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Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
111–120 of 168 posts
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#112Seriously, there's a lot of FUD on this thread. Right now it's anecdotal evidence at best that there is a relationship there at all. But most people here seem to be talking about it as if it's already proven fact. Come on HN.
Meanwhile, it is a public fact that Cisco helped build the great firewall of China[1].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peo...
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#113I told my sister-in-law (a very level-headed economist) about Palantir and she just referred to them as paramilitary thugs. It hadn't occurred to me to phrase it like that because they are a young, hip group that borrows from Lord of the Rings and evidently posts cartoons on their walls. Karp's M.O. is to simply list off all the possible use cases of data inference, including good ones. It makes him sound like a wise…
It's striking how much of modern political thinking comes down to branding.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#114Palantir has hundreds of employees swarming around downtown Palo Alto. Hundreds. Somebody is paying that company a LOT of money for something. There is something very weird about the employees in Palo Alto: I never see them at local meetups, events, parties, and such. They are truly strangers who keep to themselves and don't engage with the local community... and very young. I get the feeling they come from afar and…
Palantir was funded by In-Q-Tel. In-Q-Tel is the CIAs VC arm. It's a non-profit VC for the intelligence community. So, they don't even care if their investment makes money, they just want spy tech at whatever their budget can afford. Not conspiracy theory or speculation, all public info. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/additional-publicat... ; It's absolutely a spook sho…
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Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#115This is our future. A fascist with asymmetrical hair standing in front of a hip, edgy bit of art, who's funded by a fascist who calls himself a libertarian, waxing eloquently about how good a person he is because the company he founded is protecting the shire by injecting the increasingly unaccountable security apparatus into every single aspect of our lives where they will enforce conformity.
You don't see much American patriotism in California. If you never see your country's flag throughout the day, you don't have fascism.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#116This is our future. A fascist with asymmetrical hair standing in front of a hip, edgy bit of art, who's funded by a fascist who calls himself a libertarian, waxing eloquently about how good a person he is because the company he founded is protecting the shire by injecting the increasingly unaccountable security apparatus into every single aspect of our lives where they will enforce conformity.
I can't tell what you even mean by "fascist". The word has a specific meaning. A good example of a fascist was Mussolini. An example of a fascist view is that the nation (which should be holy) has been taken over by degenerates, liberals, the weak and people of impure ancestries or ancestries which don't belong here, and that it must be purified through violence such as purges and wars of glory.
I think Fascism is the best and closest term for a system of control that is emerging that hasn't been properly defined or given a catchy name yet. Fascism wasn't a bad word in the 30s, just like propaganda wasn't a bad word then.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#117The link between the U.S. government's program codenamed PRISM and Palantir's internal software called Prism is completely coincidental. If you take a look at their site, you will learn that Metropolis is Palantir's alias for their finance product[1]. This is obvious just looking at the page in question as it [2] describes how to add Timeseries data. Timeseries data is usually composed of information about stocks or…
I was about to post, "Nice try, Palantir employee." Then I got to the full disclosure bit. Fair enough.
I would assume that PRISM is an internal codename for the project within the NSA. Just a wild guess, but perhaps it stands for "Palantir's Repeated Interception of Society's Metadata."
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#118[deleted]
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#119Whenever Thiel talks about Palantir, I get a bit confused. I wonder if he suffers from cognitive dissonance. One of his most successful companies is a company that does big data analysis for the DOD (likely the Intelligence Community)...yet he is stridently libertarian - to the point where he is a Seasteader. So I can't quite reconcile the two.
1. Many Libertarians give defense spending a free pass, calling defense the only essential function of government.
2. Libertarians are opposed to giving money to govt, not taking money from govt.
Re: Palantir and Prism: A Possible Link
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes: solving drug trafficking routes with several constraints, making the best scams, exploiting vulnerabilities to install a botnet. All are very interesting challenges.
Drug trafficking is a relatively honorable occupation that delivers a highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society. It's unfair to compare it to the Stasi or consumer scams.
Except for all the people killed by the gangs involved in smuggling this highly demanded consumer good that's affordable for a broad cross section of society across the borders.