A for-profit vendor built a proprietary national biometric database by extracting iris scans from public county jail booking rooms, one intake at a time, then turned around and sold federal access to the biometrics of prisoners.
Plymouth County Correctional Facility is operated by the Sheriff’s Department, and Bi2 Technologies (Biometric Intelligence and Identification Technologies) developed technology with sheriffs for use in jails and prisons. One co-founder, Peter Flynn, is a retired sheriff. Sheriffs were paid with taxpayer money to run the jails, book inmates, but also scan irises into his private database. More than five million records have been drawn from 247 agencies, with every figure now paywalled for profit.
ICE has paid for access twice. First in September for $4.6 million and 200 devices. Now for $25.1 million and 1,570, awarded May 22 without competition because the agency has declared Bi2 the only firm capable of the work.
The justification for all this rushed work is a false “border emergency”. The new ICE contract even sends the system into the field before FedRAMP. The records will reach ERO agents by late June. Since FedRAMP exists to assess whether a vendor can secure the data properly, Bi2 will be running without answers to baseline questions before the data is exposed. Live biometrics of more than a million people will move through field devices without safety baselines established, during a war with Iran.
So the news is that public jails with public money built a biometrics database that a private company fenced, which is being sold to the public for more public money to run unsafely based on an emergency that doesn’t seem to exist.
Microsoft wants to call its EU commitment a “contractually binding court-fight clause.” Apparently that means Brad Smith pledges to the EU customers he will sue the US government rather than suspend EU operations.
From where I’m sitting, that pledge sure looks hollow, and Microsoft’s own documents are the proof.
First, there’s an unnatural split. The US reaches across the ocean for EU-hosted data in two ways. A CLOUD Act warrant compels Microsoft to transfer the data, or a sanctions order compels Microsoft to cut the customer off. I’m not a lawyer but these different laws mean different commands. Smith’s pledge says nothing about the first, which makes me wonder wny he’s only talking about the second.
Next, looking at the first, the promise seems to be only for the wrong door. Microsoft’s own transparency report shows 115 warrants in six months for content stored outside the US. Those are production orders being executed. The data gets handed over. That door is in constant use, and Smith’s pledge skips it entirely. The scenario he does pledge to fight, a company-wide order to suspend EU operations, has hit a hyperscaler at that scale essentially never. His promise is this to guard an already shut door while ignoring the other one swinging on its hinges.
The two doors aren’t the same scale. A single customer can be cut off, which is what happened famously to Karim Khan. A continental shutdown of all EU operations is the thing Smith promises to litigate, and that has not occurred. I can see there’s different magnitudes, so maybe he pledges against something that’s never happened because it’s never happened.
Three, where’s the revocability control of Smith’s post? The usual fear with any EU-US data deal is that an executive order can’t be trusted, because any president can revoke it. Smith’s pledge on a blog post seems many levels below that. “Contractually binding” can be deleted on a patch Tuesday.
None of this should surprise anyone. Microsoft did its thing already. When EO 14203 designated Karim Khan, the ICC chief prosecutor, his Microsoft email stopped working. Microsoft says it wasn’t them. That denial goes to who acted, not to whether the service was permitted. The order text says it bars US persons from providing services to a blocked person, email included, which makes Microsoft’s denial beside the point. And the ICC moved to openDesk either way. The actual point is that after a US designation landed, an EU Microsoft customer was no longer a customer.
Then a year later a pledge came, on a blog, addressing the warrant door, while the thing that actually failed for Khan got nothing. Hello, is this thing on? I am no lawyer, but the pledge is a contract, and the IEEPA order starts blocking “notwithstanding” any contract entered into before it. Microsoft offers the EU the exact thing that will suffer an override, on a thing that isn’t the other thing. So how does the pledge really help anyone?
At 5:50 the narration states that the most advanced country on earth “elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor.” Hitler was appointed chancellor by President Hindenburg on 30 January 1933. He was never elected to that office, and the NSDAP never won a parliamentary majority. By 22 March 1933 the regime had opened Dachau to jail and kill political opponents. Calling the infamous appointment an election, in a segment about how fascism takes hold, is an inversion of the methods that the episode claims to explain.
You inverted the thinkers you invoked
The episode says Karp marinated in Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School and presents this as ennobling background. But Marcuse had fled Germany in 1933 and spent World War II in the US Office of Strategic Services analyzing the Nazi state. Karp would have been better off staying in America than going to Frankfurt to learn the wrong lessons from old Nazis celebrating lack of accountability. Marcuse wrote Repressive Tolerance that rejected extending tolerance to fascist movements. One-Dimensional Man is a critique of how consumer abundance manufactures conformity. The arc that your episode draws, in which a wealthy postwar family’s comfort persuades Karp that American prosperity cures fascism, is the precise reversal of the thinker that you bizarrely placed at his foundation. The episode takes the man who fought the Nazi state and uses his authority to frame the operator of a fascist surveillance and targeting company. This contradiction should have prevented the comparison, but instead you tried to bring them together on a single point: both are Jewish.
You ran a Nazi trope while claiming to investigate a fascist
The narration states that the ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School “have come to dominate some of the social science departments” and carry “influence on the young” (5:16). That is the antisemitic trope known as Cultural Marxism conspiracy theory, a direct descendant of the Nazi charge of Kulturbolschewismus, which held that Jewish intellectuals were corrupting national culture and the minds of the young. You presented an antisemitic trope without context inside a segment ostensibly investigating a fascist, while naming the thinkers as Jews. That is not a small editorial lapse.
The damage
A false historical claim about how Hitler took power and how great his country was, an inverted reading of the anti-fascist thinkers to blame the Jews for the fascist Jew’s rise, and the reproduction of an antisemitic conspiracy frame together produce a segment that badly misinforms the public on the exact subject it claims to clarify.
I watched a video that says Palantir software is not inherently sinister because it’s software (3:47) just like email. That’s obviously wrong. It’s like saying land mines are not inherently sinister because they use explosives.
I knew this was going to be bad.
Then it says Hitler was elected chancellor (5:50). That is wrong. Ugh. So wrong, and so important. He was appointed 30 January 1933.
Not elected.
Not elected. And very unpopular. The NSDAP was sliding and losing support all through 1932, so by March 22, 1933 Hitler opened the Dachau camp to jail political opponents and murder them during the election. He never won a majority, and not only wasn’t elected he made voting into a death sentence. Don’t say elected.
Let me more precise. This Australian “news” video heaps undeserved praise on Hitler.
the most technologically advanced, educated, and developed country on earth elected Adolf Hitler as chancellor
No, no, and no. This video is full of basic factual errors like this, and it’s bad. Really bad.
Germany was not some pinnacle of technological advancement that birthed fascism. Its own war machine ran on animals. 75% of the Wehrmacht depended on horses. The video’s framing, that the most advanced nation on earth produced Hitler, is a lie. Hitler seized control of a nation that was copying British jet patents, importing American trucks and tractors, aspiring to build cars on seized Czech designs (Porsche/VW), and importing American racist doctrine.
Germany definitely was NOT the frontier of progress. It’s a common Hitler apologist red flag to frame Germany as the most technologically advanced. Hitler’s own complaint was the opposite, that Versailles had put Germany behind the world, and his answer was to erase all political opponents, especially the educated, and end elections in order to make germany great again. He literally tortured and murdered those who had dared to vote against him.
Memorial block for Richard Lipinski, a well known Leipzig SPD politician who voted against Hitler, was arrested, detained for years and what Germans to this day will call being “mistreated” to death.
Another huge problem with the video is Hitler was a huge fan of America (especially Henry Ford), and Nazi Germany was an implementation and industrialization of American racist doctrine. You can’t just talk about America after the war as an effect on Germany, without looking at America building Hitler.
American history is Nazi history.
So it’s bad at analysis too, which of course derives from getting so many facts wrong.
The Palantir CEO is patterning Hitler because he’s patterning pre-war America, and he’s opposed to denazification. It’s exactly the opposite of what this video is claiming. That’s crucial to understand why Palantir is inherently sinister. And it’s all missing from this annoyingly bad ABC News pump called “If you’re listening”.
Clearly they have not been listening.
The video even tries to boost Palantir software by claiming it has features like speed and ease of use, despite constant headlines from the UK are blaring that it’s extremely slow and unusable.
Notably, Palantir says they have to stop terrorists, while it’s well documented that they generate terrorists. Palantir says they oppose far-right extremists while it’s been proven they are providing far-right extremists tools to destroy political opponents. None of this news makes it into the video, but a whole lot of puffery about philosophy of the “German Jews” is in there.
Palantir literally has been the engine of destroying calm, replacing it with extrajudicial assassinations and violent extremist groups. Nothing about that gets mentioned, just a long Australian rant accusing group of powerful Jews running the universities and all thinking the same thing under the video banner of a “mastermind” from the Jews who were “dominating” childrens’ thought.
A video that claims ideas of Marcuse and the Frankfurt School “have come to dominate some of the social science departments” and carry “influence on the young” is an old and tired Cultural Marxism trope used in antisemitism. Did someone making this video think “oh, that’s good, let’s run that” and not know what it is and where it comes from? The video is spreading Nazi Kulturbolschewismus while claiming to be investigating a fascist.
What is going on here is painful, uninformed, disinformation. The legend being spread that the CEO is steeped in culture of Frankfurt School in general, let alone Habermas, is provably false. His actual supervisors were Karola Brede and Hans-Joachim Busch, in the Division of Social Sciences, a totally different part of the university than the claim this video makes.
Karp’s dissertation subject (“Aggression in der Lebenswelt” how aggression can be created and made acceptable) is the exact opposite of what this video claims. He wrote about the very mechanism now laundering himself, how violence gets dressed as necessity. He feared power and sought to adorn himself with aggression as a survival tactic. His own description of the German family that was kind to him, gave him a coat, and told him plainly they had all been Nazis before becoming Democrats reveals his own character failures (7:44). He read their postwar comfort, instead of being tried for their crimes, as proof that American prosperity cures them of fascism. The opportunist’s lesson was that whatever power rewards becomes the truth, which is what makes him available for anything a regime asks. That frictionless availability is an even bigger danger than fanaticism because it needs no conviction and recognizes no red lines.
I want to be clear. The Frankfurt School’s Habermas philosophy culminates in communication free of domination, which is the inverse of a surveillance-power operator. Palantir is the total rejection of the school of thought this video tries to pull in and blame for Palantir’s CEO. The only thing in common is… they’re both Jews, which weirdly seems to be a particularly important point to this narrator!
See all the problems? It’s probably the worst video I’ve seen in years, rife with mistakes. The latent antisemitism is ridiculous and totally unnecessary, but perhaps that’s revealing the frame of mind of the presenter.
A simple explanation of the problem, if they wanted to blame Jews, is right in front of everyone, yet rarely examined. The CEO is not German philosopher material. He is echoing the brutality of extremist Meir Kahane concepts of Jewish terrorism as “American supremacy” without any filter. There are radical, fringe fascists outside the norm, and not normal.
PLAYBOY: Then the only difference between you and, say, the American Nazi Party is that they’re wrong and you’re right?
KAHANE: I can’t put it better than that.
If you don’t know who Meir “every Jew a .22” Kahane is, and why he was classified a terrorist, you don’t know what Israel has become, and why Palantir is right there. The effect of Kahane needs airtime far more than the Frankfurt school of philosophy that the CEO repeatedly says he doesn’t follow.
And then the video tries to claim Anthropic won’t give data to the government (via Hegseth), without admitting that Anthropic just agreed to give all its data to the government (via Elon Musk).
Come on. Anthropic announces they will hand all the data over in a business deal and reporters are still thinking the hollow PR version is holding?
And then, worst of all, this video doesn’t even mention Peter Thiel, founder of Palantir. So you have a fascist founder in a story about a fascist CEO and that relationship gets no mention at all? Nothing? Instead we have to listen to a story about the Jews that Karp disagreed with and wanted to do the opposite of, while they’re falsely made adjacent to his fascism?
Overall this video does such a light touch on fascism, at times factually inaccurate, that it comes across as harmful gloss about fascism or even promotion of Hitler. The CEO likes to ski? How is that relevant to anything? Jewish philosophers at one time said that power prevents abuse of power? Ok. What are these useless tangents? This “Australian” view of history appears to be very broken and fixated on “weird” trivia.
The video fails to give an inherently sinister Palantir, well documented by their fascist words and actions, the treatment it sorely deserves: Nazi land mine. You don’t want it in your country. It’s not just software, like Karp is not just some German Jewish intellectual. Both are militant, extreme, radical, and should not be tolerated.
A Nazi is either laying or clearing mines. Can you tell from this photo? If you were authorized to shoot, what would you do?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
