In 2012, Palantir quietly embedded itself into the daily operations of the New Orleans Police Department. There were no public announcements. No contracts made available to the city council. Instead, the surveillance company partnered with a local nonprofit to sidestep oversight, gaining access to years of arrest records, licenses, addresses, and phone numbers all to build a shadowy predictive policing program.

Palantir’s software mapped webs of human relationships, assigned residents algorithmic “risk scores,” and helped police generate “target lists” all without public knowledge. “We very much like to not be publicly known,” a Palantir engineer wrote in an internal email later obtained by The Verge.

After years spent quietly powering surveillance systems for police departments and federal agencies, the company has rebranded itself as a frontier AI firm, selling machine learning platforms designed for military dominance and geopolitical control.

"AI is not a toy. It is a weapon,” said CEO Alex Karp. “It will be used to kill people.”

  • Basic Glitch@lemm.eeOP
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    2 days ago

    Yeah, I am not sure but hopefully somebody has the numbers. That is usually the argument for trampling the constitution.

    Hard to say how much has been actually documented bc they’ve been doing a lot of this stuff off record.

    They potentially saved 30000 lives locking up 100 people for crimes committed by somebody else in a states they’ve never been to and we might not even know about it

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.de
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      2 days ago

      Oh well, some people in the USA have a really “interesting” relationship with their own constitution these days… I sometimes feel like explaining it to them. Or what a constitutional republic is.

      Yeah, keeping things “off record” is the usual strategy to get away with whatever you wanted.