7 ms·

Trump’s paid Thiel’s Palantir $1.5B so far to build ICE’s surveillance network

129 points by ghobs91 7y ago

perfmode 7y ago
i’m so disappointed that i, early in my career, fell for the palantir koolaid.
- geomark 7y ago
  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.
- par 7y ago
  what was it like working there?
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hrdwdmrbl 7y ago
This is the tech company that really deserves to be beaten up in the media!
- lacker 7y ago
  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.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
word-reader 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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.
  - morpheuskafka 7y ago
    It usually involves fake/stolen documents, with the employer either negligently or intentionally turns a blind eye to, and that's the employer's defense if raided.
  - wtf_is_up 7y ago
    Non-citizen labor is cheap. Milton Friedman explained this decades ago. "Illegal Immigration only helps when its Illegal" [1] [1] https://youtu.be/C52TlPCVDio https://youtu.be/C52TlPCVDio
  - quxbar 7y ago
    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-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 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good-work...
Scoundreller 7y ago
So how many months/years until the same technology gets used against a group PT regrets, and we hear a repentance speech?
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  lol never. Thiel is a bona fide fascist. He uses his vast wealth and surveillance aparatus to fight against every progressive cause except for gay marriage rights, because that's a group he's a member of. He was an early Trump supporter, longtime financier of Project Veritas, he was the secret money behind the series of spurious lawsuits that crushed Gawker because of a personal grudge he had. Maybe if the alt-right wins and then after defeating/expelling/exterminating trans people and racial minorities they turn against gays, Thiel will have regrets, but by that point he won't care beause he got a New Zealand citizenship last year so he can bail whenever he wants.
sittingnut 7y ago
did i miss something? did anyone do anything remotely illegal(other than some immigrants)? or will be illegal in future? or is this all about doing something that is legal, but offensive to some people's selective political sensibilities?
RoyTyrell 7y ago
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.
dmix 7y ago
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-and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-... 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 7y ago
  $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/
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
_RPM 7y ago
I don't really get the Trump hate to be honest. Because he wants to lock down our border?
mlb_hn 7y ago
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-product-that-is-tearing-the-army-intelligence-community-apart-2012-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer-produ...
nostromo 7y ago
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-War-Against-Immigrants_-Trumps-Tech-Tools-Powered-by-Palantir_.pdf https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-W...
- adventured 7y ago
  That's because the headline (on thenextweb) is aggressively, intentionally politicized. It's partisan clickbait.
- tossAfterUsing 7y ago
  It surprises the dickens out of me that the editor would allow such an obviously mis-understandable title
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
symisc_devel 7y ago
Did anybody here played with Palantir's software stack? If so, how is the overall experience especially the UI?
- Aperocky 7y ago
  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.
throwawaysea 7y ago
What’s wrong with enforcing immigration laws effectively?
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  Surveillance of the general populace shouldn't be necessary to enforce immigration laws. We didn't even have an immigration enforcement department until 2003.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- pryce 7y ago
  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-ice-raids-children-video https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/08/mississippi-...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
caseysoftware 7y ago
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.
rubyn00bie 7y ago
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-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to... supporting ICE, and trump, is one helluva way to make sure you have a steady supply of it on your hands.

129 points by ghobs91 7y ago

perfmode 7y ago

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

geomark 7y ago
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.
par 7y ago
what was it like working there?

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hrdwdmrbl 7y ago

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

lacker 7y ago
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.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

word-reader 7y ago

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 7y ago
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.
- morpheuskafka 7y ago
  It usually involves fake/stolen documents, with the employer either negligently or intentionally turns a blind eye to, and that's the employer's defense if raided.
- wtf_is_up 7y ago
  Non-citizen labor is cheap. Milton Friedman explained this decades ago. "Illegal Immigration only helps when its Illegal" [1] [1] https://youtu.be/C52TlPCVDio https://youtu.be/C52TlPCVDio
- quxbar 7y ago
  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-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 https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/if-youre-a-good-work...

Scoundreller 7y ago

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

hannasanarion 7y ago
lol never. Thiel is a bona fide fascist. He uses his vast wealth and surveillance aparatus to fight against every progressive cause except for gay marriage rights, because that's a group he's a member of. He was an early Trump supporter, longtime financier of Project Veritas, he was the secret money behind the series of spurious lawsuits that crushed Gawker because of a personal grudge he had. Maybe if the alt-right wins and then after defeating/expelling/exterminating trans people and racial minorities they turn against gays, Thiel will have regrets, but by that point he won't care beause he got a New Zealand citizenship last year so he can bail whenever he wants.

sittingnut 7y ago

did i miss something? did anyone do anything remotely illegal(other than some immigrants)? or will be illegal in future? or is this all about doing something that is legal, but offensive to some people's selective political sensibilities?

RoyTyrell 7y ago

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.

dmix 7y ago

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-and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/ https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-... 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 7y ago
$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/
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

_RPM 7y ago

I don't really get the Trump hate to be honest. Because he wants to lock down our border?

mlb_hn 7y ago

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

nostromo 7y ago

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

adventured 7y ago
That's because the headline (on thenextweb) is aggressively, intentionally politicized. It's partisan clickbait.
tossAfterUsing 7y ago
It surprises the dickens out of me that the editor would allow such an obviously mis-understandable title
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

symisc_devel 7y ago

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

Aperocky 7y ago
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.

throwawaysea 7y ago

What’s wrong with enforcing immigration laws effectively?

hannasanarion 7y ago
Surveillance of the general populace shouldn't be necessary to enforce immigration laws. We didn't even have an immigration enforcement department until 2003.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
pryce 7y ago
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-ice-raids-children-video https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/08/mississippi-...
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

caseysoftware 7y ago

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.

rubyn00bie 7y ago

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-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to... supporting ICE, and trump, is one helluva way to make sure you have a steady supply of it on your hands.