Personally I'm anti-surveillance and have been for a long time, particularly the kind of stuff Snowden and others have exposed where there are warrantless wiretaps and long term storage of private citizen information. I've blogged about it many times on my blog. Palantir didn't have anything to do with that and to my knowledge never has.
Initialized doesn't invest in alcohol, tobacco and firearms as a rule because of a mandate from some of our limited partners. Just rationally we believe in funding things that do help people. We generally stay away from investing in directly competing companies and when that does come up (usually through one company pivoting) we make sure that a single partner is assigned to each and those partners are particularly careful to firewall sensitive information. It's similar to what YC and SV Angel have done for years and it works well.
"How does ethics enter into your investment choices? I see you feature Palantir prominently and I have strong feelings about mass government surveillance."
If this is a serious question, maybe don't start with something so aggressive?
This is a serious question, I hope it gets read and answered and not down voted into oblivion.