[thex86]

I was kinda expecting Palantir to be on the list. In other words, they should have been.

I still find it amazing to see how much true 1984 is becoming. I am sure the next phase is thought control, because "crimes" start there and have to be prevented at all costs. Let's get inside the minds of people and put CCTVs and audio recording devices everywhere. In tables under restaurants, in cars, in buses, every possible place. Crime has to be prevented.

The future is scary.

[jliechti1]

At the same time, Huxley's Brave New World also appears to be becoming more and more true.

"In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant.

In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." [0]

Most people don't perceive these changes to affect them/their daily lives, so they are not concerned with it. They don't care.

[0]: http://www.huxley.net/bnw-revisited/

[TsiCClawOfLight]

Panem et circenses... Governments never change.

It was Juvenal that coined this system, a mechanism of influential power over the Roman mass. "Panem et Circensus", literally "bread and circuses", was the formula for the well-being of the population, and thus a political strategy. This formula offered a variety of pleasures such as: the distribution of food, public baths, gladiators, exotic animals, chariot races, sports competition, and theater representation. It was an efficient instrument in the hands of the Emperors to keep the population peaceful, and at the same time giving them the opportunity to voice themselves in these places of performance. [0]

[0]:http://www.capitolium.org/eng/imperatori/circenses.htm

[steveklabnik]

During the Barrett Brown leaks, Palantir specifically gave a presentation diagramming the social network of Occupy, and suggesting which nodes the FBI should target to divide the movement as much as possible. They absolutely should have been in the article.

[samstave]

A coworker was offered a job there recently. I told him if he took the position he was dead to me.

Thankfully he did not, as he is an amazing engineer and he's more valuable to the world not being there.

[tptacek]

What a weird thing to be proud of.

[samstave]

It's long established here on HN that you and I absolutely are not aligned on our values of privacy and security.

When are we having that beer?

[tptacek]

I don't think this has much to do with politics.

How does it even make sense for you to be asking about getting a beer with me? Your friend considers a job you don't approve of and is dead to you. What am I? Presumably something worse than that, right?

My point is, reconsider coercing your friends into taking only the jobs you approve of.

[samstave]

Heh -- Yeah, typical tptacek form:

1. How does Palantir's technology which deeply enables the blackmailing surveillance state NOT have to do with politics.

2. You have a shitty sense of humor. Can't a friend say to another friend "You do X, you're dead to me"

3. You stated in a previous post where we deeply disagreed "But I'd still have a beer with you"

4. Your comments do begin to reinforce something I said to you previously which you took very deep offense to; I believe that you're being an apologist to the egregious security state that the NSA has made the USA become. To me, it is subtle but still apparent, I am pretty damn sure, through all our interactions here on HN, that you are incapable or purposefully reticent of seeing what a threat to the world the US intelligence apparatus is. I had said this previously, based on my opinion that this was due to the nature of your work/livelihood - and that at the time that was an assumption, but it is actually your direct comments that reinforce my position.

Stop trying to make NSA (and the surrounding technology/security companies) acceptance happen. Its not gunna happen.

[nthj]

2. Doesn't track. “Dude if you don't make it out for drinks tonight, you're dead to me” would make sense. “If you do <serious thing> you're dead to me” isn't really funny.

[promoCode]

I would contest that samstave is doing The Lord's work, in this here situation. To that, I say Amen.

[negativity]

...oh, and let's not leave out the fact that these are private companies. This is not Socialism. This is not INGSOC.

Even without the totalitarianism, the very same oppression crops up. Instead of the single Big Brother brand name, it's a cottage industry private security firms acting as thought police.

Invisible hand of The Market, indeed.

[neuralk]

No, the police are doing the policing, and the private companies are supplying the technology.

There is nothing in the article for you to believe otherwise (that the tech companies are doing the policing or any other scenario).

[Samuel_Michon]

Academi (née Blackwater) is a private company, which has been hired by US police departments for crowd control. For example, they were sent to New Orleans, right after hurricane Katrina plowed into the Gulf coast.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academi

[rodgerd]

It's like someone made an unholy bit of fan-fiction mashing together Robocop, 1984, and the bleak bits of Gibson, and it then was used as a policy document.

[wglb]

In the actual year 1984, everyone was reading the novel "1984" for fear that we had gotten there. Most regular folk concluded that we in fact were not even close.

However, keen observers knew then that this attitude was, well, uninformed. It was clear that 1984 was true well before 1984.

So I find that much of this alarm is overwrought.

[krylonkid]

Sounds like the UK where you can be jailed for a tweet.

[eigenvector]

You can be jailed for a tweet pretty much anywhere if that tweet is a direct, credible threat of violence.

[krylonkid]

In the UK you do jail time if it hurts someone's feelings.

[sanityinc]

The law responsible for that was recently overturned: http://reformsection5.org.uk/

In short, it is no longer illegal to use what a policeman or court might judge to be "insulting words or behaviour".