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Comment by garry | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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