is what we are doing morally virtuous?" hang there as a Sword of Damocles[0] is the way to go.
Sure, few things are 100% morally virtuous. But the fact that you cannot achieve perfection doesn't mean you can or should stop trying.
I see this kind of reasoning a little too often and it's a slippery slope to moral bankruptcy. Once you accept trading in part of your morals, all of them end up for sale, eventually. Instead, trading in morals should be a bloody tooth and nails fight. At best, you should only trade them in temporarily and never should you make your livelihood depend on your trading them in.
We should be as terrified of losing our morals as we are of losing our lives because once a critical mass of our morals is lost, our lives are no longer worth living.
Only once we are all truly terrified of losing our morals, constantly, will we stop not only producing bad (as in: truly questionable) technology, but also using good technology for bad.
The difference between a good and an evil person isn't that the good person is perfect or unfailing. The difference is that good person hasn't stopped trying to be good.
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...
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.
Add any company associated with the fashion industry to the list of companies that are far from virtuous. If you have not seen "Girl Model" I highly recommend it. I never had any illusions that modeling was a virtuous industry but this documentary really opened my eyes to the evil inherent in the industry.
It seems like we have plenty to discuss while giving neither Palantir nor Zynga a pass. It's a bit like you are saying we have to give Monsanto a pass because... Twinkies!
What you are calling a "double standard" is actually a false dichotomy.
>I saw the best minds of my generation write software to surveil and control the other minds of my generation.
the joke here is that it is not limited to "other" minds. Being a part of controlling part of society, people frequently start to feel like they are above the control, not a subject to it. It is a very mistaken feeling.
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.
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.
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.
I suspect the effect it has had on you also effects many, perhaps even most, other programmers as well, but I would still wager that their HR departments are particularly busy right now.
Even if only a minority of developers are receptive to working on such systems (and I don't think that, outside the West Coast/Bay Area/Startup/HN bubble, these people are actually a minority. I suspect that we are actually the ones that are outnumbered), that minority suddenly being made to think about these companies has probably given them a boost.
I can only speak to my own experiences, but at least in my case the news has really turned me off to these companies. A year or so ago I turned down an offer from Palantir due largely to privacy and ethical concerns, and since that time every single instance of Palantir showing up in the news has made me think to myself "Man I'm glad I didn't take that offer." I suspect I am not alone in my desire to make the world a better place through hacking and technology. Then again I also suspect that there is some set of less scrupulous engineers out there following the dollars. In that case I would guess that the effect of this kind of publicity is polarizing, but not in a single direction.
It was great to read your post, I helped a kid called Palmer Luckey 4 years ago with VR HMD ideas. He took my help and others and has now took funding from Joe Lonsdale, coufounder of Palantir, and I lay awake at nights at how has this happened? This cool open source kid that we all liked selling out to the darkside of people like lonsdale and In Q tel, why couldn't he be MORE like YOU? When he realized it was Palantir Types throwing the money at him, I wish he could have been a cool jedi like you and said no thanks, I don't want your money, you may have good objectives at heart Palantir, but there is just too much negativity about stuff like you guys do and I don't want any part of it. That you had ethical and moral character that I see lacking in Palmer Luckey makes me still have hope in mankind.
It may have created a slight uptick in applications but not a lot. I can't imagine that there were many people interested in working in this field that were unaware of Palantir or BAH before the news coverage. BAH and Palantir are big names in the government IT space.
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.
Come to DC sometime and take the subway to the Pentagon stop. Frequently the entire station is plastered top to bottom with giant Palantir banners advertising all the ways they can help Lt. Col. Mid-Level Functionary (who's the person who would be seeing these ads -- his boss has a driver) keep tabs on people.
I wouldn't be amazed that they do business with the national-security complex; I'd be amazed if it wasn't by far their #1 customer.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some kind of incestuous guild of business partners/software developers that flow between each organization (eg: ex-gov employees working for Palantir/Facebook/etc, vice versa).
I don't consider it a secret who my friends are, not even most of my conversations. But there is a difference between that, and the industrialized scooping up of it, the storing and correlating it forever... me, today, is not what worries me; Dr. Strangelove is.
Imagine spooks following you all day, each day, and every time after you talked with someone, they walk up to them and ask what the conversation was about. Imagine dozens of spooks per individual, each of them constantly taking notes on paper that does not perish. This is the society we live in, the society that we built while sleepwalking. Even the spooks aren't aware of what they're doing, not really.
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.
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.
Peter Theil is the founder of Palantir. He also happens to be the original investor in Facebook. I think that's where the connection between the two companies stops.
If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts.
These Daily Kos articles play it pretty loose with how they connect the dots together and make it out to be some large conspiracy.
If you want to know whether Facebook is getting revenue from the government, look at their financial returns. I'm sure you will find that most of their revenue comes from advertising, and they are not bidding on federal government contracts.
Given that programs like PRISM are done in secret, perhaps we shouldn't necessarily assume Facebook's public financial returns are sharing the whole story. Ie- money may be changing hands behind closed doors.
This, aside from the blatant invasion of privacy, should be our biggest concern about the recent NSA revaluations. As participants in a free-market economy it's important we know who is cheating. Ie- those who subvert the free-market via secret gov/intel/military deals.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/businessdesk/2013/06/widening-th... Here was a VR pioneer, Jaron Lanier, talking about how our new communities online are really only serving the interests of a few at the cost of the rest of us. I had friends in the USAF who got off facebook years ago and told me to do the same because they knew what was going on behind the scenes. There are a lot of good people, meaning to do well with these Palantir type programs. I voted for Obama because he promised "transparency" and I am not against good programs that can help us all, but when you lose "transparency" perhaps that concentrates far too much power into far too few hands. I recently watched Dreamscape about VR dreamworlds, and the CIA guy tries to assassinate the president when he won't play ball on nuclear weapons. Reminded me of JFK's last speech about secret government that he was going to expose right before he was assassinated. The NSA types say they have to have their secrets, or the terrorists will maybe blow up a city with a suitcase nuke. That would be a tremendous loss of life, how do we balance that against losing massive amounts of liberty where power and control are concentrated into a very few hands that have the right security clearances? When I was a kid I watched this movie with martin landau called Access Code, where the CIA and NSA types built all kinds of secret technologies and systems, and then the AI programs came in and took it over, and all of mankind was made the slave to the AI. That is the real fear I have going forward, these non transparent systems being taken over in the future by AI that are beyond the control of any human being. That is a reason to make them totally transparent and remove power from the NSA or CIA.
considering the potential of internet advertizing schemas to be used as orders of magnitude larger, easy transcending national borders, v2.0 of "pizza parlor" for things like money laundering, untraceable payments, etc...
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. :-(
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.
> 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?
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.
Ever thought of making a crowd sourced extension that would target these kinds of accounts? A select few people would have the privilege to tag these accounts, and everyone else using the extension would be able to see the tagged acounts.
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.
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... 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!
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.