Unless the court shrinks down to three seats (or four, if the Circuits cooperate) Alito and Thomas alone can’t dictate the way the Court treats the issue.
A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.
This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.
Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.
And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it
Legally this should be treated as signing under duress and invalidated.
If someone's life or well-being depends on it, and undergoing services in not a choice, terms and conditions should not be legally allowed to be unilaterally dictated by one party.
There are multiple layers of corruption at work here. (They also cap the number of doctors, and clinics, etc).
This doesn't seem surprising on its face given that a hospital is, not unreasonably, a heavily regulated entity.
If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.
>Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that
> if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals"
> one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals
> in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)
I am responding to these somewhat "breathless" statements that imply more than they delineate. My rebuttal is that these words frame a kind of inquiry that is common among conspiracy-attracted commentors.
The subject deserves more rigor and less insinuation IMO.
Thus, a company performing data collection and sharing it with the government may trigger nerd rage whereas company performing data collection and using the data to help profile ad targets triggers nerd advocacy, i.e., attempts to defend the practice of data collection with "justifications" that have no limit in their level of absurdity
For the surveillance target (cf. the surveilling company), what is significant about data collection is not how the data is used, it is how the data _could_ be used, which is to say, what is significant about data collection is (a) the fact that data is collected at all, not (b) what may or may not happen after the data is collected
Moreover, despite equivocal statements of reassurance in unenforceable "privacy policies" and the like, (b) is often practically impossible for those outside the company and its partners to determine anyway
Hypothetical: Trillion-dollar public company A whose core "business" is data collection and surveillance-supported advertising services takes a nosedive due to unforseen circumstances that affect its ability to sell ad services. Meanwhile, billion-dollar public company B whose core business is data collection and surveillance services for goverments sees their business on the rise. Company A decides to acquire or compete with company B
There is nothing that limits company A's use of the data it has collected for whatever purpose the company and Wall Street deems profitable
As such, the significant issue for the surveillance target is (a) not (b)
Focusing on the fact that company B assists governments whilst company A assists advertisers is a red herring
Once the data is collected, it's too late
Suing your government generates results. Suing a company usually results in it shedding it's shell corporation and taking it's assets where you can't get them.
Selling user data needs to be a federal criminal offense. You need to go to jail for doing this. You need 15+ years in prison for doing this or enabling this in bulk. Let's start talking asset forfeiture next.
It's been like that for a while; I don't think either side of America's political aisle has the heart to extricate themselves of such a privilege.
PBS's _spying on the homefront_ piece from 2007 already described this very kind of omniscient private database.
The government itself isn't constitutionally allowed to build or run anything of the kind, but it can commission friends in the private sector to do one and query it with little to no oversight
I am definitely not uploading my face and ID on Discord or any site
They went from warrant, to FISA, to just write a request about a name, to more or less describe a vague group of ppl on whom you want the data
You should watch this show. It's available online and pretty informative.
If things weren't bad enough in 2007, things that have changed since then are most notably the cloud act that was created, Ring that started to "backup" your home CCTV in the cloud, then also Ring that enabled so called "Search Parties" and made a superball ad about it
I talked with cousins about it 8 years ago and I got laughed at as a conspiracy nut for saying that our personal data will be used against us if we allow it. People either don’t understand or don’t care because they’ve grown comfortable with it.
In Capitalist Russia, you are on surveillance by bought off government;
In Soviet America, government bought off by surveillence on you!
that’s what the article is discussing? the journalists found evidence.
i’m confused what you’re confused about.
this whole entire comment section is birthed from the evidence someone found.
It's entirely left up to the reader to fill in the blanks that whatever is going on with this contract is nefarious and bad.
The Intercept used to do good work, but this article is complete trash. At least the author was self aware enough to reference the 2016 reporting.
That seems like a question worth knowing the answer to.
A second good question is what are the available competitors?
If the NCY Public Hospitals drop Palantir today, What systems will give them the same functionality at a comparable, (hopefully cheaper) price?
This is why government and corporations should not be embedded together as they have near zero laws or punishment for spying on Americans.
It isn't even just about the invasion of our rights but the government shouldn't choose winners and losers like we are seeing. It eliminates the open nature of competition.
Oh there is definitely a way it's just that saying most of it outloud will get you disappeared.
- Stones
- Sticks
- Some rope
Takes awhile, but humans eventually make a murder weapon out of that and build armies.
Now take the benign elements of a crud stack:
- Database
- Server
- User system
It takes awhile, but eventually humans will make something (something not good) out of that.
Sticks and stones may hurt my bones, but databases will never hurt me
Right?
What you've described are just benign ingredients. The poison is turning them into a "analytics" or "adtech" system.
The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.
FDE is not the only thing they sell.
Software Licenses for their products (Gotham/Foundry/AIP) is why countries (and businesses) deal with them.
That's literally it.
It's not even particularly good technology.
They have a lot of "forward deployed engineer" roles which basically means staff with security clearances who get locked in SCIFs and provide on-site technical support.
Which is really why they keep getting hired: when you write into your contract "it stays on premises and technical support can't take logs off site" they agree to it (at a hefty mark up because all of that sucks to do).
Some of their stuff for handling data and versioned pipelines seem very well done.
Musk+Thiel is also in the mix with Golden Dome, the space weapons program that was always Musk's mission. The inside "joke" is that Mars = Wars.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
They already are.. but.. have you seen the DOW?
Same thing with Tesla.
If you just google ontology you probably end up reading some Heidegger and conclude how deep these guys must be.
Whenever I hear Karp say it I always think of it like he is saying "Database" or "The Database". "What makes Palantir different is Database".
I think so much of Palantir is performative and for sales performances.
God knows it took long enough.
Notably (though I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice) - https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-45/part-164/section-164.5... describing "similar process authorized under law... material to a legitimate law enforcement inquiry" without any notion of scoping this to individuals vs. broad inquiries, seems to give an incredibly broad basis for Palantir to be asked to spin up a dashboard with PII for any query desired for the administration's political agenda. This could happen at any time in the future, with full retroactive data, across entire hospital systems, complete with an order not to reveal the program's existence to the public.
Other tech companies have seen this kind of generalized overreach as both legally risky and destructive to their brand, and have tried to fight this where possible. Palantir, of course, is the paragon of fighting on behalf of citizens, and would absolutely try to... I can't even finish this joke, I'm laughing too hard.
I'm old enough to remember we literally had a Captain America movie, barely more than a decade ago, where the villains turn private PII and health data into targeting lists. (No flying aircraft carriers were injured in the filming of this movie.)
Clearly, we learned the wrong lesson there.