Palantir enables immigration agents to look up information from the CIA
My friend Chris Rohlf has a snarky dismissal of a lot of "hardware hacking" and "IOT" security conference talks: "look at this debugger debugging!" The subtext is, once you find the debug stubs or the JTAG interface or whatever, the rest of the talk is pretty academic. Also: you have to be in a position to exercise the debugger interface to conduct the "hack".Stories like this call that snark to mind. "Look at this database databasing!"I'm loathe to stick up for Palantir, because I think Peter Thiel is a monster, and I have no particular reason to believe that Palantir is an especially moral team in its operations and management. But I think most commentary about Palantir's role in surveillance is overblown. From what I can tell, it's a very expensive consultingware database with a name that has special valence with nerds.Be mean to Palantir all you want, I guess. But don't let other tech companies off the hook. I've been trying to make this point for years with, I think, pretty limited success: if you're angry at Palantir for assisting mass deportation, you should be equally angry at Oracle and Cisco. I am --- in fact, a little more so.