Pinboard (jm)
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recent bookmarks from jmPalantir Demos AI to Fight Wars But Says It Will Be Totally Ethical Don’t Worry About It2023-04-26T22:16:19+00:00
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvb4x/palantir-demos-ai-to-fight-wars-but-says-it-will-be-totally-ethical-dont-worry-about-it
jmPalantir also isn’t selling a military-specific AI or large language model (LLM) here, it’s offering to integrate existing systems into a controlled environment. The AIP demo shows the software supporting different open-source LLMs, including FLAN-T5 XL, a fine-tuned version of GPT-NeoX-20B, and Dolly-v2-12b, as well as several custom plug-ins. Even fine-tuned AI systems off the shelf have plenty of known issues that could make asking them what to do in a warzone a nightmare. For example, they’re prone to simply making things up, or “hallucinating.” GPT-NeoX-20B in particular is an open-source alternative to GPT-3, a previous version of OpenAI’s language model, created by a startup called EleutherAI. One of EleutherAI’s open-source models -- fine-tuned by another startup called Chai -- recently convinced a Belgian man who spoke to it for six weeks to kill himself.
What Palantir is offering is the illusion of safety and control for the Pentagon as it begins to adopt AI. [...] What AIP does not do is walk through how it plans to deal with the various pernicious problems of LLMs and what the consequences might be in a military context. AIP does not appear to offer solutions to those problems beyond “frameworks” and “guardrails” it promises will make the use of military AI “ethical” and “legal.”
]]>palantir grim-meathook-future war llm aip military ai ethicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:93f35e6885c9/inside the LAPD/LASD usage of Palantir2020-09-30T09:33:08+00:00
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinehaskins1/training-documents-palantir-lapd
jmMuch of the LAPD data consists of the names of people arrested for, convicted of, or even suspected of committing crimes, but that’s just where it starts. Palantir also ingests the bycatch of daily law enforcement activity. Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system. [...] At great taxpayer expense, and without public oversight or regulation, Palantir helped the LAPD construct a vast database that indiscriminately lists the names, addresses, phone numbers, license plates, friendships, romances, jobs of Angelenos — the guilty, innocent, and those in between.
This is absolute garbage -- total bias built-in. No evidence required to get a person in the firing line:
“The focus of a data-driven surveillance system is to put a lot of innocent people in the system,” Ferguson said. “And that means that many folks who end up in the Palantir system are predominantly poor people of color, and who have already been identified by the gaze of police.”]]>palantir databases privacy law lapd lasd los-angeles surveillance big-brother police crime gangshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:414f0c4a714e/The inside story of how the UK government failed to develop a contact-tracing app2020-07-20T10:29:20+00:00
https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-the-inside-story-of-how-government-failed-to-develop-a-contact-tracing-app-12031282
jmnhsx palantir bluetooth covid-19 uk tories data-privacy nhshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:827003909000/How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age - The New York Times2019-10-03T10:12:45+00:00
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/02/magazine/ice-surveillance-deportation.html#click=https://t.co/106daANqmy
jmTracking immigrants in this country is an increasingly trivial exercise because it’s an increasingly trivial exercise to track any of us. [...] Over the course of more than a year, I tried to reverse-engineer individual ICE officers’ use of America’s vast post-Sept. 11 domestic-surveillance apparatus, retracing their hunt for targets down to the very searches they entered into their computers.
The scale of domestic surveillance of the general population in the US is huge. We need more friction:
'What may be most unusual about Washington State is not what it collects and not what it has shared but the degree to which it has been forced to become transparent about the vast quantity of personal data that courses through its bureaucracy. For decades, the overriding objective of American business and government has been to remove friction from the tracking system, by linking networks, by speeding connections, by eliminating barriers. But friction is the only thing that has ever made privacy, let alone obscurity, possible. If there’s no friction, if we can all be profiled instantly and intimately, then there’s nothing to stop any of our neighbors from being targeted — nothing, that is, except our priorities.']]>ice privacy data-protection data-privacy immigration us-politics trump surveillance palantir great-oak trackinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:b5462c83960f/Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops2019-07-15T13:57:36+00:00
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9kx4z8/revealed-this-is-palantirs-top-secret-user-manual-for-cops
jmThe Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide:
If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period.
With a name, police can also find a person's email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it's in the agency's database.
The software can map out a person's family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too.
All of this information is aggregated and synthesized in a way that gives law enforcement nearly omniscient knowledge over any suspect they decide to surveil.
]]>police surveillance palantir creepy grim data-privacy privacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:6d5a5ac1ece6/Palantir Knows Everything About You2018-04-20T12:01:33+00:00
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-palantir-peter-thiel/
jmOperation Laser has made L.A. cops more surgical — and, according to community activists, unrelenting. Once targets are enmeshed in a [Palantir] spidergram, they’re stuck.
Manuel Rios, 22, lives in the back of his grandmother’s house at the top of a hill in East L.A., in the heart of the city’s gang area. [...] He grew up surrounded by friends who joined Eastside 18, the local affiliate of the 18th Street gang, one of the largest criminal syndicates in Southern California. Rios says he was never “jumped in”—initiated into 18. He spent years addicted to crystal meth and was once arrested for possession of a handgun and sentenced to probation. But except for a stint in county jail for a burglary arrest inside a city rec center, he’s avoided further trouble and says he kicked his meth habit last year.
In 2016, Rios was sitting in a parked car with an Eastside 18 friend when a police car pulled up. His buddy ran, pursued by the cops, but Rios stayed put. “Why should I run? I’m not a gang member,” he says over steak and eggs at the IHOP near his home. The police returned and handcuffed him. One of them took his picture with a cellphone. “Welcome to the gang database!” the officer said.
Since then he’s been stopped more than a dozen times, he says, and told that if he doesn’t like it he should move. He has nowhere to go. His girlfriend just had a baby girl, and he wants to be around for them. “They say you’re in the system, you can’t lie to us,” he says. “I tell them, ‘How can I be in the hood if I haven’t got jumped in? Can’t you guys tell people who bang and who don’t?’ They go by their facts, not the real facts.”
The police, on autopilot with Palantir, are driving Rios toward his gang friends, not away from them, worries Mariella Saba, a neighbor and community organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities like East L.A. are algorithmically scraped for pre-crime suspects, data is destiny, says Saba. “These are systemic processes. When people are constantly harassed in a gang context, it pushes them to join. They internalize being told they’re bad.”
]]>palantir surveillance privacy precrime spidergrams future la gangs justice algorithms data-protection data-privacy policing harrassmenthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:047c012ce955/Palantir has secretly been using New Orleans to test its predictive policing technology - The Verge2018-02-28T10:53:39+00:00
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/27/17054740/palantir-predictive-policing-tool-new-orleans-nopd
jmPredictive policing technology has proven highly controversial wherever it is implemented, but in New Orleans, the program escaped public notice, partly because Palantir established it as a philanthropic relationship with the city through Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s signature NOLA For Life program. Thanks to its philanthropic status, as well as New Orleans’ “strong mayor” model of government, the agreement never passed through a public procurement process.
In fact, key city council members and attorneys contacted by The Verge had no idea that the city had any sort of relationship with Palantir, nor were they aware that Palantir used its program in New Orleans to market its services to another law enforcement agency for a multimillion-dollar contract.
Even James Carville, the political operative instrumental in bringing about Palantir’s collaboration with NOPD, said that the program was not public knowledge. “No one in New Orleans even knows about this, to my knowledge,” Carville said.
]]>palantir creepy surveillance crime forecasting precrime new-orleans us-politics privacyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:33ea3663b719/Palantir Provides the Engine for Donald Trump’s Deportation Machine2017-03-03T10:53:33+00:00
https://theintercept.com/2017/03/02/palantir-provides-the-engine-for-donald-trumps-deportation-machine/
jmpalantir immigration peter-thiel deportation ice us-politicshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:0398a079d7ce/The Violence of Algorithms: Why Big Data Is Only as Smart as Those Who Generate It2015-06-03T15:20:19+00:00
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2015-05-25/violence-algorithms
jmThe modern state system is built on a bargain between governments and citizens. States provide collective social goods, and in turn, via a system of norms, institutions, regulations, and ethics to hold this power accountable, citizens give states legitimacy. This bargain created order and stability out of what was an increasingly chaotic global system. If algorithms represent a new ungoverned space, a hidden and potentially ever-evolving unknowable public good, then they are an affront to our democratic system, one that requires transparency and accountability in order to function. A node of power that exists outside of these bounds is a threat to the notion of collective governance itself. This, at its core, is a profoundly undemocratic notion—one that states will have to engage with seriously if they are going to remain relevant and legitimate to their digital citizenry who give them their power.
]]>palantir algorithms big-data government democracy transparency accountability analytics surveillance war privacy protest rightshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:358d87638405/How A 'Deviant' Philosopher Built Palantir, A CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut - Forbes2013-08-14T21:51:42+00:00
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/08/14/agent-of-intelligence-how-a-deviant-philosopher-built-palantir-a-cia-funded-data-mining-juggernaut/4/
jmKatz-Lacabe wasn’t impressed. Palantir’s software, he points out, has no default time limits -- all information remains searchable for as long as it’s stored on the customer’s servers. And its auditing function? “I don’t think it means a damn thing,” he says. “Logs aren’t useful unless someone is looking at them.” [...]
What if Palantir’s audit logs -- its central safeguard against abuse -- are simply ignored? Karp responds that the logs are intended to be read by a third party. In the case of government agencies, he suggests an oversight body that reviews all surveillance -- an institution that is purely theoretical at the moment. “Something like this will exist,” Karp insists. “Societies will build it, precisely because the alternative is letting terrorism happen or losing all our liberties.”
Palantir’s critics, unsurprisingly, aren’t reassured by Karp’s hypothetical court. Electronic Privacy Information Center activist Amie Stepanovich calls Palantir “naive” to expect the government to start policing its own use of technology. The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Lee Tien derides Karp’s argument that privacy safeguards can be added to surveillance systems after the fact. “You should think about what to do with the toxic waste while you’re building the nuclear power plant,” he argues, “not some day in the future.”
]]>palantir data-retention privacy surveillance state cia forbes andy-greenberg eff epic snoopinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:jm/b:926d84dca49c/