CIA-Funded Startup Palantir Denies Link to NSA — but They Both Make a 'Prism'

On a Friday full of tech-land denials and government distancing and no real answers about how the NRA's sweeping spy program actually works, Palanatir — the "Mysterious Silicon Valley Company Helping the NSA Spy on Americans" — now insists that its own "Prism" system for database mining has nothing to do with the NSA's data-mining "PRISM" program, but that's not going to calm many privacy fears, either. "Palantir's Prism platform is completely unrelated to any US government program of the same name," the company wrote in a statement provided to The Atlantic Wire. "Prism is Palantir's name for a data integration technology used in the Palantir Metropolis platform (formerly branded as Palantir Finance). This software has been licensed to banks and hedge funds for quantitative analysis and research." It's true that Palantir Metropolis used to go by the name Palantir Finance, according to this Quora thread. And the link describing Palantir's Prism platform falls under the "Metropolis Dev" section. But the coincidence, as well as the company's strong ties to the CIA, have been hard to ignore. 

Indeed, one of the many remaining questions from Thursday night's revelation that the NSA is spying on Americans through nine major Internet companies is how, exactly, the government got "direct access" to databases if tech companies vigorously deny they do just that. Even The Washington Post, which obtained the presentation that led to the disclosure of a second NSA program in as many days, has backtracked on its stance that the companies had begun to "participate knowingly."

If Apple and Facebook and others didn't willingly allow access to their servers, and didn't know their data was being mined, how did the NSA crack in?

Palantir,