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Isn't it strange that one arm of the government, ie the NSA, can get PRISM and all their extremely complex surveillance and correlation programs up and running

by kjackson2012 13y ago

Isn't it strange that one arm of the government, ie the NSA, can get PRISM and all their extremely complex surveillance and correlation programs up and running but these much simpler and more straightforward web sites are generally failures? If anything it speaks to the quality of work that Palantir does, and the government should get them to do all the work as opposed to IBM Global Services or Accenture. Imagine if IBM or Accenture developed PRISM? We would have nothing to worry about then since it would be a complete failures.

brazzy 13y ago
Or maybe it's because you simply never hear about failures and shortcomings of such top secret systems. I am in fact quite sure that PRISM had its share of delays, annoying bugs and performance problems.
fnordfnordfnord 13y ago
How many failed projects do you think the NSA has suffered? The NSA aren't immune to reality (even though they are well insulated from it). As for why you don't hear about the failures, we know of at least one very big IT disaster project called Trailblazer. Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive blew the whistle on this particular project, and was rewarded for that favor with Espionage charges.
njharman 13y ago
What were the costs and schedules of PRISM. Did it and other NSA projects run over budget? Over schedule? Did they have any deployment or scaling issues? How about usability, efficacy and support? I would argue that collecting and data mining all the worlds data is an easier problem than integrating (U.S.) healthcare systems. Finally, the NSA projects have suffered a most spectacular project management failure. They were revealed.
andrewla 13y ago
Palantir is not involved in the NSA's PRISM program in any way, http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/06/10/palantir-prism-programs-got-nothing-to-do-with-us/ http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/06/10/palantir-prism-program....
krapp 13y ago
For all we know the PRISM interface is a horrid buggy mess itself. It's not public though.

brazzy 13y ago

Or maybe it's because you simply never hear about failures and shortcomings of such top secret systems. I am in fact quite sure that PRISM had its share of delays, annoying bugs and performance problems.

fnordfnordfnord 13y ago

How many failed projects do you think the NSA has suffered? The NSA aren't immune to reality (even though they are well insulated from it). As for why you don't hear about the failures, we know of at least one very big IT disaster project called Trailblazer. Thomas Drake, a former NSA executive blew the whistle on this particular project, and was rewarded for that favor with Espionage charges.

njharman 13y ago

What were the costs and schedules of PRISM. Did it and other NSA projects run over budget? Over schedule? Did they have any deployment or scaling issues? How about usability, efficacy and support? I would argue that collecting and data mining all the worlds data is an easier problem than integrating (U.S.) healthcare systems. Finally, the NSA projects have suffered a most spectacular project management failure. They were revealed.

andrewla 13y ago

Palantir is not involved in the NSA's PRISM program in any way, http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/06/10/palantir-prism-programs-got-nothing-to-do-with-us/ http://www.siliconbeat.com/2013/06/10/palantir-prism-program....

krapp 13y ago

For all we know the PRISM interface is a horrid buggy mess itself. It's not public though.