He is not speaking well of Palantir. He speaks well of two people in Palantir's employ, whom he knows personally, and he cites a piece of Palantir's technology as the kind of thing that the world needs more of — irrespective of whether or not the rest of their oeuvre is good, bad, or indifferent. That's it. Full stop.
He specifically says he's not touching the discussion of whether or not Palantir are good guys or bad guys. He specifically says he's not endorsing them, for compensation or otherwise. He specifically says he thinks that technology that audits every access of a piece of information is a valuable thing to have in the presence of a panopticon. And. Nothing. Else.
Any deeper reading than that is projection or fantasy. Lessig has earned being taken at his word, IMO.
> Any deeper reading than that is projection or fantasy.
Indeed, and it's concerning that Lessig is able to reply to those types of points in very clear and direct language and still have it fly over the heads of people because "PALANTIR".
Even completing ignoring the very concept of the NSA it is clear that the government will be adopting technology to handle the governance of people.
So decide, tech peoples: Should this technology build in audit trails or not? Should this technology record what interface a government employee was using to extract this data, or not?
There are practically no government databases which can be completely innocuous in the face of a determined government insider. Don't throw the baby of technology controls on misuse of data out with the bathwater of... something(?), especially with accusations as specious as "their board member knows a guy who was on the board of... BAE! (oooooh ahhhhhhh)"
> So decide, tech peoples: Should this technology build in audit trails or not? Should this technology record what interface a government employee was using to extract this data, or not?
Yes, use the technology wherever applicable, knowing that the technology does not guarantee correctness. But definitely stop the wiretapping and the collection of (even encrypted) data.
So decide, tech peoples: Should this technology build in audit trails or not? Should this technology record what interface a government employee was using to extract this data, or not?
So back to OCR paper forms then? No more web forms to fill out my tax data each year? Should I have to go visit the Social Security office in person each year too?
You're attempting to relate unrelated topics and struggling with a straw man here. If your question had been: Should we use technology in disparate areas of government like tax records and social security, clearly the answer from almost everyone would be yes, of course, as the government does already (and with relatively basic access controls which work perfectly fine). Medical records for example are kept on computers in many countries, and access to them is regulated without a sophisticated system to log access, just with fairly basic access controls.
However that has nothing to do with whether we should attempt to control NSA dragnet surveillance with technology after the fact, or help to construct a surveillance state in the first place. Debating whether we should apply controls to access to say phone record data collected by the government ignores the more important question of whether that data should be collected and collated by the NSA in the first place. I'd say that collection of the data is the only point at which adequate safeguards can be put in place, not after consumption of the data - by then it is too late, and any technical safeguards can easily be put aside later.
> However that has nothing to do with whether we should attempt to control NSA dragnet surveillance with technology after the fact
It's almost like there was a reason I explicitly disclaimed NSA when I made the point you responded to.
Even besides the IRS, what about FBI, local law enforcement, ATF, Border Patrol, and all of those other Federal agencies that have arrest powers? Should the local Good ol' Boy sheriff be able to pull up your record in NCIC with no audit trail?
I don't believe you should have a record in NCIC unless there's a very good reason, just as I don't believe the US should be collecting and storing fingerprints of visitors at the border, or collecting the phone records of every American, or the GCHQ collecting almost all the data that passes through the UK and passing it back to the NSA. The mere act of collating all that information and storing it indefinitely is incredibly dangerous, and some logging of access is not going to make it safer. So this is why I reject the premise of your question.
Not collecting all that information in a central record is the best defence against misuse - if you collect it, it will at some point in the future be misused, just as Hoover, Nixon, the GDR etc misused the far more limited powers they were given.
He is not speaking well of Palantir. He speaks well of two people in Palantir's employ, whom he knows personally, and he cites a piece of Palantir's technology as the kind of thing that the world needs more of — irrespective of whether or not the rest of their oeuvre is good, bad, or indifferent. That's it. Full stop.
He specifically says he's not touching the discussion of whether or not Palantir are good guys or bad guys. He specifically says he's not endorsing them, for compensation or otherwise. He specifically says he thinks that technology that audits every access of a piece of information is a valuable thing to have in the presence of a panopticon. And. Nothing. Else.
Any deeper reading than that is projection or fantasy. Lessig has earned being taken at his word, IMO.