Palantir & The Future of Policing

Your Dystopia Is Already Here

Hello Comrades! This is an article I wrote earlier in the week for the paying subscribers that I wanted to share with you all as example what you can have access to and secondly, because I do find the information and its implications very much worthwhile to know. If you are interested in these more in-depth pieces feel free to hit the button below. Coming up in the next few days is in an interview with a dear friend of mine where we go through the US election, Strikes and the differences in our respective cultural understanding of the issues.

I wasn’t planning on writing about this but a comrade forwarded an article yesterday that all but sent my down a deep rabbit hole of what I thought was science fiction and turns out is a reality. A scary one at that, one that I thought I was sort of aware of and despite a day of research, still know very little about. What I have found out though set off so many alarm bells which prompted to share this with you. As a heads up, there is the possibility that I will share this with the public newsletter later during the week, only because, again, I find this information to be important.

We all know the old Cruise movie, “Minority Report”. At the time it seemed so outlandish that the creators had to resort to futuristic version of Greek Oracles that predicted crimes, allowing a specialized police force to deter crime before it happened. At the time it seemed incomprehensible that today, Big Data, or rather the total surveillance of all citizens whose data would be analyzed by an AI to determine who, where, when could be a) a suspect and b) a potential criminal. I honestly thought we were a few years away from this but as it turns out, we are here and have been here for a while.

Before I get into what facts I know and an analysis thereof, the story essentially proves that the LAPD, among several metropolitan police forces in the US, uses the services provided by Palantir to better their service to their respective communities. I say that with a truck load of sarcasm.

A few questions first: Who is Palantir and what do they do? Who owns it and what are their ideas, motives and visions? How do their services apply to police work?

Palantir Technologies is a American software company that specializes in big data analytics. It was founded by Peter Thiel, Nathan Gettings, Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, and Alex Karp and I will be writing about Peter Thiel a little after this. The company's name is derived from The Lord of the Rings where the magical palantír were "seeing-stones" which allowed their users to communicate with each other or to see faraway parts of the world - and if that isn’t next level Orwellian Double Speak…

The company is known for three projects in particular: Palantir Gotham, Palantir Metropolis and Palantir Foundry. Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) and United States Department of Defense. Palantir Metropolis is used by hedge funds, banks, and financial services firms. Palantir Foundry is used by corporate clients such as Morgan Stanley, Merck KGaA, Airbus, and Fiat Chrysler and so on. Aside from their work in collecting and analyzing data for plenty of public and consumer companies it is their not so well know work for the US ( and other ) governments that becomes shady as fuck. Also noteworthy, Palantir Gotham is used by counter-terrorism analysts at offices in the United States Intelligence Community and United States Department of Defense, fraud investigators at the Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board, and cyber analysts at Information Warfare Monitor (responsible for the GhostNet and the Shadow Network investigation).

Other clients as of 2013 included DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point, the Joint IED Defeat Organization and Allies.  Also, according to TechCrunch,:

"The U.S. spy agencies also employed Palantir to connect databases across departments. Before this, most of the databases used by the CIA and FBI were siloed, forcing users to search each database individually. Now everything is linked together using Palantir."

Also, U.S. military intelligence used the Palantir product to improve their ability to predict locations of improvised explosive devices in its war in Afghanistan.

This is what very little I found out from Open Source Material on the net and whilst it is totally legal for a company to provide these services to the biggest imperial army ever seen on this planet it does raise multiple questions - how do they get their data, who has access to it and what is done with the data, especially considering that IF the data is sourced, maintained and managed by a private company with no public in-or oversight to it all. Why any of this is important you ask? Shit, you have a private data sourcing company who gets their information from we don’t know where providing analysis to the worlds most potent military, as a start.

This is when we need to look into Peter Thiel, co-founder and current Chairman of Palantir. You might remember this little fucker from when I wrote about him a while back but for anyone that missed it: He is the type of person that has had more impact on how we live, act, consume and think today than most other, most of us don’t know who he is and never will and I’ll say this without ever potentially meeting the man, do not agree on any vision for our reality and future. He is a powerful man with more money than I can possibly imagine, having founded paypal ( yes him, not Musk ), being the first investor in Facebook, running a number of companies, political SuperPacs and Think Tanks. According to his academic credentials he is smart and everything, especially his political views and more importantly his financing in U.S. politics make him a hugely unethical individual in my opinion. For anyone to bored to click on the link he basically finances every right wing nut job in the US. Let’s not mention the scandal of him buying himself a NZ passport to build his Doomsday Hideout.

With those two facts, a huge shadowy company that specializes in Data Collection and Analysis, run by someone whose opinions and views aren’t hugely democratic in my sense behind us, how do we get to policing and what does that mean for the average cat like you and me? Actually, before I get into that I do need to dip into ethics and programming here - I understand little of the later and some of the former. Any personal bias, your morality, your ethics will play a part in coding. It’s human and that is not the issue. However, when you have an AI such as the machine at play with Palantir, examining the ethics of those in charge needs to be examined and quite frankly regulated - or at least discussed and that isn’t happening, again, we know all this from Facebook, Google and co. When you go through Thiels biography and what he does you can draw the conclusion I am getting to. Again, Ethics, Programming and AI is something we all genuinely need to wise up to and discuss.

What prompted this piece is an article that broke on Buzzfeed about Palantir, it’s services and the LAPD. It is a long article, very much worth your time that you can read here. Essentially, the company provides Big Data collection services to most major city police departments, drawing data from the DMV, Social Media, Police Records as well as any and all recorded images of you in those cities to build profiles that the police forces can access, cross reference and utilize to catch criminals.

Right. If this doesn’t ring any alarm bells by now, quit reading, because it should. It’s one thing for companies like FB and Google to build intricate avatars of ourselves, manipulate them to sell more advertising and another for violent, racist, instruments of state authority to do the same. I worry that the level of transparency at work is even greater here than with Social Media.

In 2002, James Hahn, then the mayor of Los Angeles, brought in Wiliam Bratton to lead the LAPD. Bratton came from the New York Police Department, where he introduced CompStat, a program that mapped crime. Among his tasks at the LAPD were to introduce new data-driven strategies and get the department out from under the consent decree.

Andrew Ferguson, American University law professor and author of The Rise of Big Data Policing, said that at the LAPD, data-driven policing doesn't just mean using evidence to go after crimes. It means part of the police's job is to conduct more surveillance in order to get more data.

“Palantir is a data-driven surveillance system more than a data-driven policing system,” Ferguson said, meaning that Palantir helps the police watch people, rather than keep people safe. And by design, it's infinitely expandable. “It can be a platform for whatever sources of surveillance data they want to bring into the platform.”

The problem with data-driven policing, according to Ferguson, is that it doesn't solve underlying problems within policing like concerns about misconduct or racism. Although data-driven policing sounds like a push to objectivity, it’s not.

This to me is the key fact I am taking from this article. Policing has moved away from actual policing and gone to data collection and has outsourced the analysis to a private company whose goals are monetary and whose ethics are in serious question. Rather than reforming any policing philosophy to tackle the root causes for crime, implementing and incorporating psychology, social and community based work, policing has turned into Big Brother coupled with a massive increase in militarization that result in more and more conflict with us citizens. Rather than accepting the fact that they, the police, are in fact Public Servants, hired to maintain our Social Contract WITH our help, they have turned into what we used to call the Gestapo in the 3rd Reich, just on Big Data Steroids. This is a huge contributing factor to the tension between communities and the police. When everyone is put under general suspicion, especially if the data collected is put through an algorithm created by a pro-Trump, Conservative led company in a society increasingly at odds with the rampant Fascism at play you get conflict. The type of conflict that can and will tear communities and countries apart.

Seriously, read the article. It goes into great depth about this coded racism, the money involved and how so many laws were by-passed giving Palantir and the LAPD access to each other. There are so many issues at play here but predominately I wanted to raise awareness to the fact that we are all being watched, profiled and are giving access to these profiles to institutions who do not act in our interest. Who is to stop any police force to compile lists of people “unwanted” by those in charge and use these lists to make people disappear? At this stage, no one. The already existing abuse of this power is clear and the potential for even more should be even clearer. Given the already existing Data, coupled with the existing power structure of the modern police force, a hugely politicized and corrupt court system one can easily imagine what could be done when the head of the government decides to play rough, which it already is.

We need to dismantle this. Data Collection in the hand of private companies, tech police forces, the corruption and start fresh.