It seems like the sole purpose of palantir is to give data to the government they wouldnt have access to without a warrant. So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled??? The difference between now and a few years ago seems to be that companies are assisting law enforcement with even more advanced datacollection.
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This is a very accurate take. There is a ton of collection that the government is explicitly not allowed to do. However, the ability to purchase this data is much less regulated. So the work around is, get contractors to do the data collection and then purchase that data.
The government gets to ignore the will of its people and companies get to be middlemen leeches, it's perfect really.
There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.
As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen. I have no doubt that both of them have been the recipients of Peter Thiel's "generosity".
> As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen.
Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.
It’s not just Alito and Thomas who have been hostile to the 4th amendment, disrespect for the 4th amendment has been a bipartisan affair for 50 years.
I don’t see why anyone is downvoting this, it’s trivial to see the history of votes on 4th amendment cases. Terry v Ohio is a great example.
because this isn't simply a matter of the constitution, it involves a massive corporation and both of these men have been caught receiving gifts from wealthy
"friends" then openly refusing to cooperate when this information came to light.
We are assuming they are the only 2 doing (and as far as I know, none of the other judges have been implicated) but that's like finding two drunk guys passed out on a bench on a college campus and assuming that binge drinking isn't rampant in college.
I thought Carpenter vs United States was that case, but apparently it wasn't. Terry stops by local officers based on tips from regional Fusion Centers via WhatsApp sounds less unusual every day. Parallel construction has become a long-established technique.
I would hope this case wouldn't be hard to make. If the government isn't allowed to censor people through third parties (e.g., threaten onerous investigations of a platform unless a specific person is kicked off), the government shouldn't be allowed to conduct unreasonable searches through a third party. Would we be okay if the FBI contracted with private detective firms to conduct warrantless searches?
I don't want to see any more landmark cases from the current supreme court.
But what would be the legal basis for such a decision?
Noob question: how private orgs can do surveillance that government can’t?
Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?
[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.
create an LLC and start doing online marketing ("online marketing").
you're a marketing company. you're gathering data for data mining that you will sell to other brokers. lots of small or niche marketing firms out there.
could you do it as one (1) person? might be hard. but you and a few coworkers / employees is perfectly reasonable.
chances are you won't sell directly to the government but to an aggregator, but it's not crazy to think that a small org could potentially sell to the gub'mnt if the data is juicy enough. would have to be very niche stuff though, like maps of labor / union folks, or data tracking Islamic prayer app use, etc.
keep in mind that being a government vendor means you have to jump through certain hoops, and those can be onerous, but again, not theoretically impossible.
Not as an individual but as a business basically yes
At times, depending on the state, the government can even put out RFCs specifically to ask for corporations to bid on providing data that the government can't collect itself.
Purchase? You're misunderstanding how government consultancy works (this is what EU states use consultancy firms for, and that's what Palantir really is)
A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.
This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.
Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.
And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
> Palantir gives the health data to government
Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it
The problem with today's society is you walk into a hospital bleeding and they make you sign an ultimatum.
Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.
If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.
Fun fact: it’s illegal to open new hospitals without the permission of the government.
There are multiple layers of corruption at work here. (They also cap the number of doctors, and clinics, etc).
in Western history, culturally, Church was a founding force for the existance of hospitals, full-stop. Repeat with more money and more fallable humans and yes some of what you say is accurate. But, if you start naming the behavior as if it is synonymous with the original founders of Hospitals, you a) create an intellectual dishonesty on your part, b) attract wing-nuts and sociopaths who are looking for a place to join in the chanting, c) obscure important details while the casual readers focus on the glaring finger pointing.
If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.
Oh I fully realize that the original hospitals were ... let's say better than the gutter by about 10%, and no more than that. Both for the patients and everyone else in the street or even city.
And I do realize the only reason the Vatican management is better is because the Vatican is ALSO corrupt ... but with different masters. The improvement is coming from the conflict between these groups. I do get the impression the Vatican is actually the more moral of the two parties, meaning compared to the government, but not by a huge margin.
The way I read it, GP is saying that the Vatican's influence reduces such unethical distribution of medical information. Your response reads like a rebuttal, but I'm not sure what you're trying to say, nor rebut.
>in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals.
>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that
> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"
> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals
> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.
The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.
The naivete or complacency of people who work for so-called "tech" companies that perform wanton, surreptitious data collection about computer users as their core "business model" is illustrated by the belief that what is significant for the surveillance target is how the data is used
Thus, a company performing data collection and sharing it with the government may trigger nerd rage whereas company performing data collection and using the data to help profile ad targets triggers nerd advocacy, i.e., attempts to defend the practice of data collection with "justifications" that have no limit in their level of absurdity
For the surveillance target (cf. the surveilling company), what is significant about data collection is not how the data is used, it is how the data _could_ be used, which is to say, what is significant about data collection is (a) the fact that data is collected at all, not (b) what may or may not happen after the data is collected
Moreover, despite equivocal statements of reassurance in unenforceable "privacy policies" and the like, (b) is often practically impossible for those outside the company and its partners to determine anyway
Hypothetical: Trillion-dollar public company A whose core "business" is data collection and surveillance-supported advertising services takes a nosedive due to unforseen circumstances that affect its ability to sell ad services. Meanwhile, billion-dollar public company B whose core business is data collection and surveillance services for goverments sees their business on the rise. Company A decides to acquire or compete with company B
There is nothing that limits company A's use of the data it has collected for whatever purpose the company and Wall Street deems profitable
As such, the significant issue for the surveillance target is (a) not (b)
Focusing on the fact that company B assists governments whilst company A assists advertisers is a red herring
Once the data is collected, it's too late
I keep thinking about the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Illegal data gathering was a big deal only 10 years ago. It seems like with businesses like Palantir that this behavior has been normalized to the point where what was unthinkably bad 10 years ago is just business as usual today.
It’s more that many adult citizens (and increasing every year) have grown up with the patriot act and liberties being stripped away in the name of security.
I talked with cousins about it 8 years ago and I got laughed at as a conspiracy nut for saying that our personal data will be used against us if we allow it. People either don’t understand or don’t care because they’ve grown comfortable with it.
They figured out that if the government does something it is opposed by a lot of people. But if a company says they'll collect information from every single customer in exchange for some worthless token, people will willingly provide all their information to said company. And those companies will either sell that info to governments or give it away with a little ask... So, the private economy has become the biggest contributor to the surveillance state.
What people have "willingly" given their data directly to any company? It's usually buried in an agreement or hidden behind some dark pattern.
Suing your government generates results. Suing a company usually results in it shedding it's shell corporation and taking it's assets where you can't get them.
Selling user data needs to be a federal criminal offense. You need to go to jail for doing this. You need 15+ years in prison for doing this or enabling this in bulk. Let's start talking asset forfeiture next.
Exactly. Most people just don't know how much data is being collected on them, and probably can't know at this point. I say can't because the reality sounds so much like a conspiracy theory that a majority of people would simply reject the truth outright.
> So now everyone is just being warrantlessly surveiled???
It's been like that for a while; I don't think either side of America's political aisle has the heart to extricate themselves of such a privilege.
correct
PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.
The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight
I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site
Your bank and mobile data carrier and cable company already did for you, on your behalf. It’s all searchable via your phone number, which you have to provide to all the apps you DO sign up for, so they can easily query your name, photo, address, purchase history, etc.
How is it guaranteed to be the same accuracy of data that is not retrieved through a warrant ?
It just needs to be accurate-enough to eventually get a warrant.
Parallel construction. They get enough data, legal or not, to know who to look for. Then they surveil you until you slip.
Getting call records from the phone company, a private business that collects it's users' data, used to require a warrant. Why is it different now? Only because it's so trivial to hand over access to the database? I think in the past, the only thing that provided protection from illegal searches and seizures was the physical impracticality and friction involved in doing so. The warrant just allowed LEOs to dedicate their limited resources to a particular search. That is no longer a constraint.
Well, you know it's that time again...
In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;
In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!
It is like 1984. But shit.
It's wild they we are happily buying telescreens. Who would have imagined pre-2000s that would actually happen. And that the number one defense of capitalism would be to use telescreens as an example 'but look at how cheap your telescreen is, TVs were so expensive'.
Did you notice how the Dow is 50,000 ?
was
It's a software company, it sells software. You can literally go read the docs. It doesn't magically bypass the law anymore than Microsoft Sharepoint does.
Do you expect palantir's public documentation to explain how they operate as a spy agency?
Your link and description of it as a software company are irrelevant to the discussion, which concerns their retention and use of personal data. I welcome anyone to give their disclosure a critical reading. (They promise to follow the law- whew!)
You mean the logging of their web traffic and communications with them like every corporate website does? Can you specify?