One of the founders of the Startup Y Accelerator Y Combinator made criticisms without insurer this weekend of the controversial data company Palant, leading a manager of a company to offer an in-depth defense of the work of Palantir.
The back and forth came after Federal deposits has shown that the US immigration and customs (ICE) forces – responsible for carrying out the aggressive deportation strategy of the Trump administration – pays $ 30 million to create to create What he calls the operating system of the immigration life cycleOr immigrationos, to help ice to decide that targeting expulsion, as well as offering “real-time visibility” in self-emptation.
Y Combinator Founder Paul Graham shared the big titles of the palanting contract on xBy writing: “It is a very exciting period in technology at the moment. If you are a first -rate programmer, there are a large number of other places, you can go to work rather than in the company that builds the infrastructure of the police state. ”
In response, the head of the Palantir advertising Ted Mabrey wrote Let him “impatiently await the next set of hits who decided to apply to Palantant after reading your message”.
Mabrey has not discussed the details of the current work of palanting with ICE, but he declared that the company had started working with the Ministry of Internal Security (under which Ice operates) “in the immediate response to the murder of the agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas in a nicknamed effort nicknamed Operation Fallen Hero. “”
“When people are alive because of what you have built and the others died because what you have built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work,” said MABREY.
He also compared Graham’s criticism to protests against the Google Maven project in 2018, which ultimately prompted the company to stop its analysis of drone images for the army. (Google later reported that it is again more open to defense works.)
Mabrey has urged anyone interested in working to Palant to read the new book of the CEO Alexander Karp “The Technological Republic”, which argues that the software industry must rebuild its relationship with the government. (The company was Recruitment on university campuses with signs declaring that “a calculation moment has arrived for the West”)))
“We are hiring believers,” continued Mabrey. “Not in the sense of the homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic ability to believe in something bigger than you. The belief is required because 1) Our work is very, very hard and 2) you must expect to resist attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle.”
Graham then Mobrey in a hurry “Getting involved in the name of Palantant not to build things that help the government to violate the American Constitution”, although it Recognized in another post that such a commitment would have “no legal force”.
“But I hope if they [make the commitment]And an employee of Palantir is one day invited to do something illegal, he will say “I did not register for that” and I refuse, “wrote Graham.
Mabrey in turn compared Graham’s question To “do you” do you promise to stop beating your wife “living room trick in the courtyard”, but he added that the company had “made this promise in so many Sunday ways”, starting with a commitment to “the extremely thoughtful 3500 people who only embroidered because they believe that they make the world a better place every day because they see what we really do.”
