California law enforcement misused state databases more than 7k times in 2023

Not only was this true at the time but it was kind of an open secret that some of the data scientists were stalking people and using "I'm a data scientist, I need unfiltered access to the production data" as a cover.

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If you are some low level employee, certainly, the liability is too much.

But very higher level employees and Zuck himself? I would have to see actual proof of very secure lockout and segregation policies and procedures with zero exceptions or higher level administration access across the entire company to even have a chance to believe it. And that is way more effort and organizationally burdensome and costly than just trusting a few people to not be morons and be available when needed because you pay them enough money to not blab or give out access to others.

They fired the zuck? that was his idea behind the fb in the first place ..

Today they only allow creepy surveillance if it makes money.

This "would get you immediately fired" at Facebook 10 years ago. It happened a lot. It only gets you fired if you get caught and you only get caught if someone complains; the security teams aren't so much asleep at the wheel as there's a mannequin at the wheel so nobody notices what nobody notices.

But not tommorrow.

Because it’s unethical or because it’s inefficient to do this manually as opposed to algorithmically?

Zuckerberg seems like a normal human after the shit-show we have seen over the last few years.

This is a poor signal, at least in my experience. It is possible that no one looks at my profile, but I have a semi-famous acquaintance (we've had dinner but not at one's house) and 80% of my friend suggestions are 1 mutal with that person.

I do interact a lot so maybe people click to see if I also look touched? Either way I have a unique enough name that I'd notice if anyone was viewing my profile via that side-channel.

Everybody knows what purpose those tools are made for in practice simply by looking at who buys them and how they're used. So, no, Palantir does not get to claim some kind of neutrality here. It is a company knowingly enabling mass government surveillance and the associated abuses for the sake of profit.

> Palantir provides tools for data analysis and operations.

Potato potato. Palantir explicitly provides tools for data analysis and operations for government and enforcement agencies. Postgres is a database used for virtually anything that needs a database. The two aren't the same.

For the record - Palantir isn't 100% culpable of a government resource abusing its capabilities, but it sure unlocked a whole bunch of capabilities that were either too expensive or too difficult to do previously (for example, storing records in an RDMS).

> Palantir, the tools came with a robust ACL solution.

ACLs require humans to configure them. Uber also has a robust ACL. It doesn't stop someone in the org from using and abusing its God-mode.

In the Soviet Union, the NKVD had to employ prisoner laborers known as "Zeks" to design and engineer their surveillance equipment. They were motivated to betray others by the thread of a transfer to mines in Siberia that were effectively death camps. This story is told in Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, the prison for engineers being the metaphorical first circle of hell.

In the US we just use people who didn't think about it too deeply.

> It's like saying: Thanks PostgreSQL for allowing this specific data misuse case.

Sure, if PostgreSQL were specifically selling their tools to organizations known to commit those sort of abuses.

I agree in the sense that it is directly the fault of the people doing the surveillance but this sounds like "guns dont kill people, people kill people..." which is true semantically, but not in spirit.

Palantir for example works directly with the government on State and Federal levels, and know damn well what they are doing, what their tools are used for, and answer directly to the requests of the government in regards to contracted work (all at the cost of the taxpayer mind you). These are mass surveillance tools, they have one purpose.

I also don't think its insignificant to recognize the backroom deals here that have created this vicious cycle of:

working as a govt official and giving kickbacks and heavily inflated contracts to contractors, and forming laws favorable to those contractors -> then getting a consulting job at those same defense contractors or lobbying groups -> and then moving back into politics

we can't just strip away the context here, a database has a purpose, what purpose does mass surveillance tools have? I'd argue that there is no proper use case for these tools against Americans, other than authoritarianism.

I appreciate your comment, and it takes courage to post an unpopular opinion, but I'm not convinced about the analogy - Is Palantir used for myriad varied and lovely other cases? Or is it less like Postgres and more like napalm and ICBMs in that sure, it takes a human being to use it for its very much intended purpose?

"We just make and sell bone saws, it's not us that murder journalists by dismembering them while they're still alive. I mean, sure, our only customers are Saudi military and intelligence forces, but how could we possibly predict they'd misuse the tools we make?"

This is like saying guns are just a tool and not weapons designed to kill people.

> Another huge problem is that law allows union bargaining agreements to dictate what happens to disciplinary records, that officers are allowed to resign when there are investigations happening that effectively kills them, etc. Once an investigation starts you shouldn't be allowed to resign, or at the very least the investigation should still continue and you should still be able to be punished after.

I don't think requires any union pressure; the department is happy to be both rid of a problem officer and not have to put it in the public record just how bad the problem officer was.

I have a friend who is a cop in Indiana (a "right to work" state), and after talking with him, I've realized that the department, as an organization, can largely be modeled as an entity that takes action to minimize its liability (individual officers are mostly shielded from civil liability, but the department is much less so). Apropos to this subject:

- They want to minimize the number of apparent past bad actors that will be revealed during discover because a lot of past bad actors could be presented as a pattern of poor hiring and/or training. Allowing officers to resign to kill an investigation is golden).

- When something bad happens and it makes it into a courtroom with sufficient evidence that it happened, they want every officer in the department to testify that the action in question is definitely not common practice and completely contrary to training. Such testimony would be greatly undermined by a subpoena that revealed several investigations finding officers to have engaged in such behavior in the past. Again anything that stops the investigation before it can find anything material could potentially save the department millions of dollars in future liability.

This is not the problem.

The problem is a higher portion of people who just want to power trip apply to these positions, even if they are not the majority of the police force. Basically, it is the dream job for a bully.

It seems there should be severe penalties for "power tripping" (aka misuse of authority and databases for special purposes); slap of the wrist fine, suspended paychecks and internal investigations will not deter this group of people. I don't see how these crimes are considered less than drug dealing.

Specifically the punishment should include mandatory jail time and permanent ban from jobs where they have any form of authority over others including management, teaching, and all government positions.

> I think most cops see that as a necessary tool rather than the chief reward.

The problem with this view is that there are a lot of high profile cases that are examples of people abusing their power.

I am happy to believe that “most cops” see it that way.

I am less familiar with those police officers supporting reforms that would either expose or suppress the bad behavior of the minority.

Could have fooled me!

I'm more worried about the Police than any other class of criminals.

There are countless videos demonstrating that some cops are power tripping. Some guy doesn't react quickly enough to a request and they get floored brutally while the cop screams at him: "Don't you dare f** with me or I'll turn you into a puddle you a*h**! Do you understand me! I said do you understand me!"

You might argue that hey, he has adrenaline flowing and so maybe he was a bit over the line. But they are professionals supposedly trained in effective deescalation techniques. Those techniques aren't just because it is humane, it is because it results in better outcomes. But the ego trippers put all that aside because they enjoy being the punisher.

Both of my grandfathers (and an uncle and a brother in law) were career cops. One of my grandfathers said: the power given to you as a cop either brings out the best in you or the worst.

Excerpting power over others is intrinsically rewarding too, so I'm not sure why we should only expect the pure motivation.

I remember a pretty big class action lawsuit against Phillip Morris and "Big Tobacco"?

The BP Oil Spill class action?

The Anderson Family class action against GM?

The VW emissions scandal?

Enron Securities fraud case?

WorldCom accounting fraud case?

Fen-Phen diet drug settlement?

Bank of America Countrywide Mortgage fraud case?

Remember the multiple times tech companies have been fined for failing to "protect privacy"?

Do you remember of any agency having any kind of trouble after leaking private data? It's always the hackers that are to blame when there's a data leak in a government agency.

But when there's a hack at a company? the blame seems to go 100% on the company.

Struggling to perceive your thought process here. Did you really think you were making an effective point here?

They are not incorruptible but they have effectively purged their own ranks on many occasions.

You know damn well that I don't think they purged ALL bad things. Grow up.

They get their guy at all costs and will trample innocent people to do it. Many times, even often and predictably, they will extort oranipulate people into putting themselves in harms way to obtain their objectives. I didn't say the FBI is all unicorns and rainbows.

Everyone is sympathetic to that line of thinking. Most, here at least, have the brain cells to rub together to recognize that the costs of civil rights' absence are greater than the costs incurred by those rights.

Damn. It must be nice. Here in the US we struggle to hold police officers accountable for not shooting civilians.

I have hope that the culture around policing will change if people finally realize that the crime rates have dropped. But with fear of crime being a great lever with which to control people's vote, I don't see it happening anytime soon. The population is too vast, outliers too common, and ignorance of statistics too widespread. It will always be easy to convince people that some place they know nothing about is a Mad Max hellscape and that it's coming for them.

Database roles are a thing

There has been documented corruption and abuse in basically every state that uses a "may-issue" firearms permit scheme that allows official "discretion" about "suitability," as opposed to a "shall-issue" one where issuing a permit is mandatory to anyone who meets the qualifications.

Yeah I would be very interested in the demographic makeup of those people who were checked in this database compared to those who weren't. Maybe cross-referenced with who accepted/reviewed/received their application.

Maybe nothing but perhaps very interesting.

To "bear" means to carry. "You may have this firearm but you cannot carry it in a manner which is fit for purpose anywhere other than your own private property" is a pretty tough sell to anyone who believes in the second amendment.

You're not wrong but with all the other laws surrounding firearms in public and in vehicles not being able to have a concealed carry permit is a huge practical impediment to exercising one's rights.

>especially in states like California with strong urban/rural partisanship

I haven't been to a state where there isn't strong urban/rural partisanship. Is that what Rhode Island is like?