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.”
Would be nice to get some numbers on the accuracy and performance of such a dystopian sci-fi technology (Minority Report?). There should be some, since it’s already in operation for 13 years…
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…
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.
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?
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.
In this video about Lavender AI which is Israel’s Palantir, they talk about the accuracy score that the AI gives targets for how sure it is that they are Hamas. It is used to determine how expensive the weapons to take that person out, and how many innocent bystanders they are willing to take out along with that target.
https://youtu.be/4RmNJH4UN3s
Thanks, nice video and seems he has some numbers. Very inhuman that they figured out exact numbers how it has an allowance to take out 15/20 bystanders as well. Or an entire elementary school if it’s an high ranking “target”. I mean war is a bit of a different thing than policing. But a minimum 10% false positives plus collateral murder is quite a lot. And then I’m not sure if there is any substance to those numbers. I suppose they conveniently eliminate all the evidence with the same bomb that kills the people. And they don’t do research, so I wonder how they even figured out a ratio.
Yeah there’s already at least one well known case. This article mentions it https://wp.api.aclu.org/press-releases/208236
Police use to justify stops and arrests: Alerts are sent directly to a phone app used by officers, enabling immediate stops and detentions based on unverified purported facial recognition matches.
I’m looking more for large-scale quantitative numbers. I mean one destroyed life is really bad. But they could argue they’d have saved 30 lives in turn, and then we’d need to discuss how to do the maths on that…
Yeah, I am not sure but hopefully somebody has the numbers. That is usually the argument for trampling the constitution.
Hard to say how much has been actually documented bc they’ve been doing a lot of this stuff off record.
They potentially saved 30000 lives locking up 100 people for crimes committed by somebody else in a states they’ve never been to and we might not even know about it
Oh well, some people in the USA have a really “interesting” relationship with their own constitution these days… I sometimes feel like explaining it to them. Or what a constitutional republic is.
Yeah, keeping things “off record” is the usual strategy to get away with whatever you wanted.