How CIA-Backed Palantir Is Helping Police Root Out 'Thought Crimes' - and - NSA Allowed To 'Unmask' US Citizens Without Surveillance Warrant: US Court

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How CIA-Backed Palantir Is Helping Police Root Out 'Thought Crimes'

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/how-peter-thiels-palantir-will-he
lp-police-stop-thought-crimes

Palantir's technology was developed in warzones like Fallujah, where it was used to anticipate roadside bombs and attacks by insurgents. Now, it's being used on the streets of Los Angeles to root out criminals like something straight out of the movie "Minority Report."

Unsurprisingly, the privately-held tech firm is backed by the CIA's venture-capital arm. Now, the company has gathered massive amounts of data on the American populace, which it farms out to police departments, who use it to track down criminals before they strike.

But the company's technology isn't only used to track down common street thugs. It's also used to track and anticipate the crimes of white collar fraudsters like Bernie Madoff.

Little is known about the company, which, unlike most tech startups, has no plans to go public. In 2013, CEO Alex Karp, Palantir’s CEO, explained that "running a company like ours would be very difficult" if it was exposed to the scrutiny that comes with being a public company.

In other words, if the public became aware of what Palantir is doing, the backlash might dwarf the data privacy scandals that have roiled Silicon Valley in recent years.

As of 2013, Palantir's client list includes the CIA, the FBI, the NSA, the CDC, the Marine Corps, the Air Force, Special Operations Command, West Point and the IRS. Roughly half of the company's business is with the government. Q-Tel, the CIA's VC arm, was one of the company's earliest investors. The company, which doesn't have an office, uses blockchain technology to protect its tools from sophisticated hackers.

Samuel Reading, a former marine who has worked in Afghanistan for NEK Advanced Securities Group, a US military contractor, has said: "It’s the combination of every analytical tool you could ever dream of. You will know every single bad guy in your area."

Here's more from a Guardian report about the company:

Military-grade surveillance technology has now migrated from Fallujah to the suburban neighbourhoods of LA. Predictive policing is being used on illegal drivers and petty criminals through a redeployment of techniques and algorithms used by the US army dealing with insurgents in Iraq and with civilian casualty patterns.

When the US is described as a "war zone" between police and young black males, it is rarely mentioned that tactics developed by the US military in a real war zone are actually being deployed. Is predictive policing as a counter-insurgency tactic a contributing factor in the epidemic of police shootings of unarmed black men in the past four years?

One could argue that sophisticated pre-crime algorithms are not necessary when being black and male is seen as reason enough for the police to swoop. What predictive policing has done is militarise American cities, creating a heightened culture of suspicion and fear in areas where tensions are highest and policing is already most difficult. Officers being led to certain neighbourhoods solely because of an algorithm is enough to cause tension; enough to ignite a powder keg and push a delicate policing situation over the edge.

Ana Muniz is an activist and researcher who works with the Inglewood-based Youth Justice Coalition. "Any time that a society’s military and domestic police become more similar, the lines blur," she told LA Weekly. "The military is supposed to defend the territory from external enemies, that’s not the mission of the police – they’re not supposed to look at the population as an external enemy."

As the paper explains, the company offers a glimpse of the dystopian, totalitarian future that is gradually becoming a reality in China. Its capabilities to run 'special ops' using big-data tools sh

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https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-09-01/scariest-thing-youll-read-al
l-day-report-sounds-alarm-over-brain-reading-technology

for later

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This is the scary shit that kept me up at night in my 20's after reading 1984 for the first time.

I've learned to relax a bit over the years though. Almost everybody is a criminal to a greater or lesser extent. Especially once the internet made copyright violations all but obligatory. Plus, although there is a bit of my stuff out there, it's nowhere near the levels of people who have used places like Facebook every single day of their lives for the last 10 or 15 years.

And at the end of the day, I'm not all that interesting. If our government really goes after me for something I would consider that a great waste of taxpayer dollars. I'm sure there are much bigger fish to fry.

(Notice I never once said "if you're not doing anything wrong, what do you have to worry about".)




If you're at all worried about it, though there's really nothing you can do at this point unless you're like my grandma who has never used the internet one single time in your life, you should probably follow Mutahar's advice in this video:

Keep the robots out of your house please, otherwise you have no right to bitch about anything.

Thank you.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/2002-landmarks-on-the-road
-to-1984-orwellian-hell/

2002 Landmarks on the Road to “1984” Orwellian Hell

Next month will be the 18th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Politicians and bureaucrats wasted no time after that carnage to unleash the Surveillance State on average Americans, treating every person like a terrorist suspect. Since the government failed to protect the public, Americans somehow forfeited their constitutional right to privacy. Despite heroic efforts by former NSA staffer Edward Snowden and a host of activists and freedom fighters, the government continues ravaging American privacy.

Two of the largest leaps the largest leaps towards “1984” began in 2002. Though neither the Justice Department’s Operation TIPS nor the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness program was brought to completion, parcels and precedents from each program have profoundly influenced subsequent federal policies.

In July 2002, the Justice Department unveiled plans for Operation TIPS — the Terrorism Information and Prevention System. According to the Justice Department website, TIPS would be “a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity.” TIPSters would be people who, “in the daily course of their work, are in a unique position to serve as extra eyes and ears for law enforcement.” The feds aimed to recruit people in jobs that “make them uniquely well positioned to understand the ordinary course of business in the area they serve, and to identify things that are out of the ordinary.” Homeland Security director Tom Ridge said that observers in certain occupations “might pick up a break in the certain rhythm or pattern of a community.” The feds planned to enlist as many as 10 million people to watch other people’s “rhythms.”

The Justice Department provided no definition of “suspicious behavior” to guide vigilantes. As the public began to focus on the program’s sweep, opposition surfaced; even the U.S. Postal Service briefly balked at participating in the program. Director Ridge insisted that TIPS “is not a government intrusion.” He declared, “The last thing we want is Americans spying on Americans. That’s just not what the president is all about, and not what the TIPS program is all about.” Apparently, as long as the Bush administration did not announce plans to compel people to testify about the peccadilloes of their neighbors and customers, TIPS was a certified freedom-friendly program.

When Attorney General John Ashcroft was cross-examined by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on TIPS at a Judiciary Committee hearing on July 25, he insisted that “the TIPS program is something requested by industry to allow them to talk about anomalies that they encounter.” But, when George W. Bush first announced the program, he portrayed it as an administration initiative. Did thousands of Teamsters Union members petition 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue over “anomalies”? Senator Leahy asked whether reports to the TIPS hotline would become part of a federal database with millions of unsubstantiated allegations against American citizens. Ashcroft told Leahy, “I have recommended that there would be none, and I’ve been given assurance that the TIPS program would not maintain a database.” But Ashcroft could not reveal which federal official had given him the assurance.

The ACLU’s Laura Murphy observed, “This is a program where people’s activities, statements, posters in their windows or on their walls, nationality, and religious practices will be reported by untrained individuals without any relationship to criminal activity.” San Diego law professor Marjorie Cohn observed, “Operation TIPS … will encourage neighbors to snitch on neighbors and won’t distinguish between real and fabricated tips. Anyone with a grudge or vendetta against another can provide false information to the government, which will then enter the national database.”

On August 9, the Justice

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I don't know enough about the author's history to get a 'read' on his intent. But he SEEMS to be locating the problem as, ultimately, one directed straight at the Second Amendment.

I think that's extremely short-sighted.

As I understand it, our daily data is to be fed into a giant algorithm in the sky, looking for deviations from normalcy. Forget for a moment the privacy intrusions. Forget for a moment the utility of having reams of data available on everyone, to be used in case you need to stitch together a scenario that allows the government to 'remove' individuals.

I'll talk about one very naturally existing deviant population, and that is the very intelligent. FWIW, I can't think of a single extremely intelligent person I've ever met who didn't have their own unique way of looking at the world and behaving in it. Those people would stick out like a sore thumb on the scale of daily normalcy. Great way to get on a list, don't you think?

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https://www.theorganicprepper.com/harpa-social-credit-big-tech-govt-gu
n-control/

HARPA: America’s New Social Credit Plan Partners Big Tech and Govt to Further Gun Control Efforts

By Dagny Taggart

The Trump Administration is considering a very disturbing proposal that would use Big Tech companies including Google, Amazon, and Apple to collect data on users who exhibit characteristics of mental illness that could lead to “violent behavior”.

Supporters see the plan as a way Trump could “move the ball forward” on gun control.

Naturally, a new federal agency will be created to implement this program. The push to create this new agency – called the Health Advanced Research Projects Agency or HARPA – began two years ago, reports The Washington Post:

The concept was advanced by the Suzanne Wright Foundation and first discussed by officials on the Domestic Policy Council and senior White House staffers in June 2017. But the idea has gained momentum in the wake of the latest mass shootings that killed 31 people in one weekend in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio.

The Suzanne Wright Foundation re-approached the administration last week and proposed that HARPA include a “Safe Home” — “Stopping Aberrant Fatal Events by Helping Overcome Mental Extremes” — project. Officials discussed the proposal at the White House last week, said two people familiar with the discussions. These people and others spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversations. ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/22/white-house-conside
rs-new-project-seeking-links-between-mental-health-violent-behavior/)

Trump is reportedly a big fan of the HARPA proposal.

HARPA would be part of the Health and Human Services Department. Its director would be appointed by Trump, and the agency would have a separate budget, according to The Post. The agency would be modeled on another controversial federal agency – DARPA.

In Proposed Federal Agency Would Create Criteria to “Identify” Potentially Violent People ( https://blog.tenthamendmentcenter.com/2019/09/proposed-federal-agency-
would-create-criteria-to-identify-potentially-violent-people/), Mike Maharrey of the Tenth Amendment Center raises some chilling concerns regarding the new agency:

Coupled with “red flag” laws, this sounds like the beginning of a dystopian nightmare.

You have give the people pushing HARPA credit for their ability to seize on tragedies in order to garner political support for their proposal. The HARPA plan apparently hadn’t really gained much traction since it was initially proposed in 2017. By focusing on gun violence, the supporters of HARPA may have found the political lever they needed to push their plan forward and get the agency created.

The SAFE HOME plan sounds innocent enough, but it would create the foundation for

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