Palantir Denies Its 'Prism' Software Is The NSA's 'PRISM' Surveillance System | Hacker News Reader

Palantir Denies Its 'Prism' Software Is The NSA's 'PRISM' Surveillance System

forbes.com

172 pointstaylorbuley38 comments

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.

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?

Not being an employee of the NSA, he also can't confirm that Palantir Finance hasn't been repurposed to conceal the existence of space aliens captured from Area 51. What's your point?

Palantir denies it, and then one of the developers on the original project, a YC partner, comments on HN that the Palantir project had nothing to do with surveillance. Your response then demands that he prove a negative.

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.

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

The creators of Angry Birds would probably be aware if their software were an NSA-grade surveillance system rather than a cartoon physics game.

The question is: do they use a compiler written for the NSA by Ken Thompson?

That would make for a pretty poor choice of internal project name if that was the case.

Common sense backs this up. Code names are explicitly forbidden from having anything to do with the subject matter.

Edit: It might not be obvious to some, but code names are always in all caps.

> Edit: It might not be obvious to some, but code names are always in all caps.

Nope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_name#Famous_code_names

I think he's implicitly referring to American government codenames...

From http://www.designation-systems.net/usmilav/codenames.html#_C...

"Code Words are printed using all capital letters."

Can you also confirm that Palantir Prism didn't fork into PRISM?

Given the diverse nature of the two (finance software vesus data harvesting) that doesn't make sense.

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".

Exactly right. Not to mention code names are things like OCELOT ELECTRON not actually mnemonic phrases. One of the conditions of a top secret clearance is that even after your clearance expires you cannot reveal the name of anything.

I always expect that intelligence agency types resonant with the whole 'true names' meme in fantasy literature for that reason.

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).

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.

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.

LONG WINTER (completely made up).

!!! WHO THE F%!# told you about LONG WINTER!?!? What do you know? Tell us now... we know you're lying dsl! Tell us everything and we'll let you live! Lie to me one more time and I'm drilling a hole through your hand with this electric drill! Who are you working with? Who's paying you? When did you convert to radical Islam? Who's your contact? Tell us now!

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.

I feel like after this report, we've been bathing in a sea of pseudo-denials. I've yet to see anyone say categorically that any of these reports are 100% untrue, which is unfortunately, very illustrative of what's actually going on.

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.

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.

Still, according to Wikipedia the company is not spotless: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palantir_Technologies#WikiLeak...

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

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.

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

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.

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

tl;dr - Palantir was chosen because it's a cool sounding name, a pop culture reference, and relevant to the basic idea of accumulating data and analyzing it.

Longer version:

Palantíri (singular, palantír) are the "seeing stones" from Lord of the Rings. They're kind of like mythical crystal balls, but with greater powersets. They were designed by the high elves of Valinor (read: uber-magical), and can be used for communication. For more powerful entities, like wizards, they can be used to see anywhere in the world. Palantíri are rare, powerful and incredibly useful in the right hands.

Saruman uses his palantír to great effect to keep track of the various going-ons of Middle-Earth, and from his tower in Isengard is able to make tactical decisions based on information gathered by the palantír.

Given the stones' incredible power for accumulating information and forming strategic positions based on that information, Palantir Technologies chose the name as a semi-obscure reference to a mythical object of great power. This allies itself well with what Palantir represents - powerful data analysis and mining tools (among other things) with a beautiful design and focused precision.

But in the end the Palantiri were corrupted for evil ends were they not? It is interesting how myths are relived in cyclic time is it not? The stories become patterns in life and when we bind ourselves to stories we seem to bind ourselves to their endings.

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/ [2] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McLean,_Virginia [3] - http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel [4] - http://wiki.echelon2.org/wiki/Team_Themis [5] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Leiter [6] - http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-10/google-turns...

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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