The goals and motivation for using these tools, and their broad allowance of access to what should be highly controlled data (or in some cases even not collected at all) is the problem. Don’t give Palantir the bad-boy street cred they crave, focus on the policy decisions that are leading to agencies wanting tools like this in the first place.

It’s possible to simultaneously believe that ICE has a clear and ethical mandate while also believing that they are going about fulfilling that mandate via bad methods that need to change.

It’s possible to simultaneously believe that people shouldn’t be marked as intrinsically “illegal” while also believing that an immigration queue should exist and skipping it is immoral and should be illegal.

Etcetera, etcetera.

You don’t HAVE to dedicate yourself to a fully polarized set of beliefs. Nuance is possible. What the hell is causing us to lose our minds like this? Is it really just social media? So frustrating to witness.

Is there a specific product line that this app is using? What FOIA laws are applicable to its use? What kind of data does this provide? something else?

At the time, I remember thinking how extreme that seemed, and how I was "sure" nothing is black-and-white and that, certainly, while Palantir had shady connections, for sure it must bring some good to the world and, so, why boycott this poor man? It felt genuinely baffling to me.

While in many ways I consider myself a more balanced person today (precisely thinking less in black-and-white terms), this is a topic where I do not agree. I would not work for Palantir and, were I to travel back in time, I would join the boycott. Heck, given how I was when I was younger, I'd expand on it greatly and try to rally some form of physical protest.

A friend of mine once threw me the argument of "well, the enemy [presumably China] is doing this kind of stuff, so we have to do it, too". This may seem like a compelling argument at first — and it may be so for many — but it can't, to me. It's ethically disgusting. The solution to world with decaying ethics is not to continue contributing to its decay. It erases accountability, it normalizes atrocity, it strips humanity from our very own flesh and blood — it escalates conflict! It. Just. Can't. be.

We must fight this filth.

https://www.404media.co/elite-the-palantir-app-ice-uses-to-f...

https://archive.ph/wa32f

> Imagine working for this company, on this product. Every day, you go into work, in what I assume is a beautiful office with pine furniture and a well-stocked kitchen, and you build software that will help to deport people using what you know are extrajudicial means without due process. You probably have OKRs. There are customer calls with ICE. Every two-week sprint, you take on tasks that help make this engine better.

Ah yes, Schrodinger's Nazi. Simultaneously a fascist paramilitary organization, but also capable of being pushed back by policy and protest.

"Everything I don't like is Nazi" is the lefty playbook and like every other word it's completely lost it's meaning at this point.

However it seems crazy to me that even the idea of deporting people who have no legal status in this country is immediately branded Nazi. This just feeds extremism because it is extremism in and of itself

And, no, ignoring their existence is not an option, unless you want "millions" to become "tens of millions" or even more. Note also that mass deportations also happened under Biden and Obama - they just didn't attract the same publicity.