Some of the capabilities that Palantir Gotham offers:
- - If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period.
- With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database.
- The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too.
And of course, the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply to corporations.
I have a question. And I hope this doesn't sound crass or something. I have a lot of experience in weird and semi-illegal uses of technology. At what point between being born and now does a person decide "I want to do this for a living?" I figure I'll never understand. What is the motive? Money? Feeling like you're genuinely helping national security? I know that people on the other side of the law generally have better I.T. skills than governments, but who and what actually believes that this shit is going to work? How can you not feel the inherent violence in what you're doing? Sorry if I come across as too much of an idealist, but I figure by 2025 all you'll need to be able to do is hit "scan" and get any individual on this planet arrested for anything. And as soon as some crazy person gets power it's a historical tragedy all over again. Remember it's not just America.
I think it's a totally fair question, and something we tend to lose sight off. Not just in the more general sense of "asking if they could, but never if they should." Instead, "profitability" is seen as a moral good in and of itself. I also think that it's a case sometimes of getting the job and then making post hoc rationalizations.
Personal Anecdote: In the late 1980's, early 1990's, the FBI/CIA/three-letter-agency-of-choice fucked up several high-profile cases, due to mishandling digital devices like hard drives. I remember they ESD shocked one motherboard, caused a head crash on another drive, and zeroed out the directory on a drive by unplugging it while it was running without shutting down properly. The directory table never got updated, and all the incriminating data was lost. They were comically inept with the modern "Personal Computer", and had no idea how these machines worked, or how to properly contain/control/analyze them. I was a shit-hot young computer geek, working at the cutting edge of the Personal Computer Revolution in Silicon Valley, and knew this shit VERY well. I was a sysadmin for NASA, worked in product development at both hardware and software companies, and was in constant demand. They removed my desk phone due to recruiters harassing me. My dad knew the head of the FBI at the San Francisco office, whose name - I shit you not - was Bud Covert. I talked to Bud about who I was, what I knew, and how I could help. He was very interested in me and my skills. I got myself all fired up about working in a dark basement with confiscated tech, trying to recover data, and assemble information for agents working on cases. I already did this for my customers, and was fantastic at it. (Three of my employees went on to found DriveSavers, and made millions on the techniques we invented.) I have no doubt that I would have done anything to recover the data off any device they placed in front of me. Period. Figuring out what chip didn't work, desoldering it, getting a new one, soldering it in place, or dicking with hacking device drivers, or simply dumping data to an ASCII file and rebuilding it from patterns in MS Word, would have been my jam. I would have thrived on that shit. --- It never came to be. Even with the personal backing of Agent Covert, I was unable to even get an interview. I was not their "image" of an agent. It wouldn't be until about 5 years later that they started hiring people who knew what they were doing... and these people looked like the geeks you expect... beards... t-shirts... shorts and Birkenstocks... Mountain Dew... and the three-letter-agencies had to make adjustments to their organizational policies on dress codes, hair styles, facial hair, etc., to bring in the talent they needed to stop destroying evidence with their ineptitude. I would have had ZERO compunction - or even a passing thought - as to whether I believed this data was important, or whether it was being grabbed legally, or anything other than Why Doesn't This Computer Work? --- People don't write software like Palantir's products. They write a method in Java that compares the checksum of one data table with the checksum different data table. If they correlate, they log that correlation in a variable, and run the comparison on the next two tables. Repeat until i = var_ncount. Store var_ncount in table COR_sub_36128_rp, and push the code into the code repository for testing and integration into the main source tree. Then move on to the next method that needs to be written. Palantir is about 1,000 people with strong senses of morality and purpose, doing the work they are asked to do, by 5 people with no moral compass or god (other than cash). From time to time one of the 1,000 may get an inkling that they are doing something dodgy... but their project plan, timeline, and budget have all been approved by their management in the highly-federally-regulated business in which the company works... so someone "up there" must have approved this, and knows it's legal. And right. And good. Right? Right...?
Thank you for your perspective goobs. I have a few brothers that work in I.T. and their experience is usually the same. Massive projects requiring a lot of top-down organization. At the bottom level, you're right, just comparing data tables in Java. My main diss of governments is the fact that they seem to be taking a million years to shut down most illegal things happening on the internet. And they're certainly not going to be able to stop most homicidal killers before they advance their plots, so this tech will most likely just be used to infringe average people's rights.
Trying to keep things off the internet will ALWAYS fail. Period. It was designed to route around any problems, roadblocks, or controls put in place, because networks were sketchy as shit when the internet was invented. You had to expect that your poor data packet wouldn't be able to take a specific path between A and Z, because shit was always breaking. So you had to make your little packet safe. And smart. And set up common "rules" around which all the intermediate devices would operate, to help your little packet on the way. Everyone uses the Post as a metaphor for how data gets around the internet, and that is just wrong. Here's how the internet works, whether you are sending an email, or connecting to a web site, or performing an ATM transaction: 1. You write your letter, and stick it in an envelope. 2. You write a 12-digit number on the outside of your letter. (Which may only be 8 digits. Or 9. Or 10. Or 11.) 3. You throw your letter out the open window. 4. It flutters down 10 stories to the street. 5. Someone picks it up, and reads the number on the front. 6. "Hm. Never heard of it. They hand it to the person next to them. 7. Repeat until someone recognizes the first 3 digits of the number. 8. "I know this one!" 9. They give the letter to a motorcycle messenger, and tell them where to take it. 10. The motorcycle messenger delivers the letter to the doorman. 11. The doorman looks at the number, and knows the first 6 digits. "Ok. I got it from here." 12. The motorcycle messenger tries to find you again, and tell you that they delivered the letter to the right building. They may or may not find you. 13. The doorman puts the letter in a chute to go down to the Mail Room. 14. The Mail Room knows the third set of numbers, and gets the letter to the right floor. 15. The floor warden knows the room from the last set of numbers, and delivers it to the door. 16. The secretary opens the letter and checks the language it was written in (SMTP, HTML, FTP, etc.) 17. She hands it to the person at the desk that handles that protocol. 18. That person looks at all of the different instances of that protocol running in their domain (HTTP, for example, and all the web sites they host from that room), and gives it to the correct server for processing. 19. The server reads the message. If it makes sense, it sends back one code. If it doesn't make any sense (or got wet/altered in transit) it sends a back a different code. 20. A messenger arrives at your door and says, "Message Received!" 21. You send the next part of your message. (Because that was just ONE PACKET, and a single email will take DOZENS of packets to send. Add an attachment, and that number goes to THOUSANDS of packets. For a single email message.) Of course, in the intervening years since this process was invented, we have caches and smart scripts that make this process more efficient for the most popular sites in the world (wonder why that web site loads faster than the other one? Yeah. Your ISP has a local cache of it.), but this is how all information is exchanged on the internet. And that envelope you threw out the window? There are TRILLIONS of them laying on the ground. And the bike messenger that picks it up, reads it, and delivers it? There's a couple thousand of them. --- tl;dr - You will never be able to police the placement of new content onto the internet. You cannot "stop" it. Or even shut it down. The entire system is designed to be resilient to any type of interference. Even governments that own the entire pipe and can shut down the internet in their country, cannot disable the cellular and satellite networks. So there is ALWAYS a path for the data to travel.
I've been having more and more mixed feelings about "laws" lately. I mean, police are an important part of keeping a society civil. Prisons (or some incarceration system) are needed for dangerous folks like serial killers. But the law enforcement always had some leeway, to get you off with a warning, being human and understanding and giving folks a chance. On the flip side, that leeway also allowed for some shitty practices like discrimination and biases to be common. And now with the fight for more fairness, and more and more perfect information of you crimes because of technology... EVERYONE BREAKS THE LAW (sometimes). And this surveillance shit is lacking humanity, and can fuck your life just cause you talked to the wrong people once and then the AI looked into your file. And now you're on the hook for some semi-illegal shit you did years ago.
If you're interested in challenging those beliefs further, I'd recommend a couple excellent books. Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Y. Davis Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America by Kristian Williamspolice are an important part of keeping a society civil. Prisons (or some incarceration system) are needed for dangerous folks like serial killers.
I'll add it to the list! I mostly put that in because I do believe some kind of moderating authority is useful in society. Consequences for shitty actions are useful. People will take advantage of each other if there are benefits for be gained. And plain unmoral people exist too. Heck, I'm hoping to volunteer as a type of conflict resolution entity at Burning Man next week. So it's not like I reject the idea of cops in principle. But the way the system is set up now and the way it's trending is worrisome to me.
And we're already in that age. The modernization of police forces and the introduction of nationwide crime databases have already had these types of consequences. Years ago I read a book written by an ex-FBI agent about how to, basically, avoid getting arrested. The book itself is pretty terrible, loaded with unfunny coined terms he invented and tough-guy macho bullshit, but an important point he raised was that prior to technology, a brush up with the law didn't have to carry lifelong consequences. A lack of computerized databases meant all you needed to do to was skip town and nobody would ever know. There were only paper records at best. Another point he made was police services used to be a lot more corrupt, which was bad, but you could occasionally make evidence of your wrongdoing disappear if someone in town could vouch for you. Story time. A relative (can't say who) and their friends stole a bunch of stuff from a record store when they were 19 or so. Ended up getting arrested, booked into jail, the works. What happened? A detective that lived on the same street made the conviction "disappear." Now almost 50 years later it may as well have not existed. Dude went on to be a very high up technology manager (I think almost the CTO?, assistant vice president?) at a huge company. Fuck-you money. Now? Good luck. We might not have social credit here in the Western world but I wouldn't be surprised if tomorrow's kids have to optimize their score while they're CEOing some charity just to get into college and be guaranteed a 1/5 chance at the middle-class.
Yeah, it sucks :( we all do dumb shit from time to time (and hopefully learn from our mistakes). Practically everyone did some underage drinking for example. Now imagine getting caught and have that on your record forever? I have a friend with a drug possession charge (weed, before it was legal) and she had to wait 10 years to expunge her record to be able to visit the states. It’s like the government is now a helicopter parent