How the National Reconnaissance Office came to choose a sinister, planet-devouring octopus for a logo

[art_carnage]

Nope. Still a molehill.

[jerwin]

There’s a video from the Chaos Computer Club (IIRC) that goes into designing logos for top secret organizations. I regret that I cans’t find it now. A rather meandering piece that covered:

Top Secret logos
Photographing dark sites from kilometers away using telescopes
the shell coprorations used to support the “extraordinary rendition” program

It was one of those “artistic” talks.

[L_Mariachi]

I think Trevor Paglen’s I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me has been covered here before.

Inside the Black Budget

[jerwin]

Thanks! Trevor Paglen’s presentation was what I was thinking of

Anyway, the reason these patches are reviewed by declassification committees is that they often contain oblique references to secrets-- orbits, frequencies, and so on.

Yes, it’s a shared secret that enhances camaraderie, but an outsider might be able to figure it out.

It’s sort of like submariners knowing that their home is designed to quickly ascend, and punch through the arctic icecap, and launch missiles, which is sort of AWESOME (unless you’re one of those commie pinko humanitarians who doesn’t like war), but really some higher up should be looking at whether it’s a secret, or a whether the US or Soviet Union should be publicly boasting about it as a nation-- which they eventually did.