I want to stress this is a reader email, not TPM reporting. But I’m sharing it because after reading it through and doing some googling of my own there’s little doubt that Palantir is doing stuff like what the government is doing with those tech companies, even if they’re not part of ‘prism’ itself. Give this a read.

From an anonymous reader …

I don’t see anyone out there with this theory, and TPM is my favorite news source, so here goes: “PRISM” is the government’s name for a program that uses technology from Palantir. Palantir is a Silicon Valley start-up that’s now valued at well over $1B, that focuses on data analysis for the government. Here’s how Palantir describes themselves:

“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. From Silicon Valley to your doorstep, we deploy our data fusion platforms against the hardest problems we can find, wherever we are needed most.”

http://www.palantir.com/what-we-do/ They’re generally not public about who their clients are, but their first client was famously the CIA, who is also an early investor. With my theory in mind, re-read the denials from the tech companies in the WSJ (emphasis mine):

Apple: “We do not provide any government agency with direct access to our servers…”

Google: “… does not have a ‘back door’ for the government to access private user data…”

Facebook: “… not provide any government organization with direct access to Facebook servers…”

Yahoo: “We do not provide the government with direct access to our servers, systems, or network…” These denials could all still be technically true if the government is accessing the data through a government contractor, such as Palantir, rather than having direct access. I just did a quick Google search of “Palantir PRISM” to see if anyone else had this theory, and the top results were these pages:

https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-overview.html

https://docs.palantir.com/metropolisdev/prism-examples.html Apparently, Palantir has a software package called “Prism”: “Prism is a software component that lets you quickly integrate external databases into Palantir.” That sounds like exactly the tool you’d want if you were trying to find patterns in data from multiple companies. So the obvious follow-up questions are of the “am I right?” variety, but if I am, here’s what I really want to know: which Palantir clients have access to this data? Just CIA & NSA? FBI? What about municipalities, such as the NYC police department? What about the governments of other countries? What do you think? FWIW, I know a guy who works at Palantir. I asked him what he/they did once, and he was more secretive than my friends at Apple. PS, please don’t use my name if you decide to publish any of this — it’s a small town/industry. Let them Prism me instead.

Late Update: Another reader notes that Bridgewater Associates LLP, one of the largest hedge funds in the world, is also a major client of Palantir, which appears to be confirmed by many press reports.

Later Update: Here’s a video of Alexander Karp, CEO of Palantir, describing what the company does …

Yet More Update: For yet more of a sense of what Palantir does for the US government, here’s a hypothetical of what they make possible for counter-terrorism analysts in the US intel committee, as described in a 2011 article in Bloomberg …