The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/22/war-inside-palantir-data-mining-firms-ties-ice-under-attack-by-employees/

by Balgair • 7 years ago

133 170 7 years ago

washingtonpost.com

mulmen• 7 years ago

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission but working with LEOs like ICE seems to be their core business. All credit to these employees for standing up for what they believe in but what exactly did they think they were signing up for?

I have a new coworker who wears his Palantir t-shirt and it makes me uncomfortable to even see the name in my office.

prepend6• 7 years ago

Palantir is a software company right and sells tools to ICE? Does someone wearing an Excel shirt make you uncomfortable because ICE uses MSOffice?

What about OSS projects like R and Python that also enable ICE to analyze data to find people.

Is the expectation that Palantir should not sell software to ICE?

matchagaucho• 7 years ago

The difference is in Pro Services. MS does not send employees from Redmond to help ICE use Excel.

Palantir does bundle software and services. Their software is so complex, it is typically Palantir employees building the models and analytics.

TallGuyShort• 7 years ago

I think the expectation is that Palantir should make lots of money selling software to other people, and then a portion of their profits and employee's salaries is required by law to go to funding ICE anyway. That seems to be what everyone else is okay with.

SpicyLemonZest3• 7 years ago

Most enterprise software sales aren’t as low touch as an Excel license, and Palantir is very much on the high touch side of the spectrum. When Palantir sells software to a large government agency, that means squads of Palantir employees go to the government agency and help them run it, and that consulting effort is a huge component of what the customer is paying for.

Having said that, some people do think Microsoft should refuse to sell to ICE too.

analogist• 7 years ago

So you think there is no difference in guilt between being a war criminal’s arm dealer and being a war criminal’s grocer?

_bxg16• 7 years ago

The expectation is that companies like Palantir should not exist at all. Their core business is surveilling innocent people en masse.

rtkwe2• 7 years ago

Is it not easy to see that there's a moral space between creating a tool that can be used for something you dislike (basically all software falls into this category) and working specifically for a company making software that will explicitly be used for something you dislike?

michaelt• 7 years ago

A great many expansions to the power of the state have been justified with the argument "this is to fight terror and child abuse"

Perhaps they signed up naively imagining they were working on a tool that would be used for that and nothing else?

creaghpatr• 7 years ago

It's definitely a weird company to work for if you don't believe in enforcing laws, or only partial enforcement of laws; especially border laws.

CydeWeys8• 7 years ago

I interviewed with Palantir maybe seven years ago (didn't get the job) and definitely wasn't aware at the time that they were doing this kind of work, if they even were back then.

And had I known they were doing CBP stuff, I may have been OK with it under Obama even. It wasn't until Trump got elected and immigration policy became explicitly racist and enforcement child-separationy and concentration-campy that I really started opposing it.

11112361123479• 7 years ago

The article is about work with HSI, not CBP. The scope of work that HSI does is much broader, here's a quote from wikipedia about it:

HSI special agents investigate violations of more than 400 U.S. laws that threaten the national security of the United States such as counter-proliferation and export violations, human rights violations/war crimes, human smuggling, art theft, human trafficking, drug smuggling and trafficking, arms trafficking, document and benefit fraud, the manufacturing and sale of counterfeit immigration and identity documents, transnational gangs, financial crimes including money laundering and bulk cash smuggling, trade-based money laundering (including trade finance and Kimberley Process investigations), computer crime, including child exploitation, intellectual property rights/trade fraud, import/export enforcement, trafficking of counterfeit pharmaceuticals and other merchandise, mass-marketing fraud, and international Cultural Property and Antiquities crimes.

vinniejames• 7 years ago

Albert Einstein said the same thing about the Bomb, after we dropped it

sremani2• 7 years ago

> concentration-campy

Willful lack of proportion to score political karma points.

basseq• 7 years ago

Counter-anecdote: I interviewed with Palatir 6.5 years ago (also didn't get the job) and was absolutely made aware that a core part of their business was in law enforcement at both the Federal and State level.

word-reader3• 7 years ago

How has immigration policy in the US become "explicitly racist"? Immigration law has essentially remained unchanged. DACA was repealed, but DACA was an executive action not partial to country of origin. H-1B denials have increased, but based on pre-existing requirements and quotas. Administrative changes in asylum rules and public charge requirements affect every immigrant regardless of country of origin or race.

alkibiades2• 7 years ago

obama did just as bad things, most of these policies started under him. people like you just didn’t care

qazpot• 7 years ago

I am assuming ICE is "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement". I am not from USA but why every comment here is implying ICE to be some evil thing.

throwawaytoday5• 7 years ago

ICE is a recent phenomenon whose creation was only due to 9/11 attacks. Prior everything they did was handled by other organizations more effectively.

_bxg16• 7 years ago

Because they do stuff like this

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/border-patrol-agent-deta...

pjc502• 7 years ago

ICE's recent policy of separating children from their families and then holding them in inadequate conditions with insufficient medical care is starting to produce tiny coffins: https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-migrant-child-border-de...

cat1992• 7 years ago

Recent, immediate politics bearing on the agency here aside, we like to philosophically separate ourselves from the government in discourse, rather than seeing it as one part of our own, singular, cohesive society.

etc.

lamigra_burner• 7 years ago

Before 9/11 nothing. For the last two decades, it's almost like cruelty is a requirement to work in that dept. USCIS and CPB are still alright though.

anthony_doan• 7 years ago

I am not from USA but why every comment here is implying ICE to be some evil thing.

Because there are reports of ICE doing inhumane things toward the people they have detained.

1) Children are being separated from families.

2) Children are dying under ICE facilities.

3) The jailing of asylum seekers.

These are the few things that lead many people to believe ICE is evil.

Where as the other side seems to be concentrating on the illegal immigrants.

It also come down to the morality of what they're doing and if this is similar to internment camp or concentration camp.

sp332• 7 years ago

The ICE thing has gotten dramatically worse recently. Accepting a certain level of abuse of power in other LE agencies doesn't necessarily mean they're OK with, say, actively pushing back against a DoJ settlement so they can hold children in detention indefinitely, etc.

wpietri2• 7 years ago

Exactly. I think it's reasonable (although perhaps naive) for people to have a sunny view of law enforcement. Especially when, like me, they're white men from middle-class backgrounds; I've never had a bad experience with law enforcement, despite having done some stupendously dumb-ass things.

But even though I'm predisposed to view cops favorably, the stuff with ICE is shocking to me. America has a big chunk of history [1] where ethnic cleansing was common and ignored or even supported by police [2]. It's hard for me not to see ICE's aggressive dehumanization of non-white migrants as a resurgence of that. So I'm not surprised that even at Palantir people are objecting.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relatio...

[2] See, e.g., https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...

onepointsixC3• 7 years ago

actively pushing back against a DoJ settlement so they can hold children in detention indefinitely, etc.

So they're horrible abusers if they separate children and now that they are trying to rectify that by keeping children together with family by removing the detention limit they too are abusers. What would make you happy then? The only alternative is open borders which is a non starter.

mandevil2• 7 years ago

Maybe I'm the weird one, but who would wear a t-shirt from your previous company to work at your current company? That just seems to send all the wrong signals.

tjr225• 7 years ago

Doesn't seem that weird to me. Since landing in tech I haven't had to buy a single t-shirt- I just wear whatever they hand out.

dekhn• 7 years ago

I do this all the time and nobody cares.

AftHurrahWinch• 7 years ago

(stops wearing my JPL t-shirt to work)

master-litty2• 7 years ago

I find it socially acceptable. It's quite normal to jump from one tech company to another, and wearing a t-shirt from a previous employer is an artifact of that lifestyle.

My hot take: I've always interpreted it as "street cred" thing. Getting a job at Google is difficult, for example, and wearing a t-shirt from your Google days could show intellectual pride.

southphillyman• 7 years ago

It's also a way to flex. Same way people tend to wear alumni sweaters from Ivy League, Stanford level schools. I doubt you'd see anyone wearing an Infosys (or similarly viewed company) shirt in that kind of environment.

bubblethink• 7 years ago

but what exactly did they think they were signing up for?

As long as there is sufficient plausible deniability, people will sign up for anything. In the tech domain, this goes back to at least WW2 with IBM selling punch card machines to Germany.

tempsy• 7 years ago

I also don't understand this. Seems like if you were willing to work for Palantir before this made news you'd have understood that surveillance tech to police depts, corporations, etc. is exactly what the company sells/enables.

I did have a recruiter reach out a long time ago and remember they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostitution rings.

AndrewBissell2• 7 years ago

I wonder if Palantir could help the FBI get a bead on Ghislaine Maxwell.

Hahah, just kidding, Palantir is for chasing down the hoi polloi, not the madams and child abducters who service the country's elite (who after all probably give Palantir a lot of its contracts).

leggomylibro• 7 years ago

And I once had a recruiter from Axon talk about how body cameras could potentially help to hold officers accountable.

But it's good to always ask this question of any prospective employer: "who are [y]our customers?"

The customers are the ones who pay the company, and unless you're applying to work for a monopoly, they're the ones who ultimately call the shots.

jakear2• 7 years ago

I had a recruiter reach out, and I actually played along with their interview process, but at every step of the way I’d inquire about the company’s ethics. Nailed all the tech questions, but in the end did not get an offer.

Maybe I didn’t do as well as I thought I did on the tech, or maybe Palantir recruiting is selecting for people who don’t ask questions.

3sd63_w92jw• 7 years ago

But people can change their opinions as new information becomes available to them. Also, organizations are dynamic and change over time. Willingness to work for someone yesterday is no guarantee of willingness to work for them tomorrow should they change for the worse.

20-30 years ago companies like Yahoo and Oracle were innovators. They had robust software engineering and R&D operations that could attract the top talent in the field. Now, not so much...

gopalv• 7 years ago

they did actually pitch the social good use case of helping law enforcement find and arrest criminals involved in child prostitution rings.

That's sort of the crux of it - ICE wasn't supposed to be bad guys.

In fact, ICE could be heroes - they really could be, when they were breaking up trafficking and rescuing people out of criminal control.

Instead, they are tasked with tearing children away from parents and making orphans by deporting parents away.

I suspect there are people in ICE-HSI, who probably hate being lumped in together with the ICE-ERO.

The point is that the tide of public opinion on ICE would be different if the primary visible effect of them would be pulling women out of shipping containers and sending them to hospitals.

Justice might be blind, but justice without mercy has another name.

cat1992• 7 years ago

Maybe I misunderstand Palantir's mission

nope - just WaPo's use of selective editorial bias to paint problems endemic to both parties & us society in general to partisan ends.

CompanionCuuube• 7 years ago

On one hand, I am grateful for this comment. But on the other hand, I know that it is a low effort comment that you are likely able to use on many a WaPo article.

microtherion• 7 years ago

what exactly did they think they were signing up for?

It appears they're having an "Are we the Baddies?" moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU

kj98uo• 7 years ago

I thought you work remotely based on your past comments??

mcintyre1994• 7 years ago

I’ve brought up my discomfort with Palantir to a recruiter a while ago and they said I’d be working with businesses trying to get set up with Palantir analytics systems. I asked if the role was distinct from one that might work with LEO and of course it’s not, so who knows how true that really is - I’m skeptical.

astine• 7 years ago

There's a difference between supporting law enforcement generally and supporting specific law enforcement efforts. I personally want my local law enforcement to be fast and effective because I want them to keep me safe from crime, but I don't want them to violate my or other people's rights in the process of keeping me safe from crime. So, in that vein, I might not object to police gaining a specific new tool but I would object if I found out that the police were misusing it somehow.

The employees objecting to Palantir's work with ICE are probably not objecting to cooperation with border enforcement on the principle that border enforcement is immoral generally, but that recent activities by border enforcement are immoral. If it weren't for the internment camps at the border, we probably wouldn't be hearing about this.

There's a broader discussion about the 4th ammendment and Palantir's effect there, but I don't think that this particular protest is about that.

alkibiades2• 7 years ago

seeing a t shirt makes you uncomfortable?

forgottenpass• 7 years ago

but what exactly did they think they were signing up for?

The last 15 years of big "tech" have been a giant collective rationalization that building mass surveillance is innocuous.

They think they're singing up to enable palatable use cases of collecting and analyzing that data, and nothing bad will ever happen. Just the same as anyone singing up to work at google/facebook/etc...

_bxg16• 7 years ago

The company is literally named after the magic orb that Sauron uses to surveil Middle-Earth. I don't know what you expected.

_bxg16• 7 years ago

To be clear: I also think that what Palantir is doing is deplorable. I just think that if you apply there, it's pretty obvious what you're signing up for.

prepend6• 7 years ago

It’s not the Palantir that are bad, but Sauron and Saruman. They were created by elves for useful purposes.

Possibly the Palantir saved middle earth when Aragorn used it to scry events leading up to the final battles.

AndrewBissell2• 7 years ago

I guess this explains the "Defend the Shire" shirts I see Palantir employees wear sometimes. Always thought the idea they're on the side of the pastoral, mind-their-own-business Hobbits was one of the most absurd misconceptions of their purpose of any company in Silicon Valley, and that's really saying something.

asdffdsa• 7 years ago

Right, but they serve primarily as metaphysical vessels for surveillance, secrecy, corruption, and evil. Given Palantir's deliberate opaqueness and elitism, I don't see why we should grant them a charitable metaphorical characterization of their defining symbol, especially since the aforementioned values are the opposite of the "good" values (lucidity, order, and individual sovereignty) which form the backbone of ethics in Tolkein's mythology and the (Western) culture LOTR was written in.

richardknop• 7 years ago

Palantirs were created by elves if I am not mistaken. Sauron has stolen / acquired palantirs in battles but originally they were used by people like Gandalf or Elrond for communication. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.

kd33• 7 years ago

It's not just ICE but the entire government that is a problem. I personally stopped accepting any work from any government a few years ago. Once you realize what government is, there's no going back.

"The State […] is an anti-social institution, administered in the only way an anti-social institution can be administered, and by the kind of person who, in the nature of things, is best adapted to such service [a psychopath]. Taking the State wherever found, striking into its history at any point, one sees no way to differentiate the activities of its founders, administrators and beneficiaries from those of a professional-criminal class. As Dr. Sigmund Freud has observed, it can not even be said that the State has ever shown any disposition to suppress crime, but only to safeguard its own monopoly of crime." - Albert J. Nock in “Our Enemy, The State”

pjc502• 7 years ago

We should not allow the observation that some states collapse into lawlessness to turn into a blind "government is bad" attitude that ends with people being held hostage by government-sized private companies. The state can be lawless, but escaping lawlessness is impossible without the efforts of a state.

kd33• 7 years ago

Well it's more the fact that government exists by the use of force and coercion, which makes it a violent and basically terrorist organization. And that is so dispite having laws. Laws != morality.

duqd_• 7 years ago

It makes me sad that so many people are unwilling to engage with this position. Anarchism is unreasonably vilified imo.

frenchyatwork• 7 years ago

A big problem with anarchy is that it's really complicated and is usually either misunderstood by the proponent or the listeners. Anarchy is about levelling the playing field and reducing the power that the most powerful structures have in our society. The problem of removing power structures in institutions, is that they will naturally get replaced by other ones, and the replacements are often as authoritarian as the originals.

In the US, it's popular to think that you can somehow replace elected government (where power is somewhat dependant on votes, and somewhat dependent on advertising budgets/capital) with business (where power is dependent entirely on capital), and that somehow this is more "anarchist". This is a naive idea.

GhostVII• 7 years ago

What is the alternative to having a government? If the current government was completely defunded, it wouldn't prevent governance entirely - we would just be governed by some private company or organization instead. How long are you expecting a country to survive without a government before some group of armed individuals take control of it again, this time without any form of democracy?

kd33• 7 years ago

The alternative is of course no government. That is what the word anarchy means, no rulers. Larken Rose has a mini book out with nice illustrations, which discusses how we might live without government. Free download in pdf format: https://www.dropbox.com/s/yd18waixbva1jae/WhatAnarchyIsnt-FR...

maxlamb• 7 years ago

Except that are plenty of examples where the state is a pro-social institution. Take Norway for example. Societies before states (i.e. prehistory) had much higher rates of homicides by all evidence collected.

burger_moon• 7 years ago

It's kinda interesting how people are just now realizing that all the big tech companies are government contractors and not this imaginary utopia of 'making the world a better place' they were sold on.

Google, Amazon, Microsoft are all US gov't contractors. It's hilariously ironic seeing the political views of the employees suddenly clashing with their employers views of making money as if it's a new thing.

burtonator• 7 years ago

This isn't a new debate though...

My grandfather started a company which was a smaller player in the military contracting space.

It was somewhat large and his argument was that he was always 'helping democracy' but he was willfully blind IMO.

It's always going to be a bit fuzzy but it's another thing entirely when the organization you're selling to is just flat out evil.

riku_iki• 7 years ago

Google and Amazon get very marginal portion of their revenue from government, and reputation risks for main revenue sources likely discourage them in participation in shady activities with government.

jbob2000• 7 years ago

Every tech company I've ever worked for has done a project, in some way, with the government. I worked for a small healthcare startup of 5 developers, we had government contracts. I worked for a medium sized dropbox-like startup, we had government contracts.

Unless you're some dinky, meaningless, retail company, you will do business with the government at some point. That's not a bad thing, it means your company is actually doing something important.

olliej• 7 years ago

Uhh, but unlike other tech companies palantir’s core business model is violating the privacy of individuals to support the governments of many countries. Protesting your employer doing what it has always said it did is a bit rich.

cybersnowflake• 7 years ago

Palantir: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help punish people, manipulate, and violate their privacy through big data?

Engineer: sure! Just as long as I'm not enforcing a national border that's where I draw the line!

gervase• 7 years ago

If you replace "punish" with "control" I think that's an easily-extensible template, because isn't that ultimately tied to the personal ethics of the employee?

<Some Company>: hey dude want to work for a company whose job it is to help manipulate and control people by violating their privacy through big data?

Engineer: sure! Just as long as it doesn't violate this very specific aspect of my personal ethics!

That could easily describe Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc.

caymanjim• 7 years ago

Palantir's entire business is providing data mining and surveillance software to government agencies. ICE is probably the least-morally-reprehensible thing they support. They are deeply involved with DHS, CIA, NSA, all manner of classified agencies. If any of their employees have a problem with ICE, they never belonged there in the first place.

11112361123479• 7 years ago

Palantir's entire business is providing data mining and surveillance software to government agencies.

Palantir has a number of commercial customers, here's a few examples: https://www.palantir.com/palantir-foundry/impact/

nabnob4• 7 years ago

Its two main products are Palantir Gotham and Palantir Metropolis, more geeky winks from a company whose Tolkien namesake is a type of magical sphere used by the evil lord Sauron to surveil, trick, and threaten his enemies across Middle Earth. While Palantir Metropolis is pegged to quantitative analysis for Wall Street banks and hedge funds, Gotham (formerly Palantir Government) is designed for the needs of intelligence, law enforcement, and homeland security customers.

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/22/how-peter-thiels-palanti...

tzakrajs• 7 years ago

I want to join Palantir just to disrupt their business because Peter Thiel is a scum sucker and deserves the absolute worst workforce. Palantir should be liquidated and the proceeds returned to tax payers.

dang• 7 years ago

Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to HN, and especially not ragey unsubstantive comments. They just make this place worse, and we're hoping for better here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

ReptileMan• 7 years ago

This is a big company profile for palantir with the "attackers" getting less than a paragraph. 60 people out of 2500 is not much and the article didn't mention who are they - so probably low level and easily replacable if they decide to quit or be fired.

Those types of articles under the umbrella of "some people on twitter are outraged about something" that give impression of society wide consensus when they are a tiny minority or widespread action are distorting the discourse quite a bit.

Also - they wanted Palantir to donate profits from ICE contracts, but they didn't donate their salaries.

I wouldn't go after Thiel. The guy has a habbit of winning.

htek• 7 years ago

That seems... odd? They're fine with the domestic spying, pre-crime profiling based on flimsy evidence, but help with rounding up people for the concentration camps and people suddenly get cold feet.

totoasticot• 7 years ago

I'm maybe wrong, but I would like to share some ideas.

Where does this money is coming from ? I mean, does the whole question isn't a level "above" : why does such entity exists in a democratic gouvernement ? Isn't it showing a deep loophole in the system ? Same idea : how is this entity funded ? Isn't it with US-citizens's taxes ? So, aren't all US-citizens involved in this story as well ? Why would Palantir's employees be more involved than all the persons that allowed the money to be there for Palantir to be funded ?

I'm seeing more Palantir as a consequence of a system's failure than its premice.

Woild love to discuss about that however.

The war inside Palantir: Data-mining firm ties to ICE under attack by employees

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