Comment by fudged71

Comment by fudged71 5 days ago

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It's noteworthy at this point in time that there is a contradiction. The government is currently ramping up Palantir and they are using "precise targeting" of illegal aliens using "advanced data/algorithms". And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.

Maybe now is exactly the right time to publicly call out the apparent uselessness of Palantir before they fully deploy their high altitude loitering blimps and drones for pervasive surveillance and tracking protestors to their homes.

(My greater theory is that the slide into authoritarianism is not linear, but rather has a hump in the middle where government speech and actions are necessarily opposite, and that they expect the contradiction to slide. Calling out the contradiction is one of the most important things to do for people to see what is going on.)

larkost 5 days ago

I think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).

This can be seen in the case of ChongLy Thao, the American citizen (who was born in Laos). This was the man dragged out into freezing temperatures in his underwear after ICE knocked down his door (without a warrant), because they thought two other men (of Thai origin I think) were living there. The ICE agents attitude was that they must be living there, and ChongLy was hiding them. That being wrong does not cost those ICE agents anything, and that is the source of the problems.

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  • strken 5 days ago

    Do you mean false positives? A false negative would be "we checked to see whether Alice was in the country illegally, and the computer said no but the actual answer turned out to be yes".

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  • nobody9999 4 days ago

    >think this is mostly because they don't care about false-negatives. They have forgotten the idea that our justice system was supposed to hold true to: "better a hundred guilty go free than one innocent person suffer" (attributed to Benjamin Franklin).

    Putting on my pedant's hat here. Franklin may well have said something similar, but the maxim you mention is broadly known as Blackstone's Formulation (or ratio)[0] after William Blackstone[1], another Englishman.

    Many sayings are ascribed to Benjamin Franklin. And some of them, he actually said.

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Blackstone

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  • freejazz 5 days ago

    But they were wrong about the Thai people living there. That's the poster's point. Not that they don't care, but that they were wrong from the get-go because they don't actually have good information.

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    • habinero 5 days ago

      No, it's pretty clear they don't care and will never care.

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mmooss 5 days ago

> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.

Generally speaking, that is a tactic of oppression, creating a general sense of fear for everyone. Anyone can be arrested or shot.

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  • fudged71 4 days ago

    Yes obviously, but as my central point was, it is the complete opposite of their narrative of targeted operations backed by data.

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tehjoker 5 days ago

ICE/DHS are not NSA, they probably don't share efficiently. All the intelligence services are rivals and duplicate capabilities to some degree.

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ryandrake 5 days ago

> And yet, at the very same time we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people, seemingly going to any house indescriminently, and generally profiling people instead of using any intelligence whatsoever.

If the end goal is that the broad, general public are intimidated, then they're not necessarily "finding the wrong people." With the current "semi random" enforcement with many false positives, nobody feels safe, regardless of their legal status. This looks to be the goal: Intimidate everyone.

If they had a 100% true positive rate and a 0% false positive rate, the general population would not feel terrorized.

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  • fudged71 5 days ago

    That's exactly what I'm saying though. I agree that their intent is manufacturing fear and uncertainty.

    What I'm saying is that congress and the public should be holding them to their word and asking where all this Palantir money is going if the stated intent of "targeted operations/individuals" is completely misaligned with operational reality.

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direwolf20 5 days ago

Maybe the wrong people are, in reality, precisely the people they intended to target.

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diogocp 5 days ago

> we are seeing time and time again that ICE/DHS agents are finding the wrong people

There is a difference between what you are seeing and what is actually happening.

99.9% of the time they are finding the right people, but "illegal alien was deported" is as interesting a news story as "water is wet".

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  • kaitai 5 days ago

    They are going door to door in the neighborhood I grew up in.

    They're bringing in a lot of US citizens here in Minneapolis/St Paul, including a bunch of Native folks.

    The sex offender they'd been looking for at ChongLy Thao's house had already been in jail for a year.

    The Dept of Corrections is annoyed enough about the slander of their work that they now have a whole page with stats and details about their transfers to ICE, including some video of them transferring criminals into ICE custody https://mn.gov/doc/about/news/combatting-dhs-misinformation/

    I am pretty nervous about the possibilities for trampling peoples' Constitutional rights in ever more sophisticated ways, but the current iteration can't even merge a database and then get accurate names & addresses out to field agents. (That doesn't stop the kidnappings, it just makes it a big waste of money as adult US citizens with no criminal record do by & large get released.)

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  • jibal 5 days ago

    The evidence goes strongly against your claims.

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