[bebop]

This is a very accurate take. There is a ton of collection that the government is explicitly not allowed to do. However, the ability to purchase this data is much less regulated. So the work around is, get contractors to do the data collection and then purchase that data.

[glaslong]

The government gets to ignore the will of its people and companies get to be middlemen leeches, it's perfect really.

[colechristensen]

There needs to be a landmark supreme court case that decides that "Search and Seizure" protections include paying corporations for the sought after items.

[b00ty4breakfast]

As long as Alito and Thomas are still alive, this will never happen. I have no doubt that both of them have been the recipients of Peter Thiel's "generosity".

[leftbrainstrain]

I thought Carpenter vs United States was that case, but apparently it wasn't. Terry stops by local officers based on tips from regional Fusion Centers via WhatsApp sounds less unusual every day. Parallel construction has become a long-established technique.

[vharuck]

I would hope this case wouldn't be hard to make. If the government isn't allowed to censor people through third parties (e.g., threaten onerous investigations of a platform unless a specific person is kicked off), the government shouldn't be allowed to conduct unreasonable searches through a third party. Would we be okay if the FBI contracted with private detective firms to conduct warrantless searches?

[thfuran]

I don't want to see any more landmark cases from the current supreme court.

[rayiner]

But what would be the legal basis for such a decision?

[trymas]

Noob question: how private orgs can do surveillance that government can’t?

Could I - as an individual - do such surveillance[1]? Won’t three letter agency knock on my door? Is there a difference between digital surveillance and physical surveillance?

[1] obviously at smaller scale, but imagine same level of creepiness.

[red-iron-pine]

create an LLC and start doing online marketing ("online marketing").

you're a marketing company. you're gathering data for data mining that you will sell to other brokers. lots of small or niche marketing firms out there.

could you do it as one (1) person? might be hard. but you and a few coworkers / employees is perfectly reasonable.

chances are you won't sell directly to the government but to an aggregator, but it's not crazy to think that a small org could potentially sell to the gub'mnt if the data is juicy enough. would have to be very niche stuff though, like maps of labor / union folks, or data tracking Islamic prayer app use, etc.

keep in mind that being a government vendor means you have to jump through certain hoops, and those can be onerous, but again, not theoretically impossible.

[awakeasleep]

Not as an individual but as a business basically yes

[FireBeyond]

At times, depending on the state, the government can even put out RFCs specifically to ask for corporations to bid on providing data that the government can't collect itself.

[spwa4]

Purchase? You're misunderstanding how government consultancy works (this is what EU states use consultancy firms for, and that's what Palantir really is)

A purchase works as follows: I like ice cream. I give you 5$. You give me an ice cream. I enjoy ice cream.

This is: government likes private health data. Hospital gives Palantir 5$, and your health data, repeat for 1 million patients. Palantir gives the health data to government, employs the nephew of the head of the healthcare regulator. Your unemployment gets denied because the doctor said you could work.

Buying means exchanging money for goods and services. This is exchanging money AND goods AND services for nothing. It's highly illegal for private companies, if you try it you'll get sued by the tax office the second they see it and find all company accounts blocked "just in case", but of course if you are the government, directly or indirectly, it's just fine and peachy.

And you might think "this makes no sense". But you'd be advised to check out who appoints the head of the hospital first. It does make sense. (In fact just about the only break on this behavior in most EU countries is that the Vatican still has control over the board of a very surprising number of hospitals. Needless to say, the EU governments really hate that, but there tend to be deals around this. For example, in Belgium the hospitals get 50% less per resident. These sorts of deals were made, but they now mean that if the government wants the Vatican out of the board ... they have to increase spending on that hospital, often by a lot. I'd call them "Vatican hospitals" but one thing government and the Vatican really agree on is that they do not want patients to know the underlying financial arrangements around hospitals, and in many cases it's quite difficult to find who controls a hospital even though it's technically public information)

[throwaw12]

> Palantir gives the health data to government

Ice cream was sellers when they were selling it, but not the data, data belongs to someone else, who didn't explicitly allow selling it

[mistrial9]

in Western history, culturally, Church was a founding force for the existance of hospitals, full-stop. Repeat with more money and more fallable humans and yes some of what you say is accurate. But, if you start naming the behavior as if it is synonymous with the original founders of Hospitals, you a) create an intellectual dishonesty on your part, b) attract wing-nuts and sociopaths who are looking for a place to join in the chanting, c) obscure important details while the casual readers focus on the glaring finger pointing.

If you want to actually contribute to this very difficult topic, please refrain from welding disparate labels together in the introductory materials.