Revealed: This Is Palantir's Top-Secret User Manual For Cops (vice.com) 83
New submitter popcornfan679 shares a report: Through a public record request, Motherboard has obtained a user manual that gives unprecedented insight into Palantir Gotham (Palantir's other services, Palantir Foundry, is an enterprise data platform), which is used by law enforcement agencies like the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center. (Palantir is one of the most significant and secretive companies in big data analysis.) The NCRIC serves around 300 communities in northern California and is what is known as a "fusion center," a Department of Homeland Security intelligence center that aggregates and investigates information from state, local, and federal agencies, as well as some private entities, into large databases that can be searched using software like Palantir. Fusion centers have become a target of civil liberties groups in part because they collect and aggregate data from so many different public and private entities.
The guide doesn't just show how Gotham works. It also shows how police are instructed to use the software. This guide seems to be specifically made by Palantir for the California law enforcement because it includes examples specific to California. We don't know exactly what information is excluded, or what changes have been made since the document was first created. The first eight pages that we received in response to our request is undated, but the remaining twenty-one pages were copyrighted in 2016. (Palantir did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The 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 guide doesn't just show how Gotham works. It also shows how police are instructed to use the software. This guide seems to be specifically made by Palantir for the California law enforcement because it includes examples specific to California. We don't know exactly what information is excluded, or what changes have been made since the document was first created. The first eight pages that we received in response to our request is undated, but the remaining twenty-one pages were copyrighted in 2016. (Palantir did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) The 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.
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Well, if they were honest it'd be George Orwell's estate suing, because it'd be called "Big Brother". These "Fusion Centers" are one stop shopping surveillance resources where cops can reconstruct the movements and identify the (probable) associates of literally anyone residing in the US, and access sensitive personal data (social security number, bank account numbers). It's only a matter of time before this is connected up with surveillance cameras and automated facial recognition -- if it hasn't happene
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To be honest, I found it somewhat underwhelming... yes, they do have a lot of records like registries, permits, enrollment and subscriptions of various kind. But apart from the license plate readers, which seem to be a fairly separate system there wasn't much in terms of actually tracking you. The lack of any communication-specific fields makes me think this is just "Joe Average is subscribed to cable & internet from address X" and "Joe Average has a cell phone 1-555-NBDY with billing address X" not any
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(Apparent) simplicty makes a big difference. For example court records have always been public records, but being able to look them up online, without any kind of context, has a different impact on the people involved in proceedings than making them available for perusing in person.
The reason I say "apparent" is that having more information at your finger tips means you've got to think harder about context.
Who pays the trolls? (Score:3)
Question for Slashdot:
Who pays the trolls?
It's obvious that no one would troll in support of a dystopian police state, unless they were paid to do so. And they certainly wouldn't troll Slashdot of all places. The easily led rubes on Reddit and Faceboot have never heard of this site.
Most likely there are multiple troll farms attacking our forum. Based on how they write, I'd say at least some are definitely American. Plenty more are obvious ESL speakers.
I'm less interested in where the trolls live, and more i
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Are you implying that people who use correct English must be American, while others are ESL speakers?
That's cute.
"Greatest nation in the world", right?
System for Raiding and Invading Human Lives (Score:1)
So secrets about a system that raids and invades people's lives are revealed.
Who has access to this information?
It could be the person next to you at the cafe or in line at the grocery store.
How is this different than rape? What system is in place to assure that this system is only targeted at clear criminal behavior and not just a wide net of what paranoid fascist creeps deem suspicious?
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How is this different than rape?
When cops do it, it is called "Lawful access to and use of your genitals". At least in a police-state, they cannot actually rape you. Also, in a police-state every regular citizen is a criminal already.
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It is funny, in that you think anybody who isn't white is an "invader," and that some mythical job you used to have has been "taken," and that you think your resources are being "spent on illegals" when they're really being stolen from you by people who are already richer than you could ever dream to be. It is funny in the sense that you are laughable.
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It is perfectly legal to apply for asylum and similar under-duress forms of legal immigration, and also legal to present oneself at a US Immigration office inside the border of the US to make that application. It actually_is_ illegal to _prevent_ non-US-nationals from making such an application.
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Refugees are supposed to apply for asylum in the first country that can provide them asylume that they travel to. For those illegal immigrants entering the U.S. from Central America and passing through Mexico, they're supposed to seek asylum in Mexico. As for Mexican illegal immigrants, they have no cause to seek asylum. And if you think that they do, then perhaps the U.S. should launch a war against Mexico and replace the government there.
Re:Isn't it funny? (Score:5, Insightful)
our jobs from being take
You lost your job picking strawberries for $2/hour?
If you want to end illegal immigration, you do it by going after the people that hire them. No jobs, no immigrants.
The fact that we never do so should be a clue about how serious the problem of illegal immigration actually is. Imagine if thousands of employers were knowingly hiring terrorists. "Yes, death to America, here's your paycheck and the explosives are right over there."
Instead, the people in charge are the ones hiring illegal immigrants. "They're destroying our country.....but someone's gotta mow my golf courses."
But that would be far less fun than giving in to the fearmongering, wouldn't it?
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The strange thing is why Dems in recent years suddenly oppose everything that would stem this tide of illegal immigration. It's almost as if they know illegal voting for Democrats is occurring on a massive scale.
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The strange thing is why Republicans forgot they've not tried to do anything about illegal immigration until now, and repeatedly passed "amnesty" laws, and illegal immigration is actually way, way down.
It's almost like they've decided to use this to rile up their base, and their base is utterly unable to remember recent history.
FTP Forever. (Score:3)
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SFTP. Seriously, FTP.
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And in cities like Rio de Janeiro, cops have murdered hundreds of people just this year. Why don't you move there?
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Not the only post with grammar/spelling errors coming to their defense. You'd think a patriotic company like Palantir could hire some American astroturfers. But no. It's all H1-B ESL speakers.
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That's not a man, men are humans
"Person of Interest" (Score:3)
I wonder how often a "person of interest" is someone they have real articulable reasons to believe has committed a particular crime vs. they figure they must have done something wrong vs. they look about 22, wear a short skirt and they'd sure like to know where to be to "randomly" run in to her.
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Palantir> I want a girl with a short skirt and a long jacket
Re:"Person of Interest" (Score:5, Informative)
I wonder how often a "person of interest" is someone they have real articulable reasons to believe has committed a particular crime vs. they figure they must have done something wrong vs. they look about 22, wear a short skirt and they'd sure like to know where to be to "randomly" run in to her.
In San Francisco, police officers can find out what medication a person is taking.
This came out during a wrongful termination lawsuit. A police officer in San Francisco was dismissed for accessing that database for personal reasons, but his defense was that absolutely everyone in his precinct used that database to look up prospective dating partners and that he had been unfairly singled out for doing so. Apparently, law enforcement databases are excluded from HIPAA regulations.
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There's a Wiki page for that! LOVEINT [wikipedia.org]
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Potential lovers are not the only target. Celebrities are also a huge target. What would you call that? CELEBINT?
Before HIPAA passed for instance, more than 100 employees of a clinic were found to have accessed the medical records on the same day for Tonya Harding (the Olympic skater) when she visited the clinic for a sprained wrist. Source google scholar pdf [google.com]
This is why we also need HIPAA-like regulations (with serious criminal penalties) for law enforcement databases as well. If a bunch of doctors, nurses,
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The regulations already exist. That's why people get busted all the time for accessing all sorts of private records for personal use. This isn't just police, but also tax
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I remember when they were called "suspects". It changed about the same time illegals became "undocumented".
Character Assassination (Score:1)
With no oversight, this is a great way for people to be quietly blacklisted. Are HR departments currently using Palantir for their background checks?
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Almost certainly yes. But through front companies/partners.
IBM (Score:2)
It’s fine, it’s just like modern Hollerith-Maschinen, to help concentrating the unwanted people in camps.
Top-Secret! (Score:2)
I didn't know the police had top secret clearance. That's pretty big.
Julian Assange will pay for leaking this!
"security" cameras (Score:2)
Not top-secret (Score:1)
This is "Confidential and Proprietary" - maybe trade secret.. // Law Enforcement Sensitive (LES) which would be a *real* government security marking.
But certainly not marked as For Official Use Only (FOUO)
And it's not classified (as in CONFIDENTIAL, SECRET, or TOP SECRET), either. Nor was it ever - if had been redacted and released, you'd see the classification markings blacked out and a new marking substituted.
CopLink (Score:3)
The other product that does this is CopLink, which is used by a couple of other fusion centers and police departments. Functionality like this is usually offered as part of a smart cities play.
It's actually a really interesting application of data for a number of different reasons. Example: you can find addresses/areas that are associated with criminal activity, by the number of degrees. So for example, person A was picked up for crime B. Person A was picked up with person B for crime B. Person C was arrested with person B for crime C. Person D was arrested for crime D. But unless you're paying attention you might not notice that they all live in the same apartment building, or that all the cars driven by them are registered to person E at location F.
This is going to be an unpopular opinion... (Score:1)
Soooo in other words, doing the job we pay them to.
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doing the job we pay them to
More like contracting it out. We elect people to do a certain job. And we entrust them with some of our private information so that they may do it. Because, as elected officials, they are answerable to us (the voters). Palantir executives don't operate under the same sorts of accountability.