Comment by crystal_revenge

Because Snowden, agree with him or not, showed us that reality blew away our imagination.

It may feel normal now, but back then, serious people, professionals, told us that the claims just were not possible.

Until we learned that they were.

Incompetence could also be incredibly dangerous given enough destructive willpower.

https://www.thenation.com/article/world/nsa-palantir-israel-...

They're not trying to use the data to act efficiently (or in the public good for that matter), and they sure as fuck don't want you to see it. They're trying to make sure that they have dirt on anyone who becomes their enemy in the future.

I've often said we're recreating Brazil [1] instead of 1984. It's an excellent film if you haven't seen it btw, and in many ways rather more prophetic and insightful than 1984. But the ending emphasizes that incompetence just leads to a comedy of absurdity, but absurdity is no less dangerous.

As for PRISM, it's regularly used - but we engage in parallel construction since it's probably illegal and if anybody could prove legal standing to challenge it, it would be able to be legally dismantled. Basically information is collected using PRISM, and then we find some legal reason of obtaining a warrant or otherwise 'coincidentally' bumping into the targets, preventing its usage from being challenged, or even acknowledged, in court. There's a good writeup here. [2]

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJCxVkllxZw

[2] - https://theintercept.com/2018/01/09/dark-side-fbi-dea-illega...

>I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.

As a former intelligence officer with combat time I promise you there are A LOT of actions happening based on that data.

> I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.

Someone else on HN said it would be nice if the NSA published statistics or something, data so aggregate you couldn't determine much from it, but still tells you "holy shit they prevented something crazy" levels of information, harder said than done without revealing too much.

I see palntir as a techno whitewashing Mckinsey consultant. But the tech is there to make a much bigger problem than prior art, halucinations et al.

They are still dangerous even if theyre over promising because even placebos are dangerous when the displace real medical interventions.

doing Bad Things poorly is still doing Bad Things.

Because palantirs selling proposition is: you can’t find the answers in your own data, but we can.

You've never seen it because when it's efficient you won't see it.

If they throw out things like due process and reasonable doubt they can do a whole lot with the data they've collected.

That may sound hyperbolic but I hope it's obvious to most people by now that it's not.

I honestly tempt fate for fun to see how good police surveillance tech is the last few years.

I let one of my cars expire the registration a few months Everytime, because I'm lazy and because I want to see if I get flagged by a popup system Everytime a police officer passes near me. My commute car is out of registration 3 months right now. And old cop friend told me they basically never tow unless it's 6 months. I pay the $50 late fee once a year and keep doing my experiment for the last 6-7 years. Still no real signs they care.

My fun car has out of state plates for 10 years now. Ive been pulled over once for speeding, and told the officer I just bought it. I've never registered it since I bought it from a friend a decade ago. They let me go. It makes me wonder if one day they'll say "sir, we have plate scanners of this vehicle driving around this state for a year straight.. pay a fine." Not yet.

> ... I've never seen the government efficiently action on any data they have collected.

It isn't usually a question of efficiency, it is a question of damage. Technically there is an argument that something like the holocaust was inefficiently executed, but still a good reason to actively prevent governments having ready-to-use data on hand about people's ethnic origin.

A lot of the same observations probably apply to the ICE situation too. One of the big problems with the mass-migration programs has always been that there is no reasonable way to undo that sort of thing because it is far too risky for the government to be primed to identify and deport large groups of people. For all the fire and thunder the Trump administration probably isn't going to accomplish very much, but at great cost.

One of the problems is the fundamentals of their tech works "just enough".

IE; just looking at their puff piece demo for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxKghrZU5w8

- semantic data integration/triplestores/linking facts in a database.

- feature extraction from imagery / AI detection of objects as an alarm

- push to human operators

You or I might expect this to be held to a high standard - chaining facts together like this better be darned right before action is taken!

But what if the question their software solves isn't we look at a chain of evidence and act on it in a legal/just/ethical manner but we have decided to act and need a plausible pretext; akin to parallel construction?

When you assess it by that criteria, it works fantastically - you can just dump in loads and loads of data; get some wonky correlations out and go do whatever you like. Who cares if its wrong - double checking is hard work; someone else will "fix" it if you make a mistake; by lying, by giving you immunity from prosecution, by flying you out of state or going on the TV, or uh, well, that's a future you problem.

To take a non US example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robodebt_scheme

Debt calculations were flat out wrong

The unstated goal/dogwhistle at the time was to punish the poor (cost more than it would ever recover)

It was partially stopped after public outcry with a few ministerial decisions.

It took years; people dying; a royal commission and a change of political party to put a complete stop to it.

No real consequences for the senior political figures who directly enacted this

Limited consequences for 12 of 16 public servants - no arrests, no official job losses, some minor demotions.

If the goal of the machine is to displace responsibility; the above example did its job.

No, incompetence is terrifying. No one wants to get caught in a machine driven by imbeciles who don't care about truth or honoring the Constitution.

Competence is also terrifying, but for different reasons.

It sure would be convenient if they were always ineffective. Sadly there have been periods in history where governments have set themselves to brutality with incredible effectiveness.

Except you don't need to solve any remotely hard technical problems for the capabilities to be terrifying here.

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[flagged]

lol. came here to say pretty much the same thing.