[wfo]

Well first of all, any time a private corporation does secret private proprietary unreviewable analysis on members of the public which is then used by law enforcement -- this is a terrifying, horrible dystopian miscarriage of justice on its own. People (i.e. the politicians who signed off on this) should go to jail for doing this. Police should be accountable to the public, allowing them to dodge this by using private entities who are not accountable to do their dirty work is quite simply criminal corruption.

Add on top of that it's being done by a company named after a mass surveillance device used for evil in a fantasy story.

And on top of that it's being done by a Thiel company. Thiel, who is nearly a perfect personification of evil: he has made very explicit candid public statements on how he opposes the idea of democracy itself, he does not think women should have the right to vote.

And on top of that it was being done without the knowledge or consent of nearly anyone in the city.

And finally, the justice system presumes innocence. The Palantir system does the opposite -- it makes wild, arbitrary untrackable inferences that suggest guilt for people without any real evidence. It is quite literally nothing more than a very thin shield police can use to justify harassing and intimidating the "kind of people who tend to be criminals", which in this case is not that at all -- it is "the kind of people who tend to get caught and prosecuted for crimes" i.e. only violent or drug crimes (except drugs white people use), only poor criminals, only minority criminals.

Where's the massive computer analysis system that looks for wage theft committed by employers? This is after all how the vast majority of wealth is stolen in the US, citizens could recover billions of their own money if it were stopped. Where's the computer system working with law enforcement to automatically detect any insider trading? Why don't we monitor the behavior of people in finance to detect cocaine use and then send in the SWAT teams? What about a computer system that detects bad prosecutors?

[hackerman12345]

You are misreading his comments about women and democracy. He was simply saying that certain demographics aren't receptive to libertarians - he was not saying that women shouldn't have the right to vote and that democracy is bad. I daresay it's impossible to read his full writing in question and come to the conclusion one might get from simply reading an excerpt of two sentences that the Politico article wants you to see.

" It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us."

"I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other."

[wfo]

https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/educatio...

His essay here is pretty blunt about how he is opposed to democracy. He outlines how to escape democracy (he calls it politics sometimes in the essay and uses the two words essentially interchangeably, because they are the same). He outlines ways to escape from democratic governments, seasteading, techno-libertarian cyberspace, etc, where capital can rule uninfringed by the desires, needs, interests, votes of its subjects.

I was incorrect about his views on women, though, thank you for the correction I retract that completely. He simply sees women voting as a problem because they don't vote the way he wants (they are not by and large wealthy and powerful so do not vote exclusively for the interests of these constituencies, like Thiel) -- and uses this as an excuse to throw out voting altogether. I'm not sure that that's better but my characterization was inaccurate.