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Comment by philsalesses | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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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