There’s a sad story circulating about Palantir trying to weasel its way into German government through far-right channels.

Though “Hessendata,” adapted from the Gotham program developed by the US company Palantir, is not yet in use in Hamburg, it is already being used extensively by the Hesse police since 2017.

Hesse police are perhaps known best for being implicated in far-right political extremism.

Complaints about racial profiling — and far-right sympathies among officers — have plagued the German police, especially in Hesse.

Can we just say Nazis?

Hesse was trying to bring in Palantir while spreading hate.

Most of the suspects had sent messages in far-right chat groups from 2016 and 2017…. Seventeen Hesse officers were suspected of spreading hatred-inciting texts and symbols of former Nazi organizations – outlawed under post-war German law, said prosecutors. The three others, supervising officers, were further accused of obstructing justice while participating in chats but failing to stop the exchanges that continued until 2019. Aged between 29 and 54, all but one officer had been on active duty.

Oh. Not good.

The news reads like Nazi sympathizers in Germany were the ideal champion and target buyer for Palantir.

Why?

The above problems allegedly “ended” in 2019, right where the 2020 Hesse police scandals began.

Unidentified police officers in Hesse accessed the contact details of several politicians and prominent immigrants from official records and shared them with the neo-Nazi group, according to local reports.

Instead of getting better, the problems got worse and were directly related to information “access” (surveillance used in violations of privacy). Police were being setup to use Palantir for political corruption.

Which of course gets to the point: why doesn’t Palantir’s Peter Thiel ever condemn Nazism, especially given his parents fled to South Africa and America to avoid accountability for their offenses in Germany?

Thiel is no ordinary American or European. His father, Klaus, was born in Germany in 1938, which means Thiel’s grandparents were German adults during World War II.

Palantir technology doesn’t work, and becomes a tool of power abuse instead, but that’s just where the troubles begin.

It’s a Trojan horse that promises capabilities it doesn’t have, and by the time officials figure out they’ve been misled (e.g. Hitler’s rise) they’re stuck in the worst possible setup and can’t get out — expensive, highly political and totally proprietary data platform under the thumb of coin-operated politicians.

Hesse historically has been seen as a criminal justice embarrassment to Germany and even the EU.

The German state of Hesse has voted to finally scrap the death penalty from its constitution, amending a 69-year-old legal anomaly which allowed it. The western state is the last in Germany to amend its local legal code, after the national constitution abolished capital punishment in 1949. […] Capital punishment is banned in all EU countries, so this lingering quirk was seen as an embarrassment to Germany, an outspoken opponent of the practice.

Hesse police ignored a federal abolishment rule of 1949. Nudge nudge, wink, know what that means?

The Hesse police being used to push Palantir is yet another disappointment for the region, perhaps even designed to secretly help American extremists spread “death by AI” software to places that abolished fascism and its capitol punishment.

“When you saw their big growth, it was helped by the contracts they signed under the Trump administration,” Radke said. […] Thiel, who made his initial fortune co-founding PayPal [to offer the far-right an online money laundering service], is focusing squarely on getting Ohio’s Vance and Arizona’s Masters elected to the US Senate. Both Vance and Masters are former Thiel employees and raised money by offering dinners with Thiel.

Former Palantir employees are being funded by Palantir to get “elected” and run the government.

Nothing screams corruption, or that the software doesn’t work, like a fascist coup being their definition of “installed”.

Vance won. Masters lost.

Germany should thus treat the far-right sales tactics and extreme political leanings of Palantir as an opportunity to expose any direct ties from it to Nazism. I mean has anyone used Palantir on Thiel himself to show why his family went on the run from German authorities after 1949 but not during the Holocaust? I’m just asking questions.

I’ve tried and failed to make any sense of the statements that Smith & Wesson put before American courts.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by gun manufacturer Smith & Wesson Brands Inc seeking to block New Jersey’s attorney general from enforcing a subpoena to investigate whether the company committed fraud while advertising firearms to consumers. […] Smith & Wesson claimed the probe sought to suppress speech regarding gun ownership protected by the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment…

It seems that the gun manufacturer has to be told at great taxpayer expense that fraud is not a free speech issue.

The state of NJ, investigating gun deaths, had demanded to know when and where Smith & Wesson had said its guns make people safer.

The company not only violently refused to admit what it has been saying, it tied up courts to argue that it could say absolutely anything to sell products.

It seems especially dubious to push at customers that guns will definitely make them safer, while telling the courts that’s just a random opinion and therefore can’t be challenged for being a lie.

Lawyers apparently now have to figure out if the company is engaging in willful fraud; deaths or injury of the very people told they would be safer.

And that reminds me of Sig Sauer, another gun manufacturer charged with lying to its customers.

If you read the news about Apple watches from almost a decade ago, you’d be excused for being surprised to read the news today.

Let’s start with CNN in 2015:

…the back of the watch rapidly flashes green and infrared light at your skin, which gets absorbed or reflected by your blood. When your heart beats, there is more blood in your wrist, while there is less blood between beats. By sensing the timing between your heartbeats, the Apple Watch can calculate your heart rate.

As it turns out, solid-colored tattoos — particularly red ones — also absorb the green light and reflect red light. Black tattoos, which absorb both green and red light, can also screw up the Apple Watch’s heart rate sensor.

The Apple Watch works fine with dark-colored skin, scars and skin abrasions, which are translucent, allowing light to pass through. Tattoo ink is opaque, so that light can’t penetrate your skin.

Did you catch the most important line?

The Apple Watch works fine with dark-colored skin…

A new lawsuit (filed Dec 24: PDF) states that this is untrue, has been known for decades to be untrue, and deserves class action again fraud.

Perhaps most notable is that it puts a consumer watch in context of buyers expecting help with COVID-19 survival.

…reliance on pulse oximetry to triage patients and adjust supplemental oxygen levels may place Black patients at increased risk for hypoxemia.

The lawsuit thus brings to light (pun not intended) that structural racism in engineering can end up having very real impact.

We’ve seen this repeatedly before, like a direct line from Kodak photo processing to Google image analysis having the same basic racism.

Apple pretending its products were never meant to be trusted would be the worst tactic here. Everyone knows their data silo strategy expects you to depend on them whole heartedly in every minute of your life.

The fact that someone can prove customers with darker skin should have significantly lower trust in Apple engineering than lighter skin customers… is what will make the “you shouldn’t have trusted us” defense particularly toxic.

Expect lawyers from Apple to say stuff like they told people not to depend on Apple for important health data (should use doctors instead), while engineers and marketing from Apple go on pushing the opposite: only brand you can trust for important data management.

The reality of course is that if you sell an oxygen sensor during a pandemic, you know exactly what people are buying it for and you’d better be treating it as such (whether adding clearer warnings, fixing defects, or pulling it off shelves).

The disaster at Google is a good precedent in this case. Engineers had built image recognition and tested it on human photos they collected. White and Asian faces were embarrassingly misclassified as animals. The engineers corrected the code to prevent this, and released it to the public. Immediately thereafter, people with Black skin complained they were being classified as animals.

Google engineers didn’t test for human experience, they tested for Google engineers’ experience, which exposed systemic American racism.

The lawsuit thus comes at a time when greater awareness of bias in tech has converged with increasingly severe impact from that bias.

To treat the lawsuit properly, Apple should demonstrate anti-racism in its release pipeline as much as it should demonstrate usual engineering requirements like anti-vulnerability (safe development lifecycle).