How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed Into Policing

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: August 20, 2017 at 1:19:51 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed Into Policing
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> How Peter Thiel's Secretive Data Company Pushed Into Policing
> By by Mark Harris, Rhett Allain, Steven Levy, Stephen Wolfram, Karen Wickre, Negar Mottahedeh, Jessi Hempel, Gabriel 
> Nicholas
> Aug 9 2017
> <https://www.wired.com/story/how-peter-thiels-secretive-data-company-pushed-into-policing/>
>
> When Sergeant Lee DeBrabander marked a case confidential in the Long Beach drug squad’s Palantir data analysis system 
> in November 2014, he expected key details to remain hidden from unauthorized users’ eyes. In police work, this can be 
> crucial—a matter of life and death, even. It often involves protecting vulnerable witnesses, keeping upcoming 
> operations hush hush, or protecting a fellow police officer who’s working undercover.
>
> Yet not long after, someone working in the gang crimes division ran a car license plate mentioned in his case and was 
> able to read the entire file. “Can you please look at this?” DeBrabander wrote to a Palantir engineer in an email, 
> which was obtained by Backchannel in response to public records requests.
>
> Palantir had been selling its data storage, analysis, and collaboration software to police departments nationwide on 
> the basis of rock-solid security. “Palantir Law Enforcement provides robust, built-in privacy and civil liberties 
> protections, including granular access controls and advanced data retention capabilities,” its website reads.
>
> But DeBrabander had a hard time getting Palantir to respond, emails show. Two weeks after he made his first 
> complaint, his sensitive case was still an open book to other detectives at Long Beach PD. “I went over to Gangs and 
> had them run the plate since they are not listed in our confidentiality group, and sure enough the plate was found 
> within the narrative of the very report we want to keep tight control on,” he complained in an email to Palantir. 
> Four months later, his case was still visible to other officers, and he was still sending emails to Palantir to fix 
> the problem.
>
> Law enforcement accounts for just a small part of Palantir’s business, which mostly consists of military clients, 
> intelligence outfits like the CIA or Homeland Security, and large financial institutions. In police departments, 
> Palantir’s tools are now being used to flag traffic scofflaws, parole violators, and other everyday infractions. But 
> the police departments that deploy Palantir are also dependent upon it for some of their most sensitive work. 
> Palantir’s software can ingest and sift through millions of digital records across multiple jurisdictions, spotting 
> links and sharing data to make or break cases.
>
> The scale of Palantir’s implementation, the type, quantity and persistence of the data it processes, and the 
> unprecedented access that many thousands of people have to that data all raise significant concerns about privacy, 
> equity, racial justice, and civil rights. But until now, we haven’t known very much about how the system works, who 
> is using it, and what their problems are. And neither Palantir nor many of the police departments that use it are 
> willing to talk about it.
>
> In one of the largest systematic investigations of the company to date, Backchannel filed dozens of public records 
> requests with police forces across America. When Palantir started selling its products to law enforcement, it also 
> laid a paper trail. All 50 states have public records laws providing access to contracts, documents, and emails of 
> local and government bodies. That makes it possible to peer inside the company’s police-related operations in ways 
> that simply aren’t possible with its national security work.
>
> What’s clear is that law enforcement agencies deploying Palantir have run into a host of problems. Exposing data is 
> just the start. In the documents our requests produced, police departments have also accused the company, backed by 
> tech investor and Trump supporter Peter Thiel, of spiraling prices, hard-to-use software, opaque terms of service, 
> and “failure to deliver products” (in the words of one email from the Long Beach police). Palantir might streamline 
> some criminal investigations—but there’s a possibility that it comes at a high cost, for both the police forces 
> themselves and the communities they serve.
>
> These documents show how Palantir applies Silicon Valley’s playbook to domestic law enforcement. New users are 
> welcomed with discounted hardware and federal grants, sharing their own data in return for access to others’. When 
> enough jurisdictions join Palantir’s interconnected web of police departments, government agencies, and databases, 
> the resulting data trove resembles a pay-to-access social network—a Facebook of crime that’s both invisible and 
> largely unaccountable to the citizens whose behavior it tracks.
>
> This is the story of how Palantir, despite the issues unearthed by Backchannel’s investigation, came to quietly 
> dominate the domestic law enforcement intelligence infrastructure of the US’s most populous state—and how it could 
> replicate that across the nation and around the world.
>
> No one outside Palantir seems to know for sure how many police departments in America use its technology. (Despite 
> multiple requests, Palantir declined to make anyone available for an interview, or to comment on any of Backchannel’s 
> findings.) The New York Police Department has certainly used it, as have Cook County sheriffs in Chicago, the 
> Virginia State Police, the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., and a dozen law enforcement agencies 
> in Utah.
>
> The public contracts and data acquired during our months-long investigation almost certainly paint an incomplete 
> picture. However, they suggest that one state, California, accounts for many of the deployments—and perhaps close to 
> 90 percent of the sales—of Palantir’s systems to domestic law enforcement to date.
>
> Palantir’s software has been deployed by police departments in Los Angeles (LAPD), Long Beach (LBPD), and Burbank; 
> sheriff’s departments in Sacramento, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties (LASD); the state’s highway patrol; and 
> homeland security “fusion centers” run by local departments in Orange County, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, San 
> Diego and Los Angeles. Purchase orders and invoices show that these agencies have spent over $50 million with 
> Palantir since 2009.
>
> The first city in California to get involved was Los Angeles. In 2009, LAPD’s then chief of police, Bill Bratton, 
> wanted to test the real-time analysis and visualization of data. “We were looking for [a] tool to do a better job of 
> visualizing our radio calls as they were coming out,” remembers Sean Malinowski, then a captain but now a deputy 
> chief at the LAPD. “Palantir partnered with us on [an] experiment to come up with [a] situational awareness tool.”
>
> [snip]
>
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