Domestic surveillance by ICE of everyone, both citizens and those without papers, wouldn't even be necessary if either the border was properly controlled, or if employers were made more liable for employing workers illegally. But somehow we simultaneously have these billions of dollars in surveillance, associated chilling effects, the whole police-industrial complex, and no effect at all on the rate of illegal immigration, which is higher than it was under the Obama admin by some metrics.<p>Sometimes it seems like the purpose of these contracts is just to give taxpayer money to contractors to put a boot on said taxpayers' faces, rather than whatever is listed.
Shame on Palantir and Thiel for being a part of this; it's still pretty disgusting to me the sheer lack of moral responsibility at play here.<p>1. Insinuating that the tools will ever predict crime or terrorism.<p>2. Allowing, fostering, and building tools of mass surveillance without oversight in secret for no reason other than to surveil.<p>3. Aiding in the human rights abuses through enabling ICE and other organizations which fuel America's concentration camps.<p>Though this is pretty unsurprising considering he literally wants to consume the blood of the young: <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to-inject-himself-with-young-peoples-blood" rel="nofollow">https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/08/peter-thiel-wants-to...</a> supporting ICE, and trump, is one helluva way to make sure you have a steady supply of it on your hands.
This is extreme ignorance, clickbait, or outright deception.<p>Headline:<p><i>"Study: Trump’s paid Peter Thiel’s Palantir $1.5B so far to build ICE’s mass-surveillance network"</i><p>From the actual study:<p><i>"It has received over $150 million from ICE alone, and has contracts worth some $1.5 billion with different federal agencies or departments, like the FBI, Navy, and Census Bureau."</i><p>So the headline is off by 10x but the study also notes that $800M of that $1.5B is a single contract for the Army. If you remove that single outlier, Palantir's 2017-2019 contract total doesn't look all that different than the 2014-2016 contract totals. Looking through the contracts themselves (later in the report), they're from all over the Feds and consistent over time.. other than the outlier.<p>There are lots of places and ways to criticize but this doesn't look like one.
I flagged this because the report [1] directly contradicts the headline.<p>Heck, the <i>article itself</i> contradicts the headline.<p>The vast majority of the 1.5B is going to the DOD, not ICE.<p>According to the report, ICE is getting just 44m of that 1.5b.
For comparison, the IRS gets 31m and the SEC gets 56m.<p>It really looks like the article was willfully misrepresenting the numbers in order to get a hot-button social issue into the headline.<p>[1] <a href="https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-War-Against-Immigrants_-Trumps-Tech-Tools-Powered-by-Palantir_.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://mijente.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/Mijente-The-W...</a>
The "black budget" is probably a monster of waste and graft. We're lucky we even get to see how much Palantir is getting.<p>Reminds me of this old article about TARP I was reading recently. They loaned out $700B to a select few companies, many who were former employers of cabinet and treasury members. And they weren't even required to tell the public what they did with it:<p>> They’d decided not to even ask banks to monitor what they did with the bailout money [..] Instead of lending their new cash to struggling homeowners and small businesses, as Summers had promised, the banks were literally sitting on it. [..] From the start, taxpayer money was used to subsidize a string of finance mergers, from the Chase-Bear Stearns deal to the Wells Fargo Wachovia merger to Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.<p>> Congress had approved $700 billion to buy up toxic mortgages, but $250 billion of the money was now shifted to direct capital injections for banks.<p>Only $4 out of $700 billion ended up going to help home owners directly, the other $696B went to Wall St, even though it only passed congress because it was sold as helping the home owners:<p>> In fact, the amount of money that eventually got spent on homeowner aid now stands as a kind of grotesque joke compared to the Himalayan mountain range of cash that got moved onto the balance sheets of the big banks more or less instantly in the first months of the bailouts. At the start, $50 billion of TARP funds were earmarked for HAMP. In 2010, the size of the program was cut to $30 billion. As of November of last year, a mere $4 billion total has been spent for loan modifications and other homeowner aid.<p><a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-and-lies-of-the-bailout-113270/" rel="nofollow">https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/secrets-...</a><p>It's always a great time to have friends in government, but even more so in recent years. Especially the way Trump has only increased spending, just like Obama and Bush did. Likewise public/private partnerships and investments directly into private firms have increased in numbers, particularly in defence.
While Trump's undoubtably been helping Palantir, I'm not entirely sure how much can be attributed to Trump vs. ongoing procurement issues. E.g., the military's previous analysis software was arguably vaporware [1] and should have been replaced anyway. If the government doesn't have access to decent analytical software, it runs around like a headless chicken (e.g. the wars in the middle east).<p>When it comes to ICE, it looks like Palantir's just integrating data from different sources. Surveillance is an issue, so the question seems to be whether the government should be able to tap into that data in the first place.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer-product-that-is-tearing-the-army-intelligence-community-apart-2012-8" rel="nofollow">https://www.businessinsider.com/palantir-is-the-killer-produ...</a>
Hard to say if being so pro-Trump was purely a "don't bite the hand that feeds" or if he had indeed went from some sort of libertarian to having a halfie for the road to at least a police state, but this probably explains Thiel's behavior as of late.