this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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Palantir Started By Spying on a City Now Sells AI for War (aimresearch.co)
submitted 3 months ago by AcidicBasicGlitch@lemm.ee to c/technology@lemmy.world
54 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

In 2012, Palantir quietly embedded itself into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department. There were no public announcements. No contracts made available to the city council. Instead, the surveillance company partnered with a local nonprofit to sidestep oversight, gaining access to years of arrest records, licenses, addresses, and phone numbers all to build a shadowy predictive policing program.

Palantir’s software mapped webs of human relationships, assigned residents algorithmic “risk scores,” and helped police generate “target lists” all without public knowledge. “We very much like to not be publicly known,” a Palantir engineer wrote in an internal email later obtained by The Verge.

After years spent quietly powering surveillance systems for police departments and federal agencies, the company has rebranded itself as a frontier AI firm, selling machine learning platforms designed for military dominance and geopolitical control.

"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”

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[–] ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com 21 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They accurately recognized my face from a picture that was over ten years old. I no longer look like I did in the picture. This is going to get bad now that our fascist state authoritarians are everywhere jerking off with their riches and superiority. They have this tech and will do terrible things with it. Impending doom...

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 9 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I'm not very surprised. I think even old-school face recognition does things like measure distance between your eyes, nose etc, and stuff like that (your skull) doesn't change a lot during 10 years of adulthood. The real danger is that they connect all of that information. And as you said, it's everywhere these days, they have a lot of sources and -of course- it's in the wrong hands. I say "of course", because I don't think there are many applications to help with anything. That technology is mainly good for oppression. And predictive policing, social scores are content for Black Mirror episodes or old sci-fi movies. Not reality.

[–] anus@lemmy.world 2 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

You seem well informed, can you help me understand this a bit? Is this basically just ACAB, so any kind of helping the cops is Bad too?

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Well, I'm not a fan of oversimplifications and ACAB is one in this context. I think the people pushing for a repressive surveillance state are politicians and lobbyists. The police force is merely executing that. Though I bet they like expensive playthings and power and control. Because that's kind of their job.

It depends a bit on where you live. Here in Germany I think we have quite some well-trained cops who do their job well. I've met some of them. And those do what they're supposed to and help citizens with all kinds of things. Of course we also have bad cops, assholes who are cops, corrupt ones and people with blood on their hands, but I certainly hope they're far and in between. In America I'm not so sure. I'd surely never help an agency like ICE. That's proper fascist stuff and not ethical. Though I bet there are some cops who do good all day and rescue kittens from trees, idk. I don't think there's an issue with helping those if you like law and order.

I think the issue with surveillance and weird oppressive power abuse is bigger than those people. Sure they're involved and being complicit makes someone bad as well, but they're somewhere at the bottom when they do things like in the article above. Or randomly arrest people in NYC because they have $6 billion to waste on weird tech and some AI tells them to do wrong things. I think the real issue though are the people who give them the $6b, the people who decide what dystopian shit to buy with it, the people who passed the laws to instruct them to do it. And last but not least companies like Palantir who make a fortune off of people's misery.

So you'd need to fight those. Opposing the police in certain ways might be part of that, but it's not going to do much.