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0 pointsnabnob6y ago0 comments

Wow. How do Palantir engineers sleep at night? Later in the article, it describes how LAPD uses Palantir software - tracking almost everyone in poor neighborhoods at all times. All of this use is completely without warrants, and the police know to avoid mentioning Palantir in court documents so that its use won't be challanged.

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derefr6y ago· 3 in thread

> All of this use is completely without warrants

Do you need a warrant to stake out a public place and write down everything you see? I get the impression that that's the analogous non-automated workload. (Except for the scale; to get equivalent results, you'd have to have thousands of people watching.)

>Except for the scale; to get equivalent results, you'd have to have thousands of people watching.

Which is the only thing that matters. Sure, warrants aren't necessary, but the concept of mass, automated surveillance is so new that we simply haven't figured out what to do about it yet.

magduf6y ago

>Sure, warrants aren't necessary, but the concept of mass, automated surveillance is so new that we simply haven't figured out what to do about it yet.

We haven't? It seems like we have: we're embracing it wholeheartedly. We're just careful to only use it (for now) on groups of people who don't have much power to push back on it.

It's worth considering that the scale argument is exactly why it didn't require a warrant before. If you only have the man power to invade the privacy of ten people, you'll do so with thought and diligence.

However, if you can use the same manpower to invade the privacy of ten- or one-hundred-thousand people, the thought put into who you monitor so closely drops precipitously.

geodel6y ago

> Wow. How do Palantir engineers sleep at night?

Like other >99% of the engineers in the world.

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