[jchonphoenix]

Full Disclosure: I'm ex-Palantir Government Dev

Ok guys. Let's use Occam's Razor for a second. What's more likely?

1) A company that purposefully goes around blackmailing people to make deals, uses underhanded tactics, and spies on the people, yet is able to hire amazingly talented (and opinionated supporters of the EFF) engineers from Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and MIT.

Or

2)a company that builds a data analytics platform that is useful to a lot of people and honestly believes they're helping the world by finding missing children, tracking terrorism, and fighting fraud.

Although this article is just ludicrous. All because I think up the same domain name as someone else doesn't mean I hacked into their computer and stole their code.

[laurenia]

Those options aren't mutually exclusive.

[clicks]

There are subsections within large companies; it's usually unclear to most employees what that subsection really does (that is, if they're even aware of the existence of the subsection to begin with).

Companies try to gauge level of "trustworthiness" and transfer folks higherups feel are trust-able into the subsections where work is done that some may feel is ethically dubious.