<story><title>Palantir enables immigration agents to look up information from the CIA</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2017/03/17/palantir-enables-immigration-agents-to-access-information-from-the-cia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>My friend Chris Rohlf has a snarky dismissal of a lot of &amp;quot;hardware hacking&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;IOT&amp;quot; security conference talks: &amp;quot;look at this debugger debugging!&amp;quot; The subtext is, once you find the debug stubs or the JTAG interface or whatever, the rest of the talk is pretty academic. Also: you have to be in a position to exercise the debugger interface to conduct the &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Stories like this call that snark to mind. &amp;quot;Look at this database databasing!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m loathe to stick up for Palantir, because I think Peter Thiel is a monster, and I have no particular reason to believe that Palantir is an especially moral team in its operations and management. But I think most commentary about Palantir&amp;#x27;s role in surveillance is overblown. From what I can tell, it&amp;#x27;s a very expensive consultingware database with a name that has special valence with nerds.&lt;p&gt;Be mean to Palantir all you want, I guess. But don&amp;#x27;t let other tech companies off the hook. I&amp;#x27;ve been trying to make this point for years with, I think, pretty limited success: if you&amp;#x27;re angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>tyre</author><text>To expand on your point on Palantir just being a database, it&amp;#x27;s a good lesson to startup founders: solve the problem your user had.&lt;p&gt;The biggest problem that Palantir solves is: we (CIA, FBI, whatever) have to pull together data from 500 software systems that don&amp;#x27;t share a common taxonomy, hold petabytes of data in totally different ways, live in agencies across the world, and have all sorts of nuanced permissions models (e.g. &amp;quot;Five Eyes&amp;quot; or &amp;quot;this data was shared to New Zealand by a country that doesn&amp;#x27;t share data directly with the US, but New Zealand does share data to the US. I&amp;#x27;m a US agent looking at NZ data, do I see this?&amp;quot;).&lt;p&gt;They basically clean and centralize information. It&amp;#x27;s super unsexy (probably my least favorite thing to do as an engineer.) But that is the problem that these organizations have.</text></comment>
<story><title>Palantir enables immigration agents to look up information from the CIA</title><url>https://theintercept.com/2017/03/17/palantir-enables-immigration-agents-to-access-information-from-the-cia/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tptacek</author><text>My friend Chris Rohlf has a snarky dismissal of a lot of &amp;quot;hardware hacking&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;IOT&amp;quot; security conference talks: &amp;quot;look at this debugger debugging!&amp;quot; The subtext is, once you find the debug stubs or the JTAG interface or whatever, the rest of the talk is pretty academic. Also: you have to be in a position to exercise the debugger interface to conduct the &amp;quot;hack&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;Stories like this call that snark to mind. &amp;quot;Look at this database databasing!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m loathe to stick up for Palantir, because I think Peter Thiel is a monster, and I have no particular reason to believe that Palantir is an especially moral team in its operations and management. But I think most commentary about Palantir&amp;#x27;s role in surveillance is overblown. From what I can tell, it&amp;#x27;s a very expensive consultingware database with a name that has special valence with nerds.&lt;p&gt;Be mean to Palantir all you want, I guess. But don&amp;#x27;t let other tech companies off the hook. I&amp;#x27;ve been trying to make this point for years with, I think, pretty limited success: if you&amp;#x27;re angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Chaebixi</author><text>&amp;gt; My friend Chris Rohlf has a snarky dismissal of a lot of &amp;quot;hardware hacking&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;IOT&amp;quot; security conference talks: &amp;quot;look at this debugger debugging!&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Stories like this call that snark to mind. &amp;quot;Look at this database databasing!&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t a technical story, it&amp;#x27;s a social and governmental one.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; if you&amp;#x27;re angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t Palantir&amp;#x27;s assistance clearer and more direct?  Aren&amp;#x27;t they building applications with a lot of knowledge of what they&amp;#x27;ll be used to do?  As far as I know, Cisco doesn&amp;#x27;t sell products like &amp;quot;gigabit mass-deporation cloud router 2239.&amp;quot;  Any assistance they give is much more indirect.</text></comment>