> They've assisted NSA, and now they're using some skills to help agents look up info on undocumented immigrants.
I'm supposed to be outraged that a company is supplying software to help a government employee do their job in an efficient manner?
IBM supplied computation systems to Nazi Germany, where they were used to carry out the murder of millions of people.
Had it done so knowingly, its management should have been taken out back and shot, right alongside the other perpetrators.
I have, however, implied that "Helping the government do its job" has no bearing on the morality of your actions. What the job is does.
Either that or you're being deliberately obtuse and are trolling.
Palantir assists with quite a number of... Ethically controversial government activities.
Comparisons to the current administration are likely overblown, but are not entirely without merit. Comparisons could also be made to past administrations. The important thing is to consider how well the comparison matches, how problematic the features being compared are in each item, and how that works within context.
If those that cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it, so too are those that refuse to consider the past.
I was initially annoyed at how inefficient that software was, how its slow speed and clunky interface inevitably made it hard to focus on the work of identifying suspects. I could think of a lot of ways to make it easier to filter and interactively rank/pin photos for easier on-the-fly comparison. But then on further reflection, I realized it's probably a good thing that that software is so clunky. Making the software slicker (i.e. as portrayed in CSI shows) could mislead or pressure users (both police and victims) into thinking that their human ability to identify people from mugshots is more accurate than it actually is.
Identifying in mugshot does nothing, you have to identify suspect in person and detective will interrogate suspect and you both. There are multitude of checks before anything is done. So still failing to understand how good software which could possible show the suspect is the problem? The main reason possibly could be that they(government) cannot hire good programmers who could build useable systems.
Identifying a mugshot isn't "nothing". It can be used as evidence for probable cause in getting a search warrant or at least paying the suspect a visit.