Spitfire List Web site and blog of anti-fascist researcher and radio personality Dave Emory.
The tag 'Palantir' is associated with 12 posts.

Birds of a Feather: The So-Called Internet “Privacy Activists,” the Intelligence Services and Big Tech

Yasha Levine’s recent book “Sur­veil­lance Val­ley” is a MUST READ! Rel­a­tive­ly short and very much to the point, this volume–subtitled “The Secret Mil­i­tary His­to­ry of the Internet”–chronicles the fact that the Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped as part of the same group of over­lap­ping DARPA/Pentagon projects as Agent Orange. In posts and pro­grams to come, we will more ful­ly devel­op the basic themes set forth in the excerpt recapped in this post: 1 )The Inter­net is a weapon, devel­oped for counter-insur­gency pur­pos­es. 2) Big Tech firms net­work with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry. 3) Big Tech firms that data mine their cus­tomers on a near­ly unimag­in­able scale do so as a direct, oper­a­tional exten­sion of the very sur­veil­lance func­tion upon which the Inter­net is pred­i­cat­ed. 4) The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Apple­baum were devel­oped by the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect. 5) The tech­nolo­gies tout­ed by the so-called “Pri­va­cy Activists” such as Edward Snow­den and Jacob Applebaum–such as the Tor Inter­net func­tion and the Sig­nal mobile phone app– are read­i­ly acces­si­ble to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they are sup­posed to deflect. 6) The orga­ni­za­tions that pro­mote the alleged virtues of Snow­den, Apple­baum, Tor, Sig­nal et al are linked to the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they would have us believe they oppose. 7) Big Tech firms embrace “Inter­net Free­dom” as a dis­trac­tion from their own will­ful and all-embrac­ing data min­ing and their ongo­ing con­scious col­lab­o­ra­tion with the very intel­li­gence ser­vices they pub­licly decry.


The Cambridge Analytica Microcosm in Our Panoptic Macrocosm

Let the Great Unfriend­ing Com­mence! Specif­i­cal­ly, the mass unfriend­ing of Face­book, which would be a well deserved unfriend­ing after the scan­dalous rev­e­la­tions in a recent series of arti­cles cen­tered around the claims of Christo­pher Wylie, a Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca whis­tle-blow­er who helped found the firm and worked there until late 2014 until he and oth­ers grew increas­ing­ly uncom­fort­able with the far right goals and ques­tion­able actions of the firm. And those ques­tion­able actions by Cam­bridge involve a larg­er and more scan­dalous Face­book pol­i­cy brought forth by a Fac­book whis­tle-blow­er, Sandy Parak­i­las: Face­book was hand­ing out exact­ly the kind of data col­lect­ed by Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca to all sorts of app devel­op­ers for years. Beyond that, it appears that Face­book real­ly did have an excep­tion­al­ly close rela­tion­ship with Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca’s research part­ner and was only both­ered by its data col­lec­tion when the media got wind of it. It also looks like Steve Ban­non was over­see­ing this entire process, although he claims to know noth­ing. Oh, and Palan­tir appears to have had an infor­mal rela­tion­ship with Cam­bridge Ana­lyt­i­ca this whole time. And this state of affairs is an exten­sion of how the inter­net has been used from its very con­cep­tion a half cen­tu­ry ago. And that’s all part of why the Great Unfriend­ing of Face­book real­ly is long over­due, along with a lot of oth­er reforms.


Books for Download

The New Germany and The Old Nazis Book written in 1961 asks: Has Germany really changed? If so, where are the hundreds of thousands who once faithfully and eagerly served Hitler's reign of terror? And what is life like today for the Jews who are still in Germany? Read more »