While I agree with some others here that the idea of the government watching public tweets is generally fine, I think the concern here is that there's various legal restrictions on how the government can conduct surveillance, and by using a willing private company to do the surveillance instead, they can avoid oversight and bypass some (most? all?) of those restrictions.
Another concern is the perverse incentives setup by private surveillance tech like this, where you very easily get into ShotSpotter situations where the ability to deliver perceived value to the government is more important that not fabricating evidence to ruin people's lives: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...
I know Palantir will work with your data, but do they also offer any sources of data themselves? If so, this sounds more or less the same as that (or at least that part of their offerings).
I'm very ignorant of the legal context for this sort of thing, so I really don't know if it'd be trivial (legally) for the government to try to get this information themselves.
As an analogy, I think this is (ethically) similar to parallel construction. But rather than hide the illegal activity outright, you tunnel it through a private company. That way you get the same derived value as you would if you had broken the law to do it for yourself, but without the law breaking. I guess something like Room 641A is the best of both worlds.
Another concern is the perverse incentives setup by private surveillance tech like this, where you very easily get into ShotSpotter situations where the ability to deliver perceived value to the government is more important that not fabricating evidence to ruin people's lives: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/07/its-time-police-stop-u...
I know Palantir will work with your data, but do they also offer any sources of data themselves? If so, this sounds more or less the same as that (or at least that part of their offerings).
I'm very ignorant of the legal context for this sort of thing, so I really don't know if it'd be trivial (legally) for the government to try to get this information themselves.
As an analogy, I think this is (ethically) similar to parallel construction. But rather than hide the illegal activity outright, you tunnel it through a private company. That way you get the same derived value as you would if you had broken the law to do it for yourself, but without the law breaking. I guess something like Room 641A is the best of both worlds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A