vox--2020-07-16--Everything you need to know about Palantir, the secretive company coming for all your data

In the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic , many of the country ’ s public health departments , still reliant on fax machines , were woefully unprepared for the massive amounts of data they needed to process .
Looking for a tidy private sector solution to a messy government problem , the Department of Health and Human Services ( HHS ) paid a shadowy Silicon Valley company with ties to the Trump administration to build something new .
That company is called Palantir Technologies , and if you don ’ t know much about it , that ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and analysis , most of which it does for government agencies .
It has about $ 1.5 billion in federal government contracts alone , including , recently , with the Space Force and the Navy .
Now , as new Covid-19 case numbers break records daily , Palantir is trying to help organize the information with a new platform called HHS Protect , which will be run by another private company called TeleTracking .
This partnership has effectively replaced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ’ s ( CDC ) National Healthcare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s orders to hospitals to stop reporting their information to it .
HHS Protect , which is not accessible to the general public , is now the only source for this information .
“ Today , the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data , ” Michael Caputo , assistant secretary of the HHS for public affairs , told the New York Times .
“ America requires it in real time .
The new , faster , and complete data system is what our nation needs to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ architect of this complete data system , isn ’ t a household name like its Palo Alto peers , but the 17-year-old company founded by Peter Thiel is one of the most valuable private companies in Silicon Valley .
That anonymity is a feature , not a bug : Palantir does most of its work for the government , including national security and intelligence operations .
In recent years , headlines about the company have stressed its access to everything about all of us , which privacy advocates have long criticized .
Palantir @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with killing Osama bin Laden ( a claim that has never been confirmed ) and blamed for tearing unauthorized immigrant families apart .
Now the notoriously secretive surveillance startup that the White House is entrusting with the nation ’ s coronavirus data is about to go public .
The Lord of the Rings-based solution to 9/11 Palantir was founded in 2003 by venture capitalist and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel along with Joe Lonsdale , Stephen Cohen , Nathan Gettings , and Alex Karp , its eccentric CEO who has a law degree and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ keeps 20 identical pairs of swimming goggles in his office .
The company ’ s name comes from J.R.R .
Tolkein ’ s “ palantíri , ” which are magical orbs that let their possessors see anything happening in the world at any time .
The name fits , too , as Palantir ’ s vision has always been to create software that can mine and analyze large and disparate data sets , putting them all in one place and finding connections between them .
The company came together not long after 9/11 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tool that could have identified and stopped the hijackers and would prevent similar attacks from happening in the future .
Sure enough , by 2011 , Bloomberg Businessweek was calling Palantir “ an indispensable tool employed by the US intelligence community in the war on terrorism.
” The magazine added , “ Palantir technology essentially solves the Sept. 11 intelligence problem.
” Indeed , the CIA was one of Palantir ’ s earliest investors through its venture capital arm , In-Q-Tel ( yes , the CIA has a venture capital arm ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ for years as the company refined and improved its technology , according to Forbes .
By 2010 , Palantir ’ s customers were mostly government agencies , though there were some private companies in the mix .
Having managed to quietly work its way toward a $ 1 billion valuation , it was then one of the most valuable startups in Silicon Valley .
By 2015 , Palantir was valued at $ 20 billion .
“ I think it ’ s worth keeping in mind that Palantir sees itself not alongside Uber , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Raytheon , Lockheed Martin , and Booz Allen , ” said the Intercept ’ s Sam Biddle , who has covered Palantir for years .
“ Palantir wants to be a defense contractor , not a Silicon Valley unicorn.
” Palantir has grown into a company with roughly 2,500 employees , most of them engineers who write the software that collects data , and embedded analysts who work on site with Palantir ’ s customers to make sense of it .
Company culture has been described as cult-like , big on T-shirts and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than Lockheed.
” Employees are called “ Palantirians.
” One of Palantir ’ s product demonstrations , as described in Bloomberg Businessweek ’ s 2011 article , presents a fictional example of the software ’ s capabilities : A terrorist leaves a trail of data across Florida , including one-way plane tickets , condo rentals , bank withdrawals , phone calls to Syria , and security camera footage from Walt Disney World .
Taken separately , these details don ’ t add up to much , but Palantir ’ s software ties together @ @ @ @ @ @ @ helps clients see connections across them .
In this case , actions that are innocuous on their own are much more suspicious when combined , and the CIA could identify and stop a terrorist ’ s plan to attack a theme park .
Again , that was a hypothetical product demonstration , but Palantir ’ s technology has been credited with saving its financial institution customers hundreds of millions of dollars , being used to detect Chinese spyware on the Dalai Lama ’ s computer , thwarting Pakistani suicide bombers , and unraveling @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Its customers have included the CDC , police departments in America and abroad , and large corporations like JPMorgan and Home Depot .
Palantir even sued the US Army in 2016 to force it to consider using its intelligence software after the Army chose to go with its own .
Palantir won the suit , and then it won an $ 800 million contract .
Despite its high valuation and lucrative contracts , however , Palantir has yet to make a profit .
Palantir ’ s work , the government agencies that contract @ @ @ @ @ @ @ details about the company ’ s inner workings mean it ’ s often seen as secretive , all-knowing , and even malevolent .
Seven years after touting Palantir ’ s terrorism-fighting abilities , Bloomberg Businessweek ran a feature on the company with the headline “ Palantir Knows Everything About You.
” In a book with the phrase “ destroying democracy ” in the title , Robert Scheer called Palantir a “ monstrous government snoop , mining our most intimate data.
” The company ’ s software has been criticized for its dragnet ways @ @ @ @ @ @ @ innocent people so it can catch a few possible criminals .
“ Palantir ’ s data-mining software is used to analyze vast amounts of personal data held by the federal government to make determinations that affect people ’ s lives with little to no oversight , ” said Jeramie D. Scott , senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center ( EPIC ) , which successfully sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE ) to get records on its work with Palantir .
“ Palantir analyzes databases containing telephone numbers , email addresses @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and social media information .
...
The documents EPIC obtained showed that ICE ’ s Palantir-based databases could analyze call records and GPS data as well as conduct social network analysis of the information linking different individuals.
” The company suffered one of its first rounds of bad press in 2011 when a hacker discovered it was part of a proposal to Bank of America to sabotage Wikileaks .
In response , Palantir issued a public apology , created a “ Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties , ” and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the engineer responsible .
The post-9/11 world that Palantir was born into in 2003 then changed considerably in 2013 when leaks from Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency used the directive of protecting the country at all costs in order to mass-collect the phone records of millions of Americans , leading to widespread outcry and some reforms .
Palantir denied working with the NSA on that particular project but has worked with the agency on others , according to an internal video that was leaked to BuzzFeed News .
Palantir ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country has also brought renewed scrutiny to the company , especially in light of recent protests against police brutality .
Palantir ’ s software powers the Los Angeles Police Department ’ s predictive crime program , called Operation LASER , which tries to identify and target potential criminals for increased surveillance .
The program ended in 2019 amid doubts that predictive policing was an effective crime deterrent , as well as criticism from civil rights organizations that it unfairly targeted minority communities .
It ’ s hard to get exact numbers on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with , but New Orleans ’ s and New York ’ s police departments are known customers , and Palantir boasts on its website of its work with the Salt Lake City Police Department .
Palantir declined Recode ’ s request for comment , but the company has said its technology is built with protections for privacy and civil liberties .
While the company ’ s software obviously collects and works with data for its clients , the company says it doesn ’ t collect or use any of that data for itself @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has come with some consequences .
In the past few years , nonprofits have dropped Palantir as a corporate sponsor , and students regularly protest Palantir-related campus events and recruiting sessions .
In an op-ed for the Washington Post , Karp noted that a “ small group ” of protesters regularly assembles outside Palantir ’ s offices , and he ’ s said that his own home is the site of near-daily protests .
He has a personal security guard at all times .
The Investor Alliance for Human Rights criticized Palantir ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , saying it was “ failing to fulfill its human rights responsibilities ” and noting that its use of personal data came with “ legal risks ” and could be in violation of state laws .
That reputation has followed Palantir even as its technology seems to be doing some good during the Covid-19 pandemic .
The company is providing its services at almost no cost to the United Kingdom ’ s National Health Service ( NHS ) , but headlines focused on how much patient data the company was getting access to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what it would do with it .
The NHS has also provided patient data to other companies , including Microsoft and Amazon .
Stateside , there ’ s HHS Protect — another example of Palantir ’ s expansion into how the government collects and manages data and whom it trusts to do it ( and , it seems , whom it does not ) .
A spokesperson for HHS told NBC News last month that ICE would not have access to HHS Protect and that all information in it was de-identified anyway .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ concerns about if and how patients ’ personal health information will be protected , and that it won ’ t be shared with other federal agencies .
They ’ ve specifically cited Palantir ’ s work on the project as one of their issues .
“ Our concerns that HHS Protect could be misused in this way are compounded by the fact that Palantir has a history of contracting with ICE , including two active awards worth over $ 38 million in total , ” they said in a June letter to HHS @ @ @ @ @ @ @ controversial because its co-founder and board chair , Peter Thiel , is controversial .
Thiel , who was one of Facebook ’ s first outside investors and maintains a position on its board of directors , has seen his share of criticism over the years , but the libertarian billionaire really came into the public eye in 2016 when he revealed himself as the money behind Hulk Hogan ’ s privacy lawsuit against Gawker ( which would ultimately kill the site ) and an early Trump supporter .
As most of liberal Silicon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out against Trump , Thiel was one of relatively few public figures who supported his candidacy .
After speaking at the Republican National Convention , he gave the Trump campaign $ 1.25 million , and when Trump won the election , New York magazine said he was “ poised to become a national villain.
” Thiel has been rewarded for his support : He was chosen to be a member of the president ’ s transition team ; in the early days of the Trump presidency , Politico dubbed Thiel “ Donald Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Silicon Valley ” ; and Thiel ’ s chief of staff and protégé , Michael Kratsios , served as the White House ’ s chief technology officer from 2017 until this month , when he was named acting undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense .
Thiel ’ s Trump support is said to have changed going into the 2020 election , however , and he hasn ’ t donated to Trump ’ s campaign since October 2018 .
Due , in part , to Thiel ’ s Trump links @ @ @ @ @ @ @ round of scrutiny .
Its contract with ICE caused numerous civil rights organizations to blame Palantir for helping the agency find and deport unauthorized immigrants .
While other companies were ending their relationships with certain government agencies over purported ethical concerns , Palantir renewed its ICE contract in 2019 despite reported opposition even from its own employees , some of whom left the company over it .
Palantir ’ s CEO , on the other hand , has said it ’ s not his company ’ s place to decide how its software @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it suited Palantir to paint itself as this lean and mean ‘ secretive ” startup , ’ ” said Biddle , who used to work at Gawker .
“ Now that they ’ re established and have clearly weathered popular outrage over their work with ICE and a lifetime association with Peter Thiel , it ’ s time to cash in.
” The company that would never go public is about to go public Karp famously and repeatedly said that he would never take his company public , believing that staying private @ @ @ @ @ @ @ competitors didn ’ t have .
“ The minute companies go public , they are less competitive , ” Karp said in 2014 .
“ You need a lot of creative , wacky people that maybe Wall Street won ’ t understand .
They might say the wrong thing all the way through an interview .
… You really want your people to be focused on solving the problem.
” But Karp has seemed more amenable to the idea in the last few years .
When Palantir added its first female board member @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all but certain — according to California law , public companies must have at least one female board member .
Palantir filed its initial paperwork with the SEC on July 6 in a confidential filing that allowed it to avoid revealing much about its inner workings to the public .
Twitter , Uber , and Spotify , among other startup giants , have done the same thing .
There ’ s no timeline for when the company might actually go public .
Despite Palantir ’ s enormous valuation , the company has reportedly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to live up to ” its “ hot startup image , ” as the Wall Street Journal said in 2018 .
Bloomberg reported last year that Palantir ’ s valuation had plummeted to half , maybe even a quarter , of its 2015 peak , as investors wrote down the value of their holdings and the company offered discounted shares to employees to boost morale .
Big corporate clients such as Coca-Cola , American Express , Hershey , Nasdaq , Home Depot , and JPMorgan have dropped the service , as has the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But 2020 has been mostly good to Palantir , if to no one else .
The company says it ’ s on track to make $ 1 billion in 2020 and turn a profit for the first time .
It has that $ 800 million contract with the Army and is said to be increasing its corporate customer base with its “ Foundry ” product , which requires significantly less time , money , and employees to set up than the company ’ s custom-built solutions .
Meanwhile , as evidenced by its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has increased worldwide demand for its software .
Investors and employees alike have been itching for a return on their investment for years , and now might be the best time to make their wishes come true .
“ The market right now is crazy , ” Ashu Garg , a partner at venture capital firm Foundation Capital , told Recode .
“ There ’ s a junk rally for tech stocks in the public markets , and most tech stocks are very richly valued without a lot of discrimination around quality.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ opaque business practices will have to be more transparent , and the company may not be able to simply wave off public outcry over its work as it has in the past .
But experts and advocates seem to doubt much will really change on either of those fronts .
“ Going public might make some additional information public , but it does not guarantee oversight or accountability , ” Scott said .
Garg doesn ’ t think Palantir ’ s work with agencies like ICE and the resulting bad publicity will be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ market , given how interwoven that work is and has always been with the company ’ s business model — not the case for , say , the Facebooks and Ubers and Zooms of the world .
“ Palantir ’ s core business , and probably its most profitable business , is its government business — especially work for three-letter agencies and the Department of Defense , ” Garg said .
“ I don ’ t think that ’ s going to change.
” What remains to be seen , then , is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 21st-century Silicon Valley disruption to 20th-century defense contracting will live up to its valuation when it hits the stock market .
At a time when Big Tech companies are trying to make their data collection practices more transparent and say they ’ ll give consumers more control over them ( and are facing increased pressure from lawmakers to do so ) , Palantir has been able to keep much of its work with our data secret .
A successful IPO will only give it more reasons and opportunities to do so .
Open @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
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In the earlier days of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of the country’s public health departments, still reliant on fax machines, were woefully unprepared for the massive amounts of data they needed to process. Looking for a tidy private-sector solution to a messy government problem, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) paid a shadowy Silicon Valley company with ties to the Trump administration to build something new. That company is called Palantir Technologies, and if you don’t know much about it, that’s by design.
A lot of that could change in the coming months, however: Palantir is about to go public.
Palantir specializes in data-gathering and analysis, most of which it does for government agencies. It has about $1.5 billion in federal government contracts alone, including, recently, with the Space Force and the Navy. In July, with new Covid-19 case numbers breaking records daily, the HHS announced an abrupt shift in how that data would be reported: hospitals would now report their data exclusively to HHS Protect, a new platform Palantir developed that would be run by another private company called TeleTracking. This would effectively replace the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) National Healthcare Safety Network, per the Trump administration’s orders to hospitals to stop reporting their information to it. HHS Protect, which was not accessible to the general public, was now the only source for this information.
“Today, the CDC still has at least a week lag in reporting hospital data,” Michael Caputo, assistant secretary of the HHS for public affairs, told the New York Times then. “America requires it in real time. The new, faster, and complete data system is what our nation needs to defeat the coronavirus.”
A month later, however, the order to bypass the CDC was reversed as public outcry along with complaints from state attorneys general, members of Congress, and health workers mounted against it. HHS Protect also unveiled a public data hub for the information, though this has been plagued by reports that the data is incomplete, inaccurate, and more delayed than the CDC’s ever was.
Palantir, the architect of this complete data system, isn’t a household name like its Palo Alto peers, but the 17-year-old company founded by Peter Thiel is one of the most valuable private companies in Silicon Valley. That anonymity is a feature, not a bug: Palantir does most of its work for the government, including national security and intelligence operations. Its recently released financial documents say the company hopes to extend that reach even further, taking advantage of the Trump administration’s push to use commercial products rather than build its own to “become the default operating system for data across the US government.”
In recent years, headlines about the company have stressed its access to everything about all of us, which privacy advocates have long criticized. Palantir’s data-mining software has been credited with killing Osama bin Laden (a claim that has never been confirmed) and blamed for tearing unauthorized immigrant families apart.
As the notoriously secretive surveillance startup that the White House is entrusting with the nation’s coronavirus data is about to go public, some details of how the company works and its Trump administration-inspired vision are, too.
The Lord of the Rings-based solution to 9/11
Palantir was founded in 2003 by venture capitalist and Paypal co-founder Peter Thiel along with Joe Lonsdale, Stephen Cohen, Nathan Gettings, and Alex Karp, its eccentric CEO who has a law degree and a PhD in neoclassical social theory and keeps 20 identical pairs of swimming goggles in his office. The company’s name comes from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “palantíri,” which are magical orbs that let their possessors see anything happening in the world at any time. The name fits, too, as Palantir’s vision has always been to create software that can mine and analyze large and disparate data sets, putting them all in one place and finding connections between them.
The company came together not long after 9/11, when Palantir was pitched as a tool that could have identified and stopped the hijackers and would prevent similar attacks from happening in the future. Sure enough, by 2011, Bloomberg Businessweek was calling Palantir “an indispensable tool employed by the US intelligence community in the war on terrorism.” The magazine added, “Palantir technology essentially solves the Sept. 11 intelligence problem.”
Indeed, the CIA was one of Palantir’s earliest investors through its venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel (yes, the CIA has a venture capital arm). It was Palantir’s only customer for years as the company refined and improved its technology, according to Forbes. By 2010, Palantir’s customers were mostly government agencies, though there were some private companies in the mix. Having managed to quietly work its way toward a $1 billion valuation, it was then one of the most valuable startups in Silicon Valley. By 2015, Palantir was valued at $20 billion.
“I think it’s worth keeping in mind that Palantir sees itself not alongside Uber, Twitter, and Netflix, but alongside Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and Booz Allen,” said the Intercept’s Sam Biddle, who has covered Palantir for years. “Palantir wants to be a defense contractor, not a Silicon Valley unicorn.”
Palantir has grown into a company with roughly 2,400 employees, most of them engineers who write the software that collects data, and embedded analysts who work on site with Palantir’s customers to make sense of it. Company culture has been described as cult-like, big on T-shirts and Care Bears, and “more Google than Lockheed.” Employees are called “Palantirians.”
One of Palantir’s product demonstrations, as described in Bloomberg Businessweek’s 2011 article, presents a fictional example of the software’s capabilities: A terrorist leaves a trail of data across Florida, including one-way plane tickets, condo rentals, bank withdrawals, phone calls to Syria, and security camera footage from Walt Disney World. Taken separately, these details don’t add up to much, but Palantir’s software ties together thousands of databases across various agencies and helps clients see connections across them. In this case, actions that are innocuous on their own are much more suspicious when combined, and the CIA could identify and stop a terrorist’s plan to attack a theme park.
Again, that was a hypothetical product demonstration, but Palantir’s technology has been credited with saving its financial institution customers hundreds of millions of dollars, being used to detect Chinese spyware on the Dalai Lama’s computer, thwarting Pakistani suicide bombers, and unraveling Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme. Its customers have included the CDC, police departments in America and abroad, and large corporations like JPMorgan and Home Depot. Palantir even sued the US Army in 2016 to force it to consider using its intelligence software after the Army chose to go with its own. Palantir won the suit, and then it won an $800 million contract.
Despite its high valuation and lucrative contracts, however, Palantir’s financial documents show the company has never made a profit, with a net loss of about $580 million in 2018 and 2019 and nearly $165 million in the first half of 2020. Those numbers are trending in the right direction, though the company admitted in the filing, “[W]e expect our operating expenses to increase, and we may not become profitable in the future” and “we may not be able to sustain our revenue growth rate in the future.”
“A monstrous government snoop”
Palantir’s work, the government agencies that contract it, and the relative lack of details about the company’s inner workings mean it’s often seen as secretive, all-knowing, and even malevolent. Seven years after touting Palantir’s terrorism-fighting abilities, Bloomberg Businessweek ran a feature on the company with the headline “Palantir Knows Everything About You.” In a book with the phrase “destroying democracy” in the title, Robert Scheer called Palantir a “monstrous government snoop, mining our most intimate data.” The company’s software has been criticized for its dragnet ways, pulling in records about millions of innocent people so it can catch a few possible criminals.
“Palantir’s data-mining software is used to analyze vast amounts of personal data held by the federal government to make determinations that affect people’s lives with little to no oversight,” said Jeramie D. Scott, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which successfully sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to get records on its work with Palantir. “Palantir analyzes databases containing telephone numbers, email addresses, financial data, call transaction records, and social media information. ... The documents EPIC obtained showed that ICE’s Palantir-based databases could analyze call records and GPS data as well as conduct social network analysis of the information linking different individuals.”
The company suffered one of its first rounds of bad press in 2011 when a hacker discovered it was part of a proposal to Bank of America to sabotage Wikileaks. In response, Palantir issued a public apology, created a “Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties,” and suspended — but did not fire — the engineer responsible.
The post-9/11 world that Palantir was born into in 2003 then changed considerably in 2013 when leaks from Edward Snowden revealed that the National Security Agency used the directive of protecting the country at all costs in order to mass-collect the phone records of millions of Americans, leading to widespread outcry and some reforms. Palantir denied working with the NSA on that particular project but has worked with the agency on others, according to an internal video that was leaked to BuzzFeed News.
Palantir’s work with various police departments across the country has also brought renewed scrutiny to the company, especially in light of recent protests against police brutality. Palantir’s software powers the Los Angeles Police Department’s predictive crime program, called Operation LASER, which tries to identify and target potential criminals for increased surveillance. The program ended in 2019 amid doubts that predictive policing was an effective crime deterrent, as well as criticism from civil rights organizations that it unfairly targeted minority communities. It’s hard to get exact numbers on how many police departments Palantir has contracts with, but New Orleans’s and New York’s police departments are known customers, and Palantir boasts on its website of its work with the Salt Lake City Police Department.
Palantir declined Recode’s request for comment, but the company has said its technology is built with protections for privacy and civil liberties. While the company’s software obviously collects and works with data for its clients, the company says it doesn’t collect or use any of that data for itself.
Palantir’s less-than-great public image has come with some consequences. In the past few years, nonprofits have dropped Palantir as a corporate sponsor, and students regularly protest Palantir-related campus events and recruiting sessions. In an op-ed for the Washington Post, Karp noted that a “small group” of protesters regularly assembles outside Palantir’s offices, and he’s said that his own home is the site of near-daily protests. He has a personal security guard at all times. The Investor Alliance for Human Rights criticized Palantir’s work with the government and ICE, saying it was “failing to fulfill its human rights responsibilities” and noting that its use of personal data came with “legal risks” and could be in violation of state laws.
That reputation has followed Palantir even as its technology seems to be doing some good during the Covid-19 pandemic. The company is providing its services at almost no cost to the United Kingdom’s National Health Service (NHS), but headlines focused on how much patient data the company was getting access to in order to do that work and what it would do with it. The NHS has also provided patient data to other companies, including Microsoft and Amazon.
Stateside, there’s HHS Protect — another example of Palantir’s expansion into how the government collects and manages data and whom it trusts to do it (and, it seems, whom it does not). A spokesperson for HHS told NBC News in June that ICE would not have access to HHS Protect and that all information in it was de-identified anyway. But some politicians have still expressed their concerns about if and how patients’ personal health information will be protected, and that it won’t be shared with other federal agencies. They’ve specifically cited Palantir’s work on the project as one of their issues.
“Our concerns that HHS Protect could be misused in this way are compounded by the fact that Palantir has a history of contracting with ICE, including two active awards worth over $38 million in total,” they said in a June letter to HHS Secretary Alex Azar.
Palantir admitted in its filing that negative coverage — which it said was often inaccurate and misleading — and the resulting public perception of its services could damage its relationships with current customers, dissuade potential new customers, and upset both investors and employees.
“Palantir is complicit in the surveillance, arrest and deportation of our communities through their work with ICE,” Jacinta Gonzalez, a senior campaign director at Mijente, an advocacy hub that has railed against Palantir and its ICE contracts for years, said in a statement to Recode. “Their S-1 recognizes that these are risky contracts to take on. We’re calling on investors everywhere not to invest when the IPO happens. An investment in Palantir only serves to profit off the continued surveillance and exploitation of communities by ICE.”
Palantir’s Peter Thiel problem
Palantir is also controversial because its co-founder and board chair, Peter Thiel, is controversial. Thiel, who was one of Facebook’s first outside investors and maintains a position on its board of directors, has seen his share of criticism over the years, but the libertarian billionaire really came into the public eye in 2016 when he revealed himself as the money behind Hulk Hogan’s privacy lawsuit against Gawker (which would ultimately kill the site) and an early Trump supporter.
As most of liberal Silicon Valley’s big names publicly came out against Trump, Thiel was one of relatively few public figures who supported his candidacy. After speaking at the Republican National Convention, he gave the Trump campaign $1.25 million, and when Trump won the election, New York magazine said he was “poised to become a national villain.” Thiel has been rewarded for his support: He was chosen to be a member of the president’s transition team; in the early days of the Trump presidency, Politico dubbed Thiel “Donald Trump’s ‘shadow president’ in Silicon Valley”; and Thiel’s chief of staff and protégé, Michael Kratsios, served as the White House’s chief technology officer from 2017 until this month, when he was named acting undersecretary for research and engineering at the Department of Defense. Thiel’s Trump support is said to have changed going into the 2020 election, however, and he hasn’t donated to Trump’s campaign since October 2018.
Due, in part, to Thiel’s Trump links, the company has faced a new round of scrutiny. Its contract with ICE caused numerous civil rights organizations to blame Palantir for helping the agency find and deport unauthorized immigrants. While other companies were ending their relationships with certain government agencies over purported ethical concerns, Palantir renewed its ICE contract in 2019 despite reported opposition even from its own employees, some of whom left the company over it. Palantir’s CEO, on the other hand, has said it’s not his company’s place to decide how its software is used.
The company appears to have doubled down on this reputation, according to statements made by Karp in a letter included with the company’s public filing documents.
“Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments,” Karp wrote. “We have chosen sides, and we know that our partners value our commitment. We stand by them when it is convenient, and when it is not.”
Perhaps to that end, Palantir recently moved its headquarters from its longtime home of Palo Alto to Denver, Colorado.
“For a while, it suited Palantir to paint itself as this lean and mean ‘secretive” startup,’” said Biddle, who used to work at Gawker. “Now that they’re established and have clearly weathered popular outrage over their work with ICE and a lifetime association with Peter Thiel, it’s time to cash in.”
The company that would never go public is about to go public
Karp famously and repeatedly said that he would never take his company public, believing that staying private gave Palantir an edge its public company competitors didn’t have.
“The minute companies go public, they are less competitive,” Karp said in 2014. “You need a lot of creative, wacky people that maybe Wall Street won’t understand. They might say the wrong thing all the way through an interview. … You really want your people to be focused on solving the problem.”
But Karp has seemed more amenable to the idea in the last few years. When Palantir added its first female board member in June, a public filing seemed all but certain — according to California law, public companies must have at least one female board member. Palantir filed its initial paperwork with the SEC on July 6 in a confidential filing that allowed it to avoid revealing much about its inner workings to the public. Twitter, Uber, and Spotify, among other startup giants, have done the same thing. There’s no timeline for when the company might actually go public.
Despite Palantir’s enormous valuation, the company has never made a profit and “struggled to live up to” its “hot startup image,” as the Wall Street Journal said in 2018. Bloomberg reported last year that Palantir’s valuation had plummeted to half, maybe even a quarter, of its 2015 peak, as investors wrote down the value of their holdings and the company offered discounted shares to employees to boost morale. Big corporate clients such as Coca-Cola, American Express, Hershey, Nasdaq, Home Depot, and JPMorgan have dropped the service, as has the NSA, according to BuzzFeed News.
But 2020 has been mostly good to Palantir, if to no one else. The company pulled in $480 million in revenue in the first half of the year, putting it on track to possibly hit $1 billion by the year’s end. It has that $800 million contract with the Army and is said to be increasing its corporate customer base with its “Foundry” product, which requires significantly less time, money, and employees to set up than the company’s custom-built solutions. Meanwhile, as evidenced by its recent work with HHS, the pandemic has increased worldwide demand for its software. Investors and employees alike have been itching for a return on their investment for years, and now might be the best time to make their wishes come true.
“The market right now is crazy,” Ashu Garg, a partner at venture capital firm Foundation Capital, told Recode. “There’s a junk rally for tech stocks in the public markets, and most tech stocks are very richly valued without a lot of discrimination around quality.”
Going public will mean Palantir’s opaque business practices will have to be more transparent, and the company may not be able to simply wave off public outcry over its work as it has in the past. But experts and advocates seem to doubt much will really change on either of those fronts.
“Going public might make some additional information public, but it does not guarantee oversight or accountability,” Scott said.
Garg doesn’t think Palantir’s work with agencies like ICE and the resulting bad publicity will be too much of a detriment in the market, given how interwoven that work is and has always been with the company’s business model — not the case for, say, the Facebooks and Ubers and Zooms of the world.
“Palantir’s core business, and probably its most profitable business, is its government business — especially work for three-letter agencies and the Department of Defense,” Garg said. “I don’t think that’s going to change.”
What remains to be seen, then, is if Palantir’s ability to marry 21st-century Silicon Valley disruption to 20th-century defense contracting will live up to its valuation when it hits the stock market. At a time when Big Tech companies are trying to make their data collection practices more transparent and say they’ll give consumers more control over them (and are facing increased pressure from lawmakers to do so), Palantir has been able to keep much of its work with our data secret. A successful IPO will only give it more reasons and opportunities to do so.
Open Sourced is made possible by Omidyar Network. All Open Sourced content is editorially independent and produced by our journalists.
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vox--2020-07-16--Elizabeth Warren wants answers on Facebook’s fact-checking loophole

Sens .
Elizabeth Warren , Tom Carper , Brian Schatz , and Sheldon Whitehouse are demanding more information from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about a reported “ loophole ” for climate misinformation in Facebook ’ s fact-checking program .
In a letter sent to Zuckerberg on Wednesday , the senators reference a widely reported-on incident from last year that involved a story about climate change models written by two people from an organization called the CO2 Coalition and published by the Washington Examiner .
The piece questioned the extent of climate change and was flagged as false by one of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Science Feedback .
Five scientists contributed to the fact-check and concluded that the piece had “ very low ” scientific credibility and misled people about how climate change models actually work , and the post was labeled as false .
The label was later removed after Facebook reiterated to Science Feedback its policies about fact-checking opinion .
“ If Facebook is truly ‘ committed to fighting the spread of false news on Facebook and Instagram , ’ the company must immediately acknowledge in its fact-checking process that the climate crisis is not a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ loopholes that allow climate disinformation to spread on its platform , ” the senators wrote .
They also ask Zuckerberg to explain how disinformation related to Covid-19 and vaccinations differs from disinformation related to climate change .
As the senators ’ letter points out , Facebook ’ s handling of this particular incident raises questions about how the platform handles fact-checking as well as all content on its platform that is labeled as or deemed to be opinion .
The lawmakers also raised questions about the extent to which Facebook is actually committed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Warren and her colleagues want to know more about what types of posts Facebook is exempting from fact-checking because they ’ re deemed opinion and how Facebook factors in false information about climate change within its overall efforts to combat fake news .
Facebook admits there ’ s confusion about its approach .
Facebook ’ s policy communications director Andy Stone told the New York Times earlier this week that the company ’ s opinion exception for fact-checking has existed since 2016 .
According to the paper , “ Mr .
Stone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ originally published as an op-ed , clearly aligned with Facebook ’ s definition of opinion content and added that fact checkers should have been aware of that classification.
” Stone also said that climate change content doesn ’ t create an imminent threat to peoples ’ health or safety .
But following the publication of that article , Facebook representative Liz Bourgeois provided another statement , which was shared with Recode .
“ When someone posts content based on false facts — even if it ’ s an op-ed or editorial — it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bourgeois said .
“ We ’ re working to make this clearer in our guidelines so our fact checkers can use their judgment to determine whether it is an attempt to mask false information under the guise of opinion.
” In short , just because content calls itself opinion doesn ’ t mean it ’ s ineligible for fact-checking .
The statement comes amid concern that those seeking to spread misinformation , including those that deny climate change , could claim their content was opinion in order to avoid Facebook ’ s fact-checking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ over who ultimately gets to decide what content is deserving of a fact-check .
On its website , Facebook says that those seeking to appeal fact-checkers ’ decisions should go to those fact-checkers directly .
A Facebook spokesperson also told Recode that Science Feedback removed the rating after Facebook clarified guidance about its approach to rating opinions .
Meanwhile , a science editor for Science Feedback ’ s Climate Feedback , Scott Johnson , told Recode in an email : “ We were informed by the Facebook team that the Washington Examiner article @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a fact-check rating.
” “ Even though they claim that it ’ s an opinion piece , there were many statements of fact in the piece , and those statements were either wrong or misleading , ” Andrew Dessler , a climate change expert at Texas A & M who contributed to the Science Feedback fact-check , told Recode .
“ Facebook is this impenetrable fortress that nobody has any idea — as far as I can tell , at least — how these decisions are made .
So I don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it.
” The confusion over what ’ s is eligible for fact-checking come as Facebook faces accusations of having a double standard for misinformation .
While Covid-19 misinformation has been aggressively taken down — for having the threat of imminent harm — climate misinformation isn ’ t treated the same way .
At the same time , the company is still facing wide-ranging criticism over how it handles sources of misinformation and disinformation .
“ [ T ] he climate crisis and environmental degradation are not matters of opinion , ” the senators @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that hurt communities and economies throughout the world — including and especially Black communities and other communities of color — and will continue to do so.
” This echos other critics of the platform .
Earlier this month , climate leaders and several prominent politicians , including Tom Steyer and Stacey Abrams , wrote a letter to Facebook ’ s Oversight Board demanding that the company close the loophole that allows content to be deemed ineligible for fact-checking after being labeled as opinion .
That letter followed a joint report from the newsletters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ same time , Facebook is facing an ongoing boycott from advertisers called Stop Hate for Profit , which is led by civil rights leaders urging the company to fight hate speech and misinformation , including climate denialism .
“ I think that Facebook is making a business decision here .
This is not any kind of principled stand about opinion , ” said Dessler about the confusion surrounding Facebook ’ s policies .
“ We ’ ve gotten ourselves into a terrible situation here where we ’ ve left it up to corporations @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say.
” Update , July 16 , 3:15 pm Eastern : We ’ ve added more information about Facebook ’ s fact-checking system and the senators ’ letter to this article .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , and our audience around the world , with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this moment requires .
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Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Tom Carper, Brian Schatz, and Sheldon Whitehouse are demanding more information from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg about a reported “loophole” for climate misinformation in Facebook’s fact-checking program.
In a letter sent to Zuckerberg on Wednesday, the senators reference a widely reported-on incident from last year that involved a story about climate change models written by two people from an organization called the CO2 Coalition and published by the Washington Examiner. The piece questioned the extent of climate change and was flagged as false by one of Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners, Science Feedback. Five scientists contributed to the fact-check and concluded that the piece had “very low” scientific credibility and misled people about how climate change models actually work, and the post was labeled as false. The label was later removed after Facebook reiterated to Science Feedback its policies about fact-checking opinion.
“If Facebook is truly ‘committed to fighting the spread of false news on Facebook and Instagram,’ the company must immediately acknowledge in its fact-checking process that the climate crisis is not a matter of opinion and act to close loopholes that allow climate disinformation to spread on its platform,” the senators wrote. They also ask Zuckerberg to explain how disinformation related to Covid-19 and vaccinations differs from disinformation related to climate change.
As the senators’ letter points out, Facebook’s handling of this particular incident raises questions about how the platform handles fact-checking as well as all content on its platform that is labeled as or deemed to be opinion. The lawmakers also raised questions about the extent to which Facebook is actually committed to clamping down on disinformation. Now, Warren and her colleagues want to know more about what types of posts Facebook is exempting from fact-checking because they’re deemed opinion and how Facebook factors in false information about climate change within its overall efforts to combat fake news.
Facebook admits there’s confusion about its approach. Facebook’s policy communications director Andy Stone told the New York Times earlier this week that the company’s opinion exception for fact-checking has existed since 2016. According to the paper, “Mr. Stone said that The Washington Examiner post, originally published as an op-ed, clearly aligned with Facebook’s definition of opinion content and added that fact checkers should have been aware of that classification.” Stone also said that climate change content doesn’t create an imminent threat to peoples’ health or safety.
But following the publication of that article, Facebook representative Liz Bourgeois provided another statement, which was shared with Recode.
“When someone posts content based on false facts — even if it’s an op-ed or editorial — it is still eligible for fact-checking,” Bourgeois said. “We’re working to make this clearer in our guidelines so our fact checkers can use their judgment to determine whether it is an attempt to mask false information under the guise of opinion.”
In short, just because content calls itself opinion doesn’t mean it’s ineligible for fact-checking. The statement comes amid concern that those seeking to spread misinformation, including those that deny climate change, could claim their content was opinion in order to avoid Facebook’s fact-checking process.
There’s also concern over who ultimately gets to decide what content is deserving of a fact-check. On its website, Facebook says that those seeking to appeal fact-checkers’ decisions should go to those fact-checkers directly. A Facebook spokesperson also told Recode that Science Feedback removed the rating after Facebook clarified guidance about its approach to rating opinions. Meanwhile, a science editor for Science Feedback’s Climate Feedback, Scott Johnson, told Recode in an email: “We were informed by the Facebook team that the Washington Examiner article should be considered opinion and ineligible for a fact-check rating.”
“Even though they claim that it’s an opinion piece, there were many statements of fact in the piece, and those statements were either wrong or misleading,” Andrew Dessler, a climate change expert at Texas A&M who contributed to the Science Feedback fact-check, told Recode. “Facebook is this impenetrable fortress that nobody has any idea — as far as I can tell, at least — how these decisions are made. So I don’t know who made the decision to do it.”
The confusion over what’s is eligible for fact-checking come as Facebook faces accusations of having a double standard for misinformation. While Covid-19 misinformation has been aggressively taken down — for having the threat of imminent harm — climate misinformation isn’t treated the same way. At the same time, the company is still facing wide-ranging criticism over how it handles sources of misinformation and disinformation.
“[T]he climate crisis and environmental degradation are not matters of opinion,” the senators wrote. “They are existential threats that hurt communities and economies throughout the world — including and especially Black communities and other communities of color — and will continue to do so.”
This echos other critics of the platform. Earlier this month, climate leaders and several prominent politicians, including Tom Steyer and Stacey Abrams, wrote a letter to Facebook’s Oversight Board demanding that the company close the loophole that allows content to be deemed ineligible for fact-checking after being labeled as opinion. That letter followed a joint report from the newsletters HEATED and Popular Information. At the same time, Facebook is facing an ongoing boycott from advertisers called Stop Hate for Profit, which is led by civil rights leaders urging the company to fight hate speech and misinformation, including climate denialism.
“I think that Facebook is making a business decision here. This is not any kind of principled stand about opinion,” said Dessler about the confusion surrounding Facebook’s policies. “We’ve gotten ourselves into a terrible situation here where we’ve left it up to corporations to make decisions about what people can say.”
Update, July 16, 3:15 pm ET: We’ve added more information about Facebook’s fact-checking system and the senators’ letter to this article.


vox--2020-07-16--The White House’s campaign against Anthony Fauci is a symptom of a bigger problem

The White House decided this week — the same week the US is seeing record Covid-19 cases nationwide , driven by the outbreaks in California , Florida , and Texas — was the right time to try to discredit the most widely respected scientist in the Trump administration , Dr. Anthony Fauci .
He was first targeted with a whisper campaign by administration sources to top White House reporters .
A few days later , Trump ’ s top trade official dispensed with the whispering and said it loud and clear in a USA Today op-ed : Fauci should not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appears , would disagree .
Fauci continues to enjoy a much higher approval rating and much more public trust than the president of the United States .
As an earthy but authoritative voice on the coronavirus pandemic , Fauci inadvertently broke the first rule of the Trump White House : Nobody gets to outshine the president .
The disinformation campaign against him from Trump loyalists can likely be explained , at least in part , by those clashing personalities .
But the White House ’ s cold war against Fauci reveals a more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s coronavirus response : an unwillingness to defer to science over politics , and to allow the advice of public health experts to dictate the pace of the recovery instead of proceeding at a rate that may help the president ’ s reelection prospects .
When I asked experts about the differences between Trump ’ s record and Joe Biden ’ s proposed response plan , they singled out the reliance on science and experts like Fauci .
I heard the same when I asked about the differences between the US response and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ successfully suppressed the virus .
“ Clearly , big differences are the emphasis on science and experts , ” Jennifer Kates at the Kaiser Family Foundation told me .
Biden would emphasize “ putting science/public health leaders at the forefront and big focus on public health guidance.
” It ’ s tempting to view Trump versus Fauci as an interpersonal rivalry , two New Yorkers with big personalities and a talent for television finding themselves at odds during this high-profile crisis .
But the feud with Fauci is merely the symptom of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his top aides have actively ignored or sought to discredit scientific experts on the best ways to handle the coronavirus response .
Fauci leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease , part of the National Institutes of Health .
It ’ s a position he ’ s held for more than 35 years , making him by default the top government scientist in a pandemic .
And he has , from the start , been a key figure in the coronavirus response .
He has also , with more and more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ found himself at odds with the president and his economic advisers on important issues .
He ’ s contradicted Trump on hydroxychloroquine , on testing and travel bans , on restarting the NFL season , and on reopening schools in the fall .
By April , Trump was approvingly quoting a tweet from one of his supporters with a # FireFauci hashtag .
The nation ’ s top infectious disease expert appears to have lost the president ’ s personal confidence months ago .
Fauci told the Financial Times last week that he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two months .
But the tension escalated with a new intensity over the weekend .
Fauci ’ s sin seems to have been his downcast assessment of America ’ s coronavirus outbreak , as cases continue to pick up , hospitalizations and deaths surge , and testing backlogs hamper the country ’ s ability to nimbly respond to the crisis .
Trump said in an interview last week he disagreed with Fauci ’ s assessment of the situation on the ground .
Then the White House sent a document to the Washington Post @ @ @ @ @ @ @ file usually deployed against a political rival in a campaign , not a top government scientist in the middle of a pandemic .
As Post reporter Josh Dawsey described it in a Saturday story : The White House press shop tried to wave away any claims of their malicious intent against Fauci , provoking virtual eye rolls from seasoned political reporters : Some of Fauci ’ s early comments certainly do read differently now than they would have in January and February .
He has reversed himself on the question of laypeople wearing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ community has .
But the White House also appears to have willfully misconstrued some of his statements to make them look worse than they were .
As the New York Times noted , the White House oppo file singled out a February 29 interview in which Fauci said there was no need for Americans to change their day-to-day routine — but left out his comment from the very same interview warning the coronavirus could eventually become a major outbreak .
An op-ed in USA Today by top Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro dispensed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Anthony Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public , but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.
” Navarro dinged Fauci for initially opposing Trump ’ s China travel ban , for allegedly downplaying the virus ’ s threat , for flip-flopping on masks , for doubting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine , and for minimizing the recent decline in US Covid-19 deaths .
The only problem , as a separate USA Today fact-check made clear , is most of Navarro ’ s claims were false or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all clear the China ban had a significant effect on spread as many US infections may have been imported from Europe instead .
Fauci was always warning that the coronavirus can develop into a more serious problem , while Trump and the White House consistently minimized the threat .
Fauci has for months been urging people to wear masks , ever since the scientific consensus shifted .
Most medical studies have affirmed Fauci ’ s doubts about hydroxychloroquine .
And Covid-19 deaths have begun rising again , as experts predicted they would once @ @ @ @ @ @ @ House communications office once again tried to put some distance between the administration officials bashing Fauci and the president , saying the Navarro op-ed didn ’ t go through proper internal channels before it was published .
But reporting from the Los Angeles Times quickly complicated that characterization ; an administration official told the newspaper that Trump had “ authorized ” and “ encouraged ” the op-ed .
Fauci , for his part , took all the drama in relative stride and suggested that the ploys against him were doomed to backfire .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ like that and the entire scientific and press community push back on it , it ultimately hurts the president , ” he told the Atlantic on Wednesday .
And as for Navarro , his new public rival : “ I can ’ t explain Peter Navarro .
He ’ s in a world by himself.
” Spoken with the confidence of a man who , according to a new Quinnipiac University survey , 65 percent of Americans say they trust to tell the truth about the coronavirus .
Just 30 percent of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ He may be out of the loop and in disfavor with the White House , but it ’ s clear from the numbers , voters would like Dr. Fauci back on call , ” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy said .
Fauci was back at a White House task force meeting on Wednesday , the day after Navarro ’ s op-ed went up , a fact subtly revealed in a tweet from Vice President Mike Pence .
But the Trump administration ’ s general attitude toward scientists like Fauci doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for very long .
The Trump administration has sought to discredit all kinds of public health experts and advice Fauci can , at times , sound as if he is fact-checking Trump in real time .
Last Tuesday , the president was touting “ a tenfold decrease in mortality ” and “ the lowest mortality rate in the world.
” The same day , at an event with Democratic Sen. Doug Jones , Fauci said “ that it ’ s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and the possibility that deaths will start to rise again ( as they have ) .
This has been happening for months and it often draws a rebuke from the White House or from the president himself .
In June , Fauci sounded skeptical that the NFL would be able to safely start its regular season in the fall .
Trump , who is betting his reelection fortunes on a swift return to normalcy , didn ’ t appreciate the comment .
But this kind of disparagement against scientific authorities isn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) , as an institution , has been consistently undermined by the White House .
The agency went months without holding press briefings on Covid-19 .
The discord has been on display again in the last few weeks as Trump seizes on reopening schools as the next big political issue for him .
The CDC has laid out its guidelines for schools hoping to bring students back to their buildings in the fall .
Trump and other top administration officials have been dismissive of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clear , we don ’ t want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don ’ t reopen their schools , ” Vice President Mike Pence said this week .
This has been happening for months .
In April , the White House formally convened a task force to consider the best strategies for reopening the economy — and a few days later , the president was tweeting support for protesters agitating to “ LIBERATE ” states from their stay-at-home orders .
In May , the CDC released a watered-down version of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the White House judged the original guidance “ too prescriptive.
” Now the administration has ordered hospitals to stop reporting their Covid-19 data to the CDC and start providing that information to the main health department instead .
Experts worry the change could lead to the Trump administration burying data that doesn ’ t fit its preferred narrative of the pandemic — much as Fauci has been cut out and called out for dissenting from the party line .
These paragons of public health have been sidelined and bowled over by a Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the middle of an election year .
Rather than take the hard steps necessary to contain the outbreak , the White House has tried without success to wish it out of existence .
Months ago , Fauci was telling the public and presumably the president that the best way to safely reopen the economy was to improve testing and contact tracing .
Today , as Fauci finds himself on the wrong side of the White House ’ s whims again , a testing backlog is debilitating the country ’ s ability to surveil @ @ @ @ @ @ @ largely ignored by the federal government , and hasty reopening appears to have led to the spike in cases and deaths that experts warned it would without the necessary precautions .
Six months into the pandemic , with no signs that it will soon abate , the Trump administration is still not heeding the advice of its best-known public health expert .
Instead , the president and his allies sound intent on blaming the messenger .
Every day at Vox , we aim to answer your most important questions and provide you , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with information that has the power to save lives .
Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment : to empower you through understanding .
Vox ’ s work is reaching more people than ever , but our distinctive brand of explanatory journalism takes resources — particularly during a pandemic and an economic downturn .
Your financial contribution will not constitute a donation , but it will enable our staff to continue to offer free articles , videos , and podcasts at the quality and volume that this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ contribution to Vox today .

The White House decided this week — the same week the US is seeing record Covid-19 cases nationwide, driven by the outbreaks in California, Florida, and Texas — was the right time to try to discredit the most widely respected scientist in the Trump administration, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
He was first targeted with a whisper campaign by administration sources to top White House reporters. A few days later, Trump’s top trade official dispensed with the whispering and said it loud and clear in a USA Today op-ed: Fauci should not be trusted.
The public, it appears, would disagree. Fauci continues to enjoy a much higher approval rating and much more public trust than the president of the United States. As an earthy but authoritative voice on the coronavirus pandemic, Fauci inadvertently broke the first rule of the Trump White House: Nobody gets to outshine the president. The disinformation campaign against him from Trump loyalists can likely be explained, at least in part, by those clashing personalities.
But the White House’s cold war against Fauci reveals a more fundamental problem with the Trump administration’s coronavirus response: an unwillingness to defer to science over politics, and to allow the advice of public health experts to dictate the pace of the recovery instead of proceeding at a rate that may help the president’s reelection prospects.
When I asked experts about the differences between Trump’s record and Joe Biden’s proposed response plan, they singled out the reliance on science and experts like Fauci. I heard the same when I asked about the differences between the US response and those of other countries that have more successfully suppressed the virus.
“Clearly, big differences are the emphasis on science and experts,” Jennifer Kates at the Kaiser Family Foundation told me. Biden would emphasize “putting science/public health leaders at the forefront and big focus on public health guidance.”
It’s tempting to view Trump versus Fauci as an interpersonal rivalry, two New Yorkers with big personalities and a talent for television finding themselves at odds during this high-profile crisis.
But the feud with Fauci is merely the symptom of a broader syndrome: Trump and many of his top aides have actively ignored or sought to discredit scientific experts on the best ways to handle the coronavirus response.
Anthony Fauci versus Peter Navarro and the Trump White House, explained
Fauci leads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, part of the National Institutes of Health. It’s a position he’s held for more than 35 years, making him by default the top government scientist in a pandemic. And he has, from the start, been a key figure in the coronavirus response.
He has also, with more and more frequency over the spring and summer, found himself at odds with the president and his economic advisers on important issues. He’s contradicted Trump on hydroxychloroquine, on testing and travel bans, on restarting the NFL season, and on reopening schools in the fall. By April, Trump was approvingly quoting a tweet from one of his supporters with a #FireFauci hashtag.
Sorry Fake News, it’s all on tape. I banned China long before people spoke up. Thank you @OANN https://t.co/d40JQkUZg5 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 12, 2020
The nation’s top infectious disease expert appears to have lost the president’s personal confidence months ago. Fauci told the Financial Times last week that he hadn’t personally briefed Trump in two months.
But the tension escalated with a new intensity over the weekend. Fauci’s sin seems to have been his downcast assessment of America’s coronavirus outbreak, as cases continue to pick up, hospitalizations and deaths surge, and testing backlogs hamper the country’s ability to nimbly respond to the crisis. Trump said in an interview last week he disagreed with Fauci’s assessment of the situation on the ground.
Then the White House sent a document to the Washington Post that read like the kind of opposition file usually deployed against a political rival in a campaign, not a top government scientist in the middle of a pandemic. As Post reporter Josh Dawsey described it in a Saturday story:
A White House official released a statement saying that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things” and included a lengthy list of the scientist’s comments from early in the outbreak. Those included his early doubt that people with no symptoms could play a significant role in spreading the virus — a notion based on earlier outbreaks that the novel coronavirus would turn on its head. They also point to public reassurances Fauci made in late February, around the time of the first U.S. case of community transmission, that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”
The White House press shop tried to wave away any claims of their malicious intent against Fauci, provoking virtual eye rolls from seasoned political reporters:
They didn’t put their names on the “response” laid out in format of an oppo doc, gave background statement to several reporters expressing “concern” about Fauci’s accuracy. If they want to do it they should own it, not pretend it didn’t happen. https://t.co/MI0vkivaIl — Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) July 13, 2020
Some of Fauci’s early comments certainly do read differently now than they would have in January and February. He has reversed himself on the question of laypeople wearing masks, as most of the scientific community has. But the White House also appears to have willfully misconstrued some of his statements to make them look worse than they were. As the New York Times noted, the White House oppo file singled out a February 29 interview in which Fauci said there was no need for Americans to change their day-to-day routine — but left out his comment from the very same interview warning the coronavirus could eventually become a major outbreak.
An op-ed in USA Today by top Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro dispensed with any equivocation: “Dr. Anthony Fauci has a good bedside manner with the public, but he has been wrong about everything I have interacted with him on.” Navarro dinged Fauci for initially opposing Trump’s China travel ban, for allegedly downplaying the virus’s threat, for flip-flopping on masks, for doubting the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine, and for minimizing the recent decline in US Covid-19 deaths.
The only problem, as a separate USA Today fact-check made clear, is most of Navarro’s claims were false or misleading. It’s not at all clear the China ban had a significant effect on spread as many US infections may have been imported from Europe instead. Fauci was always warning that the coronavirus can develop into a more serious problem, while Trump and the White House consistently minimized the threat. Fauci has for months been urging people to wear masks, ever since the scientific consensus shifted. Most medical studies have affirmed Fauci’s doubts about hydroxychloroquine. And Covid-19 deaths have begun rising again, as experts predicted they would once cases started increasing again.
The White House communications office once again tried to put some distance between the administration officials bashing Fauci and the president, saying the Navarro op-ed didn’t go through proper internal channels before it was published. (USA Today revealed after the op-ed was published that the newspaper had actually approached Navarro about writing his perspective on Fauci.)
But reporting from the Los Angeles Times quickly complicated that characterization; an administration official told the newspaper that Trump had “authorized” and “encouraged” the op-ed.
Fauci, for his part, took all the drama in relative stride and suggested that the ploys against him were doomed to backfire.
“When the staff lets out something like that and the entire scientific and press community push back on it, it ultimately hurts the president,” he told the Atlantic on Wednesday. And as for Navarro, his new public rival: “I can’t explain Peter Navarro. He’s in a world by himself.”
Spoken with the confidence of a man who, according to a new Quinnipiac University survey, 65 percent of Americans say they trust to tell the truth about the coronavirus. Just 30 percent of the public says the same about Trump.
“He may be out of the loop and in disfavor with the White House, but it’s clear from the numbers, voters would like Dr. Fauci back on call,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy said.
Fauci was back at a White House task force meeting on Wednesday, the day after Navarro’s op-ed went up, a fact subtly revealed in a tweet from Vice President Mike Pence. But the Trump administration’s general attitude toward scientists like Fauci doesn’t bode well for this newfound warmth lasting for very long.
The Trump administration has sought to discredit all kinds of public health experts and advice
Fauci can, at times, sound as if he is fact-checking Trump in real time. Last Tuesday, the president was touting “a tenfold decrease in mortality” and “the lowest mortality rate in the world.” The same day, at an event with Democratic Sen. Doug Jones, Fauci said “that it’s a false narrative to take comfort in a lower rate of death” given the other complications of the disease and the possibility that deaths will start to rise again (as they have).
This has been happening for months and it often draws a rebuke from the White House or from the president himself. In June, Fauci sounded skeptical that the NFL would be able to safely start its regular season in the fall. Trump, who is betting his reelection fortunes on a swift return to normalcy, didn’t appreciate the comment.
Tony Fauci has nothing to do with NFL Football. They are planning a very safe and controlled opening. However, if they don’t stand for our National Anthem and our Great American Flag, I won’t be watching!!! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 19, 2020
But this kind of disparagement against scientific authorities isn’t limited to Fauci as an individual. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as an institution, has been consistently undermined by the White House. The agency went months without holding press briefings on Covid-19.
The discord has been on display again in the last few weeks as Trump seizes on reopening schools as the next big political issue for him. The CDC has laid out its guidelines for schools hoping to bring students back to their buildings in the fall. Trump and other top administration officials have been dismissive of those standards.
“To be very clear, we don’t want CDC guidance to be a reason why people don’t reopen their schools,” Vice President Mike Pence said this week.
This has been happening for months. In April, the White House formally convened a task force to consider the best strategies for reopening the economy — and a few days later, the president was tweeting support for protesters agitating to “LIBERATE” states from their stay-at-home orders. In May, the CDC released a watered-down version of its recommendations for states’ reopening after the White House judged the original guidance “too prescriptive.”
Now the administration has ordered hospitals to stop reporting their Covid-19 data to the CDC and start providing that information to the main health department instead. Experts worry the change could lead to the Trump administration burying data that doesn’t fit its preferred narrative of the pandemic — much as Fauci has been cut out and called out for dissenting from the party line.
These paragons of public health have been sidelined and bowled over by a Trump White House weathering a global pandemic in the middle of an election year. Rather than take the hard steps necessary to contain the outbreak, the White House has tried without success to wish it out of existence.
Months ago, Fauci was telling the public and presumably the president that the best way to safely reopen the economy was to improve testing and contact tracing. Today, as Fauci finds himself on the wrong side of the White House’s whims again, a testing backlog is debilitating the country’s ability to surveil the disease, contact tracing has been largely ignored by the federal government, and hasty reopening appears to have led to the spike in cases and deaths that experts warned it would without the necessary precautions.
Six months into the pandemic, with no signs that it will soon abate, the Trump administration is still not heeding the advice of its best-known public health expert. Instead, the president and his allies sound intent on blaming the messenger.


vox--2020-07-16--Silicon Valley pours money into Biden’s campaign — and snubs Trump’s

Silicon Valley ’ s elite are choosing their partisan teams with just over 100 days to go until Election Day — and few appear to be backing President Donald Trump .
The clearest view yet of the breakdown came in fundraising reports released Wednesday .
They portray a tech industry that has unmistakably coalesced around Joe Biden , the presumptive Democratic nominee , despite him being the first choice of few during the party primary .
Now , juxtaposed against a president long reviled by the power set of Silicon Valley , Biden is sweeping up cash from billionaires , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ show of force .
A who ’ s who of tech ’ s rich and powerful cut checks of up to $ 620,600 — the legal maximum — to a jumbo-sized joint fundraising committee of Biden and Democratic Party groups around the country after April 1 , when the primary was effectively over and the fundraising quarter began .
The committee ’ s fundraising report makes clear that Silicon Valley forms a large part of the backbone of Biden ’ s high-dollar fundraising operation .
For instance , of the dozen people who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Victory Fund , half came from the Bay Area .
Among the tech billionaires giving the legal maximum , or close to it : Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz ; philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs ; eBay ’ s first full-time employee , Jeff Skoll ; Zynga founder Mark Pincus ; and media moguls Barry Diller and Jeffrey Katzenberg .
If you scanned the Biden Victory Fund ’ s report , every few lines you ’ d find another marquee name who forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars .
The quarterly fundraising report of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ high-wattage supporters of the president do exist in Silicon Valley , they have preferred to maintain low profiles in an industry where they fear backlash .
So the billionaires who did cut major checks to Trump stand out even more .
The sole tech titan who cut a significant check last quarter to Trump ’ s joint fundraising group with the Republican Parties was Safra Catz , the CEO of the software giant Oracle .
Catz and her husband each donated $ 125,000 to Trump Victory in the spring , the latest sign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which perhaps more than any other tech giant has fostered a close relationship with the White House .
In some ways , who was missing from Trump ’ s quarterly fundraising report was more notable than who was on it .
That ’ s especially true for Peter Thiel , the billionaire who served as Trump ’ s emissary to Silicon Valley after loudly backing Trump in 2016 to the chagrin of his industry .
Thiel , who has reportedly drawn distance from the president and is now a non-factor in Trump ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ donation to Trump Victory during the three-month period — extending the fundraising snub from Thiel since the last gift he made in October 2018 .
Thiel is instead focusing so far on down-ballot races , and on one race in particular .
In June , Thiel invested an additional $ 500,000 in a super PAC that he set up to back Kris Kobach , a hardline immigration official running for the Republican nomination for the US Senate in Kansas .
Thiel has now spent $ 750,000 on behalf of Kobach , whom Democrats @ @ @ @ @ @ @ candidate .
Another billionaire leaving a noteworthy mark on the election , the reports reveal , is former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer , who is now the world ’ s fifth-richest person .
Ballmer , who is today best known as the exuberant owner of the Los Angeles Clippers , has not been seen as particularly ideological .
He ’ s funded Republicans and Democrats over the years , but in generally modest amounts compared to his billionaire peers .
But Ballmer made a landmark political donation this spring when he gave $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a gun-control group founded by Mike Bloomberg that primarily supports Democrats .
( Bloomberg , the former New York City mayor , campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president this year . )
It was Ballmer ’ s single-largest disclosed donation ever , more than 200 times as large as his next-biggest check ( $ 32,000 ) .
And it came around the same time that his wife , Connie Ballmer , cut her own single-biggest disclosed check , a half-million dollars to a pro-Biden super PAC .
The Ballmers have long @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they have never put a foot down with the same financial force as they did this spring .
And in a tech industry shaken by Trump , they ’ re proving to be not alone .
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Silicon Valley’s elite are choosing their partisan teams with just over 100 days to go until Election Day — and few appear to be backing President Donald Trump.
The clearest view yet of the breakdown came in fundraising reports released Wednesday. They portray a tech industry that has unmistakably coalesced around Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, despite him being the first choice of few during the party primary. Now, juxtaposed against a president long reviled by the power set of Silicon Valley, Biden is sweeping up cash from billionaires, CEOs, and political kingmakers in a show of force.
A who’s who of tech’s rich and powerful cut checks of up to $620,600 — the legal maximum — to a jumbo-sized joint fundraising committee of Biden and Democratic Party groups around the country after April 1, when the primary was effectively over and the fundraising quarter began. The committee’s fundraising report makes clear that Silicon Valley forms a large part of the backbone of Biden’s high-dollar fundraising operation. For instance, of the dozen people who gave the legal maximum to the Biden Victory Fund, half came from the Bay Area.
Among the tech billionaires giving the legal maximum, or close to it: Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz; philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs; eBay’s first full-time employee, Jeff Skoll; Zynga founder Mark Pincus; and media moguls Barry Diller and Jeffrey Katzenberg. If you scanned the Biden Victory Fund’s report, every few lines you’d find another marquee name who forked over hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The quarterly fundraising report of Trump Victory reads much differently. While high-wattage supporters of the president do exist in Silicon Valley, they have preferred to maintain low profiles in an industry where they fear backlash.
So the billionaires who did cut major checks to Trump stand out even more. The sole tech titan who cut a significant check last quarter to Trump’s joint fundraising group with the Republican Parties was Safra Catz, the CEO of the software giant Oracle. Catz and her husband each donated $125,000 to Trump Victory in the spring, the latest sign of coziness between Trump and Oracle, which perhaps more than any other tech giant has fostered a close relationship with the White House.
In some ways, who was missing from Trump’s quarterly fundraising report was more notable than who was on it. That’s especially true for Peter Thiel, the billionaire who served as Trump’s emissary to Silicon Valley after loudly backing Trump in 2016 to the chagrin of his industry. Thiel, who has reportedly drawn distance from the president and is now a non-factor in Trump’s orbit, did not make a donation to Trump Victory during the three-month period — extending the fundraising snub from Thiel since the last gift he made in October 2018.
Thiel is instead focusing so far on down-ballot races, and on one race in particular. In June, Thiel invested an additional $500,000 in a super PAC that he set up to back Kris Kobach, a hardline immigration official running for the Republican nomination for the US Senate in Kansas. Thiel has now spent $750,000 on behalf of Kobach, whom Democrats at least see as a weak general-election candidate.
Another billionaire leaving a noteworthy mark on the election, the reports reveal, is former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who is now the world’s fifth-richest person. Ballmer, who is today best known as the exuberant owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, has not been seen as particularly ideological. He’s funded Republicans and Democrats over the years, but in generally modest amounts compared to his billionaire peers.
But Ballmer and his wife, Connie, made a landmark political donation this spring when they gave $7 million to Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun-control group founded by Mike Bloomberg that primarily supports down-ballot Democrats. (Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, campaigned for the Democratic nomination for president this year.) The donation is the Ballmers’ single-largest disclosed donation ever, more than 200 times as large as Steve Ballmer’s next-biggest check ($32,000). And it came around the same time that Connie Ballmer cut her own single-biggest disclosed check, a half-million dollars to a pro-Biden super PAC.
The Ballmers have long been advocates for gun control. But they have never put a foot down with the same financial force as they did this spring. And in a tech industry shaken by Trump, they’re proving to be not alone.