We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough.
We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition as privatized surveillance now. Cambridge analytica should have been the warning shot but it wasn't enough.
These are CMMS and HHS data. The government literally collected it. On government forms.
This thread is Exhibit A for how the tech-privacy community so often trips itself up. We have abuse of government data at hand. It’s clear. It’s sharp. Nobody denies the government has the data, how they got the data or how they’re using it.
So instead we go into parallel construction and advertising dragnets and a bunch of stuff that isn’t clear cut, isn’t relevant, but is someone’s bogeybear that has to be scratched.
Also, don't forget that profit maximization means selling to the highest bidder, which might not be US govt. Certainly, there is means, motive, and opportunity for individuals with access to sell this info to geopolitical adversaries, and it is BY FAR the easiest way for adversaries to acquire it.
It has happened before and it will happen again.
In this case the story didn’t make it clear whether or not they even had an administrative warrant. I’d be interested to find out if they did.
* https://www.wired.com/story/us-judge-rules-ice-raids-require...
* https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2026/01/judge-orders-release-...
> A federal judge in Minnesota on Thursday ordered the release of a Liberian man four days after heavily armed immigration agents broke into his home using a battering ram and arrested him.
> U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Bryan said in his ruling that the agents violated Garrison Gibson’s Fourth Amendment rights against unlawful search and seizure.
Maybe what we're really seeing now though is the feedback loop, the information laundering industrial complex that is the surveillance economy.
In retrospect what has actually happened with mass surveillance has been far worse than what the most unhinged conspiracy nut on shortwave radio or some crazy end times Geocities web site was predicting back then. The predictions of the conspiracy nuts were conservative.
The big thing everyone got wrong was that we assumed people would care and put up resistance. We assumed people would choose technologies that protected their privacy and would get mad when highly invasive things were foisted on them. That never happened. Give people convenience and shiny and fun "content" like TikTok and YouTube and they'll consent to live in a total panopticon. They don't care.
We're also seeing that people will choose wealth and comfort over rights and freedom. This bargain is being made all over the world to varying degrees, and the trend is toward increasingly authoritarian societies that offer a comfortable lifestyle as long as you don't question it too much. A quote I read a while back described the emerging system like this: "it's Brave New World unless you question it, then it turns into 1984 real fast."
This is all a devil's bargain, but like the devil's bargain in fiction it's great at first. The devil really does deliver. It's all fun until you get dragged off to hell at the end.
You predicted HHS and CMMS having the address patients give them on HHS and CMMS forms? Like, sure. Good job. I predict the IRS has my address.
> This is a devil's bargain
Medicare (and the IRS) having your home address is a devil’s bargain?
Each individual data point seems normal or innocuous, but when you tie them all together and then leverage the tech panopticon you have an insane amount of detail on every person. There are no meaningful legal safeguards on how this data is used, especially when it's laundered through private contractors not subject to much oversight.
When you couple this with increasingly unlimited powers granted to law enforcement agencies, you get a situation where a system could decide you're a threat and some just comes and beats the shit out of you, takes your property, or shoots you, and you have little recourse.
The people cheering for this seem to think it'll never be used against them.
None of that is relevant to the article. It’s about HHS data being queried to give ICE probable addresses. What you’re doing is indistinguishable from whataboutism.
I don’t think that’s your intent. But we have an actual abuse of public data at hand here. Going on a tangent about dragnet surveillance is off topic and misleading.
They are and should be separable. DHS hoovering up government data is orthogonal to private data collection. They could become related. But they aren’t, and muddling a hypothetical problem with a clear, present and actual one is a good way to normalize the latter.
Keep in mind that DOGE made off with a huge stash of data, which combined with other data, such as voter registration data, twitter messages (public and private) and other such datastores could become an extremely efficient tool in messing with elections. The whole system is predicated on that being hard and so we trust the outcome of elections but with todays tools in the hands of the large US companies currently in cahoots with the Trump administration this is childs play.
The data we’re talking about here are home addresses. HHS (or the IRS) having home addresses isn’t what most Americans would or should consider problematic.
Totally agree. Where I disagree is in saying the government shouldn’t have these records. Like, no. The government knowing where I live is not only fine but also sort of necessary. Just because it has some data doesn’t mean it can abuse it.
Sure. Again, we agree. What I’m pushing back on is the notion that it was inappropriate for any branch of the government to have these data, or that any of this has anything to do with private dragnets.
They’re addresses. This isn’t a possession problem, it’s one of access.
> the USA does not have the equivalent of a GDPR
You could have super GDPR that bans all private dragnets and HHS would still have home addresses. This is a Privacy Act and HIPAA problem.
If you worry about paying rent or buying food you likely don't care if some abstract entity knows to what kind of videos you jerk off.
Palentir has certainly assisted, but the origin of the data collection here was public and then unleashed by the state to private entity.
Yes, it's surely public information and therefore ought to be subject to the same controls as any other personal health information. It seems moot that it was given to a private company; the issue just shifts to being that the private company (apparently) does not comply with data protection laws, e.g. HIPAA.
Does this imply that undocumented aliens subject to deportation have been making claims on Medicare/Medicaid monies?
No. HHS is broader than CMMS.
Like, if these data were being used to audit the CMMS roles for illegal immigrants, that would be something. That’s not what DHS is doing because I suspect they don’t want to have to produce a report that says this was a made-up bit of electioneering.
I remember protesting against data retention laws in the early 2000s. People thought we were nuts for using historical examples about the Nazis abusing all kinds of records to hunt down Jews. History was never going to repeat itself that way.
Until it did.
What data-retention issues do you have with HHS having patients’ home addresses?
There isn’t a data-retention issue with HHS having home records, there is an abuse issue with DHS giving it to Palantir to VLOOKUP addresses out of.
I think you may have missed that I was replying specifically to this part of a parent comment and agreeting with it:
> We are really seeing the fears of data collection from the 2000s and 2010s come to fruition
Kinda ironic but I think you’ve got the current situation a little backwards. Karp (who is Jewish) has boasted about Palantir being used to hunt down the “far right”: https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/28/palantir_boss_fii_spe...
I think it’s very important to focus on how data collection of this nature is bad, not that “because Nazis did it” it’s bad. The latter is exactly what Karp wants, and he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis. Similar to how the Holocaust narrative is used to justify the Palestinian genocide.
It's bad for both reasons. Palantir is the IBM of our time, using scaled data engineering to handle the tracking and incarceration of ethnic minorities, who are quickly shipped off for worse persecution, including torture, at government-run camps, all without any due process.
> he can turn around and say he’s actually preventing Nazis
Anyone can say anything absurd, counterfactual, and unconvincing, regardless of circumstances. For us to consider it true, we'd need some evidence that it is at least more true than the opposite.
> Say thank you," Karp added.
Thanks for the link. Wow, I didn't realize that he was such an insufferable, sociopathic, abusive douchebag as a person. Like a wife-beater who insists his victim thank him for it.
These kinds of mass surveillance data ops should be illegal, regardless of who is doing it.
...according to an unsubstantiated claim by the CEO of Palantir while on a PR tour.
The EU said ‘hold my mead,’ and built the literal Skynet from the terminator movies. Has the same damn job too, coordinate, communicate, control.
Humanity doesn’t learn from its past because it is too focused on its future. Unfortunately for us, war… war never changes.
... because the private sector tends to be far more competent and able to get shit done fast and effectively.
It's more that there's fewer legal protections, so private surveillance is a great way for governments to launder the illegal things they want to do.
Governments have to operate in a more open manner (at least those with a reasonable amount of democratic accountability do). So the dysfunction is made public more often, and likely used over decades for political point-scoring.
It's similar to open source development. Everyone moans that open source projects are full of infighting slowing down development compared to closed projects.
Then, as soon as someone comes along and gets shit done like with systemd or the Linux kernel it's the opposite complaint. The doer is now a wannabe dictator ordering everyone about.
DHS was founded in 2002, TSA was founded in 2001. CFPB in 2010, Space Force in 2019.
Even agencies that have been around “forever” aren’t that old. The EPA was founded in 1970, and OSHA was founded in 1971.
I work in fintech, at a market leader. We are wildly inefficient, but there is little interest in fixing it, because we’re making money hand over fist.
I wouldn't be so sure about this. A lot of what markets do is unnecessary overhead needed to make markets work. Maintaining enough competition means having to pay the costs of having multiple organizations doing the same thing. Each must have their own strategy, HR, marketing, etc. A lot of work is unnecessarily repeated. A lot of behavior that is forced by competition, like advertising / patent and copyright systems / hiding research instead of sharing it is very wasteful. Profits going to the owners is also an overhead cost that might not be needed in other types of economic arrangements. All these costs need to be paid at every level of the production chain.
We should also consider the goals of each type of organization. The goal of a business operating in a market is to maximize profit for the owners of the business. It's efficient at that. The goals of a government can be much more varied. They can't really be easily compared.
The government, however, has historically been constrained by a constitution that had been updated and interpreted according to the popular sentiment of the day.
Large companies colluding to reject potential hires due to surveilled ideology, sexual preferences of people in the closet filtered to scammers, hate groups learning about the family members of activists, insurance rejecting customers based on illegally obtained data… the list of risks is giant.
Non-state actors can't easily use violence to throw me in jail.
Are you insane? When if ever are the agents of the state held responsible. If anything the civil suit against the business is more likely to go somewhere.
The fact that the state may "pay out" does not mean it has any serious incentive not to shoot the person dead so long as such payouts don't become too regular.
I owe Comcast $200, according to them. I've "owed" it for years. Can you imagine if I owed any government agency the same sum for the same time. I'd be arrested and thrown in jail for non-payment and/or some sort of quasi-contempt charge if I refused.
The surveillance non state actors are already doing anything this administration wants.
The argument isn't that it's good these companies are doing this - it's not. The argument is that it would be even worse if the state was doing it directly. There are more avenues to stop, nullify, and avoid this when it's a private enterprise than when it's the state.
Let me rephrase: why wouldn’t state actors be scary?
The state might have a monopoly on legal physical violence, but I think it is naive to think private interests can’t harm you just as much, with or without state connections. See my previous examples.
The go-to example is recording. Watch any "First Amendment auditor" video on YouTube (prepare yourself, most of them are a struggle to watch). I can walk into any government building, and as long as I'm in a publicly accessible area, I can record almost whatever and whoever I want. This includes otherwise private property that the government is leasing. I essentially cannot be kicked out unless I cause a disturbance as long as the location is open for public business. This is true for DMVs, county administrative buildings, police offices, jails, any government service with a public area and public hours.
On the flip side, if Target wants to ban recording in their stores, not only can they do so with zero risk of litigation, but if you get trespassed you can be fined or go to jail for a violation. The penalties get even harsher for the same trespassing crime if it's a private residence and not a business.
I'm sure we can come up with counterexamples, and maybe surveillance is the best one, but philosophically it's pretty easy to see why it's worse for the government to do a Bad Thing than for any individual or private enterprise to do the exact same Bad Thing.
Edit: I'd love to hear a justification as to why this is being downvoted because nothing in the content warrants that.
This was not the claim though, the claim is that it’s not scary to be surveilled until that information reaches state actors.
States acting against citizens can be worse in a moral/political sense, but a victim is not more or less harmed depending on the aggressor.
(I didn’t downvote, if it matters, I just saw the message).