> Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.
I don't think that's the basis of the name at all.
Much more likely, the rainbow part represents all the sources they pull data from, each so different from the next, and the white part represents the single unified feed it provides the NSA agent using it.
Without thinking a whole lot about it I had assumed prisms were used in the optical splitters/couplers central to the program. That doesn't seem to be the case.
I don't think that's the basis of the name at all.
Much more likely, the rainbow part represents all the sources they pull data from, each so different from the next, and the white part represents the single unified feed it provides the NSA agent using it.