
Palantir Denies Its 'Prism' Software Is The NSA's 'PRISM' Surveillance System - taylorbuley
http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/06/07/startup-palantir-denies-its-prism-software-is-the-nsas-prism-surveillance-system/
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garry
I can personally confirm Palantir Prism is not NSA's Prism. I helped build
that team and write that software in 2006. It was Palantir Finance, and it was
built for use at hedge funds and financial houses as a quant analysis platform
for traders.

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philsalesses
You can't confirm that Palantir's Prism is not the NSA's Prism unless you have
complete access to both systems. Palantir could be correct in saying that
their Prism was not designed for the NSA, but is it outside possibility to
believe the NSA is using software outside the knowledge of a corporation?

~~~
chc
This seems a bit like saying that maybe the NSA is using Angry Birds as their
surveillance system without Rovio's knowledge. The creators of Angry Birds
would probably be aware if their software were an NSA-grade surveillance
system rather than a cartoon physics game.

~~~
Jd
This hilarious comment makes up for a lot of the NSA related garbage I've had
the misfortune to read recently. Thanks!

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nostrademons
People make too much of the name. If you were involved with a top-secret
government surveillance project, would you _ever_ mention the name outside of
the NSA, even to companies you're partnering with? It's likely that until now
nobody outside of the NSA had ever heard of "PRISM", which is why you get
these blanket denials from the tech companies supposedly involved. To them,
it's "The government is coming to us with requests for data on our users", not
"Help work with us on this top-secret project named PRISM".

~~~
dsl
Projects often have multiple designators. US-984XN is the official name.
Internally the collection platform (source) is referred to as PRISM (as an
example, the entire U-2 program was CHESS). Each relationship with a partner
probably had a code name like LONG WINTER (completely made up).

~~~
samstave
Who gets to choose the names? How do they prevent duplicates? Is there some
approval process for names? I find this particular topic really interesting,
specifically who and how a name for any top secret program is selected.

~~~
dsl
The selection process I don't believe to be public, and varies between
organization. However everybody at least reserves them in a DoD database
called The Code Word Nickname and Exercise Term System. Regardless of the
project, code words become classified once they are exposed or no longer in
use, and can be reused after two years.

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hristov
Sometimes you can learn a lot from carefully worded denials. They thoroughly
denied that their Prism software is related to the Prism program but they did
not deny that they sell information gathering software to the government. They
most likely do sell information gathering software to the government. Their
close relations to intelligence services are well known. But that software is
not called Prism.

~~~
freyr
They make information processing software, and the government is a client. So
what? The company is quite open about, and has been since the start.

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milesf
Who knows what to believe anymore. Hopefully encryption will become the norm
for everyone so that parity can be regained.

RMS seems less crazy than he used to. His radical views seem to be quite
rational. We need free software and privacy to have freedom.

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mixedbit
Still, according to Wikipedia the company is not spotless:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#WikiLeak...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#WikiLeaks_proposals)

And its technology is probably far from being privacy friendly: 'Every day,
our platforms are quietly at work helping law firms, banks, hospitals, law
enforcement and defense agencies, regulators and enterprises of all stripes
protect and maximize their intelligence and other core assets. '
[http://www.palantir.com/solutions](http://www.palantir.com/solutions)

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duggieawesome
Anyone know how Palantir Tech chose their name? I just learned that palantir
is the seeing stone used by Saruman from Lord of the Rings.

~~~
tptacek
Tech company chooses name from Lord of the Rings. More news at 11.

~~~
mapt
Tech company chooses name that allows a literal _eye of evil_ to spy on any
land and corrupt good men from the comfort of its infernal lair.

~~~
liedra
Except they weren't originally developed to be used by literal eyes of evil.
They were the skype of the time, pretty much.

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obstacle1
Palantir is much larger than just Prism, and its collection of "solutions"
sound frighteningly suitable for surveillance operations. From their "what we
do" statement [1]:

>We build software that allows organizations to make sense of massive amounts
of disparate data. We solve the technical problems, so they can solve the
human ones. Combating terrorism. Prosecuting crimes. Fighting fraud.
Eliminating waste.

They evidently do enough business with the government to warrant an office in
McLean, VA. Incidentally, McLean is also home to the CIA Headquarters and the
office of the Director of National Intelligence [2].

Palantir's seed funding included $2mm from In-Q-Tel, the CIA's investment arm.
[3]

The company was part of a consortium called "Team Themis" along with HBGary
and Berico. The team was approached by a law firm hired by the US Chamber of
Commerce and BoA to attack WikiLeaks and WikiLeaks supporters. [4]

In 2011, Palantir hired Michael Leiter, former Director of US National
Counter-terrorism Center. Leitner served under both the Bush and Obama
administrations. [5]

The company is known to work directly with GOOG on security-related data
mining projects [6]:

>Google Ideas task force, teaming with Palantir Technologies and
Salesforce.com (CRM) to build the first data-sharing platform to identify
global patterns on how the human-trafficking trade operates and how to better
protect the victims.

>The Google announcement [of this partnership] came on the same day the White
House called for more data-sharing among federal agencies to help disrupt
these criminal human-trafficking networks.

Make of all this what you will.

[1] - [http://www.palantir.com/what-we-do&#x2F](http://www.palantir.com/what-
we-do&#x2F); [2] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean,_Virginia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean,_Virginia)
[3] - [http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/In-Q-
Tel](http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel) [4] -
[http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Team_Themis](http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Team_Themis)
[5] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Leiter](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Leiter)
[6] - [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/google-
turns...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/google-turns-to-big-
data-to-unmask-human-traffickers)

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runn1ng
Yeah, it actually makes sense. If you read the official Prism description, it
is pretty vague (it takes some... data formats? I guess? and converts it to..
different data formats? I think?), but nothing from the description matches
the Guardian/Washington Post description in the slightest.

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neuro
According to Chamber of Commerce meetings, Palantir developed and stored
scraped data from social media sites. Berico and HBGary uploaded data to this
database.

~~~
EvanKelly
The US Chamber of Commerce is a non-governmental lobbying group. I would take
anything you source from them with a grain of salt.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Commer...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Commerce)

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maybe
What the hell people are gonna sue each other over the Moz and Doz
similarities and here are two software programs called Prism they may do the
same thing.

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bane
You know, you don't really hear about these kinds of sketchy behaviors and
associations with the hundreds or thousands of other companies that work with
the government. What is it with these guys? I suspect amateurism, but there's
got to be more than that. Getting your CEO invited to Bilderberg running
what's still not a terribly large or influential company takes one hell of an
operation.

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montagg
Considering the context, the name of the company is very, very interesting.

> A palantir is a dangerous tool, Sarumon. ... We do not know who else may be
> watching.

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kev83
Now Palantir can take up the work under this mask of publicity, then it'll be
revealed in a few years or decades.

~~~
pyre
Just because some ideas about the government that have been decried as 'crazy
conspiracy theories' have turned out to be true doesn't mean that all 'crazy
conspiracy theories' are all of the sudden validated and/or more plausible.

