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Comment by remx | Hacker News Reader

Well according to this Wikipedia piece[0] about the NSA and Palantir:

    A document leaked to TechCrunch revealed that
    Palantir's clients as of 2013 included at least
    twelve groups within the U.S. government,
    including the CIA, DHS, NSA, FBI, CDC

From: http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/11/leaked-palantir-doc-reveals...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#cite_not...

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Please be reasonable. Having NSA and several US agencies as customers doesn't mean you are a tentacle of the NSA.

Even in the case of companies owned in part by In-Q-Tel I guess the point is to make their technology available to the US goverment. Maybe 20 years ago the goverment would fund that with DARPA or something similar, but now there is an open technology market and I guess they should be investing to get their opinion heard on the direction they need the technologies to evolve.

> Please be reasonable. Having NSA and several US agencies as customers doesn't mean you are a tentacle of the NSA.

You could argue that any company that actively works with the NSA to increase their coverage is a tentacle.

That's such a broad definition of "tentacle" it's meaningless. We all know what "tentacle" means in this context, and it's not satisfied just by being a government contractor or provider.

So Palantir is actually twelve tentacles, no? A dodecapus?

I was thinking of some sort of Lovecraftian nightmare monster with any arbitrary amount of tentacles

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