HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surveillance Complex

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/06/23/1218189/-HBGary-Palantir-Prism-Facebook-The-Industrial-Surveillance-Complex

by dfc • 13 years ago

107 71 13 years ago

rdudekul• 13 years ago

This is scary stuff!

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.

ihsw• 13 years ago

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).

samstave3• 13 years ago

FB is riddled with .gov/,mil employees. Their head of security went from NSA to FB to NSA.

They are unscrupulous.

VladRussian23• 13 years ago

{x: has_security_clearance(x) = true}

psbp• 13 years ago

"I wonder how much I can trust Facebook now."

Just now?

nir2• 13 years ago

Isn't advertising your personal information, relationships and whereabouts the whole point of Facebook? If it's private, don't put it on Facebook.

boi_v2• 13 years ago

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.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

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.

smacktoward• 13 years ago

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.

danielrhodes• 13 years ago

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.

VladRussian23• 13 years ago

revenue comes from advertising

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...

mrschwabe• 13 years ago

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.

fixxer• 13 years ago

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.

Homunculiheaded• 13 years ago

For me it's had an almost opposite effect.

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.

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

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.

ahlatimer• 13 years ago

For reference, here's the Steve Yegge talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKmQW_Nkfk8

I thoroughly enjoyed it.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

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.

myndless• 13 years ago

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.

martinlandau4• 13 years ago

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.

dfc2• 13 years ago

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.

ganeumann• 13 years ago

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?

LoganCale• 13 years ago

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.

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

There's a pretty good article on it here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-oper...

marze• 13 years ago

The sock puppets are most interesting. Would any be posting here?

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

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. :-(

samstave3• 13 years ago

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.

jbooth• 13 years ago

Pretty sure HN is under their radar for the most part.

sheri• 13 years ago

"Bonesaw"?? Really? That sounds like a McBain movie from the Simpsons.

skore5• 13 years ago

I particularly enjoyed the use of the word "holistic" in the sentence "a holistic approach to target discovery".

bitwize• 13 years ago

BOOOONESAAAAW IS RAAAAIDY!

skore5• 13 years ago

I saw the best minds of my generation write software to surveil and control the other minds of my generation.

3am• 13 years ago

This is not a new phenomenon.

skore5• 13 years ago

Agreed, sadly.

rayiner• 13 years ago

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."

dfc2• 13 years ago

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.

skore5• 13 years ago

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.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damocles (including this here because it's an educating read, even if you think you know about it)

NhanH• 13 years ago

> Working on search or data classification technology that has applications to obsoleting workers and putting them out of a job = not evil?

Possibly, if that technology also allows us to, says, cure cancer?

Hyperbole aside, putting workers out of jobs are apple-and-watermelon different than "helping" the military industry (spying or otherwise).

And I'm fairly sure that the complaint of too much focus on the ads industry isn't particularly rare either.

pnathan2• 13 years ago

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...

Zigurd• 13 years ago

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.

VladRussian23• 13 years ago

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.

Permit3• 13 years ago

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.

glesica3• 13 years ago

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?

Permit3• 13 years ago

  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.

JPKab• 13 years ago

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.

lostlogin• 13 years ago

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.

cliveowen• 13 years ago

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.

martinlandau4• 13 years ago

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!

HBGary, Palantir, Prism, Facebook and The Industrial Surveillance Complex

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