Comment on Apparently Palantir can access the content of social media accounts that were deleted a decade ago.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
People apparently don’t know about the NSA Utah Datacenter.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
Been a thing for over a decade, unimaginable total storage size, and they literally archive everything.
This place had between 3 and 12 exabytes of storage capacity, in 2013.
1 exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes.
How big was your pc/laptop hard drive in 2013?
Maybe… 250 gigs to 2 teras, something like that?
This data center could now easily be in the yottabyte range ( millions of exabytes ), maybe even ronnabytes ( billions of exabytes ).
rankred.com/largest-data-centers-in-the-world/
6th largest data center in the world by physical size, and it is the only one on this list explictly designated for ‘national security’.
The NSA has taps on every single major trunk line going in or out of the US, they coordinate with every major ISP, every major software provider, data center operator.
They have so much archived data that their actual problem is figuring out how to search through it efficiently… and that is a big thing that Palantir does.
I came here to make this comment less cogently. You have it exactly.
Now, does it violate US law and multiple Executive Orders to search the database to get dirt on US Citizens and use it against their election campaign? Yes. Yes it does. But this administration thinks laws are for sissies.
Opposition research isn’t really illegal, there’s no confirmation that anything from Palantir was actually used, and it’s trivially easy for any layperson to view deleted reddit comments-- to be perfectly honest in this specific case I just don’t think there was anything really untoward
I’m still a bit skeptical Palantir would expose this capability over a Senate race which hasn’t even gotten through primaries. I haven’t looked into it that much, but I think it’s far more likely there’s something on the accouny which makes it easy to identify, and someone this dude knows figured it out before he deleted that account.
And this was always the problem of building the panopticon, everyone justified doing it by saying ‘well, its fine so long as the good guys are in charge.’
This is why the panopticon system is destroyed by Lucius Fox after using it to find the Joker in the Dark Knight.
The system itself is too dangerous to be allowed to exist in a world of flawed humans, and it will eventually be wielded by those least morally qualified to wield it.
Fuck, this is also basically analagous to the Lord of the Rings… Frodo is the hero for destroying the One Ring, not wielding, because it literally corrupts you.
God damnit.
No wonder that guy didn’t understand One Piece
This “too dangerous to exist” argument is seemingly more true for nuclear technology, but the world recognized the threat and came together to manage it.
I will grant you that database and ability to search it lends itself easily to popular oppression, but it still requires thinking, breathing humans to do the oppressing.
Most technology is not dangerous without psychopaths in power, and damn near everything is dangerous with psychopaths in power.
Dragonstaff@leminal.space 5 months ago
When people were up in arms about China getting data from TikTok, I wondered if they had any idea of what the NSA does.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
When that was going on, the whole time I was saying that if we ban Tiktok for data security reasons, we should ban Facebook and Instagram for exactly the same reason, and yes, we should ban basically all social media at this point, its all a perfect spying machine, one you get addicted to, beyond hiding in plain sight…
Of course, that’s extremely unlikely to happen… but it is an actually consistent position.
Cavemanfreak@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
We probably should. But the reason for the ban is because they don’t want foreign governments swaying the american public; only the US government is allowed to do that.
Dragonstaff@leminal.space 5 months ago
The sale to a right wing Trumpbuddy proves what I have been saying. The position of the US government is quite consistent: “WE get all of your data.”