The title does not do the content justice. Since Snowden it's been known to the entire world, even outside of HN, that the US government has had this capability for decades now, with mass dragnet surveillance of all internet traffic.
What has changed is that now they're actually using this to a degree that even China generally does not do. If a German had written a comment in support of the Hong Kong protests on Facebook at some point in time, they're extremely unlikely to get denied entry to China over this, despite them almost certainly having even stronger capabilities and databases to easily find this out.
Palantir.
Valar Ventures.
Mithril Capital.
Lembas LLC.
It’s remarkable to me how someone like Thiel could be such a fan of Lord of the Rings, with its central themes of the corrupting influence of unchecked power and good triumphing over evil and evil’s will to control and dominate—then decide to become Gollum.
Help me make sense of this as an old timer because I’m lost
Everything described in the thread has been going on since the Patriot Act was signed in 2001.
As early as 2010, I was able to look up ANY IMEI/IMSI combo in Proton and see all links to other IMEI/SI collected worldwide.
By 2013 I could query those in Palantir on a Secret or SCI level depending on who held the data which would also aggregate and provide to me OSINT, LE reports or other data associated with those id
What’s new here?
Is it just that more people know about it now?
All the stuff I described above was public information as to both “capabilities” and used as casus belli for warrants (US) or kinetic actions (OCONUS).
A thought experiment I have been having asks if we should instead open it up to the public.
For some reason I have been fixated on license plate readers (probably not a bad parallel to Palantir?). Plenty of people on HN justifiably decry license plate readers due to their violation of our privacy (to be sure there's an argument to made though since you are technically "in public" when driving — your privacy protections might be on shaky legal grounds).
But if license plate readers are already a reality (we know they are), why should only private actors have that data? This would make sense if we completely trusted those private actors, of course.
The opposite could be a public, open-source license plate reader that caught on (people using dash cams + open software) — the data sent to a collective, public database. (Perhaps the software strips out personal license plates — only logging tags of official or government vehicles?).
My first reaction is the degree to which that could be abused by ... stalkers? Truly a bad thing. But then I ask myself to what degree the private license plate readers are perhaps "being abused" (or will be more and more) and we don't even know about it.
As I say, a thought experiment that I find myself seeing merits both for and against.
What's with the title? It says "Journalists ..." (plural) when so far as I can tell it's the story of one journalist. While I'm sure there's at least one other journalist wary of traveling to the US, that's not the story at hand, and HN guidelines prohibit editorializing of titles.
I just had some otherwise nice-sounding recruiter pings from Palantir-adjacent companies. I couldn’t do it. I found another role that’s everything I wanted and I can look at myself in the mirror.
I think that the time may come in the near future where "proper" white collar Americans will have an obligation to flagrantly violate new laws and be arrested on purpose in order to create a critical mass of people who both have experienced the excesses of the regime and also are motivated enough to do something about it. This would have to be paired with colossally well-funded lawsuits, as during the Civil Rights movement.
Closely related to this, I have been continually frustrated with the insistence of the left wing that it borders on immoral to take a job as a soldier, police officer, prison guard, or bailiff, and that there's no reason to raise any of their pay. That leaves the various armed forces around the country staffed with individuals who feel very little opposition to rote authoritarianism, corruption, and rule-by-force. There are relatively few individuals working in day-to-day policing or intelligence work that spend a lot of time thinking about the duty of agents of the state to follow its laws.
This guy thought deleting his posts would make a difference... but he's sure it's Palantir.
They've been doing this using all sorts of social media OSINT tools for a decade or more. Okay, he's annoyed but that's not a license to make stuff up.
The US is just following the European example of "responsibly" moderating speech [1], instead of blindly sticking to the 1st amendment, as they were so often called to [2].
[1] https://www.gbnews.com/news/renaud-camus-banned-migration-vi...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/what-eu...
Palantir's role or non-role aside, the idea that we're even looking into whether people wrote about a student protest is absurd. The "combating antisemitism" cover story for all of this is incredibly cynical.