How the U.S. Spy Satellite Program Chose This Hilariously Scary Earth-Eating Octopus as Its Logo

[Tab]

Perhaps you remember a time, two years ago, when the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office released its new mission logo, an enormous tentacled monster covering the earth with its sucker-lined legs. Perhaps it reminded you of a comic-book villain from your youth. Perhaps you were only vaguely familiar of the NRO before then, and have since come to think of them only as “the scary octopus guys.” Now, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request by security researcher Runa Sandvik, highlighted at MuckRock today, we know a bit more about how the scary octopus logo came to be.

In response to Sandvik’s request for documents relating to the preparation of the logo, the NRO sent 15 heavily redacted pages of paperwork dating to 2012, months before NRO launched the satellite bearing the octopus. According to the documents, on some level the logo is an inside joke about a piece of equipment called an “octopus harness.” But mostly, the men and women at the agency chose the image because it looked badass, and you can’t really disagree with them there. One slide from a presentation reads:

"The NROL-39 Octopus symbolizes the resourcefulness, adaptability, and perseverance of this mission. The image of the Octopus reaching around the world is representative of this mission and the warfighters it supports, who serve valiantly all over the globe protecting our nation. Like the Octopus, our mission, our warfighters, and our nation will always remain versatile and find a way to adapt to and overcome any threat we face."

Some other interesting details: the text and symbol had to be approved “to ensure neither contains any hidden classified meanings,” and the tentacles were “randomly placed,” perhaps to avoid the appearance of bias.

In 2013, the American public was at the height of its post-Snowden wokeness about surveillance overreach, and the Octopus was rightfully criticized as a tone-deaf way to represent the U.S. intelligence community. As MuckRock notes, there is only one indication in the documents that anyone saw the backlash coming: a handwritten note, in blue pen, on the report’s front page. “A little sinister!!” it reads.

http://gawker.com/how-the-u-s-spy-satellite-program-chose-this-hilarious-1753853371

[TlalocW]

1. I prefer to think

That the NRO is just filled with people who worship Lovecraft's Elder Gods.

TlalocW

[petronius]

2. Hmm - the tentacles were “randomly placed,” but just happen to wrap

right across Russia, central Asia, and China.

Although I'm more concerned about what they apparently did to Scandinavia: looks like they wiped out Sweden and Finland, and just shoved Norway over a bit to hide the gap...

[MowCowWhoHow III]

3. Hail Hydra?

[elias49]

4. The octopus looks drunk to me.

In any case, an interesting choice of logo. Especially if you're familiar with Danny Casolaro.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Octopus-Secret-Government-Casolaro/dp/0922915393

[Renew Deal]

5. I always thought the octopus logo was one of the most honest things the govt did

[Tab]

6. Frankly, it is

I'm surprised someone got away with it.

[MisterP]

7. did they go back to their Cartari and their Alciato?

[Octafish]

8. Anatomy of the Deep State -- The Shadow Government that calls the shots

Per Bill Moyers via Alternet...



D.C. Insider Mike Lofgren -- a congressional staff member for 28 years specializing in national security possessing top secret security clearance -- reports: There's a Shadow Govt. Running the Country, and It's Not Up for Re-Election. Power centers in DC and the corporate corridors of Manhattan and Silicon Valley are calling the shots. I'd recommend DUers, while the lights are still on, go to either source and download their own copy.

Anatomy of the Deep State

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo. —"The Martyrdom of Man" by Winwood Reade (1871)

By Mike Lofgren
BillMoyers.com / Feb. 21, 2014

There is the visible government situated around the Mall in Washington, and then there is another, more shadowy, more indefinable government that is not explained in Civics 101 or observable to tourists at the White House or the Capitol. The former is traditional Washington partisan politics: the tip of the iceberg that a public watching C-SPAN sees daily and which is theoretically controllable via elections. The subsurface part of the iceberg I shall call the Deep State, which operates on its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power. [1]

During the last five years, the news media have been flooded with pundits decrying the broken politics of Washington. The conventional wisdom has it that partisan gridlock and dysfunction have become the new normal. That is certainly the case, and I have been among the harshest critics of this development. But it is also imperative to acknowledge the limits of this critique as it applies to the American governmental system. On one level, the critique is self-evident: in the domain that the public can see, Congress is hopelessly deadlocked in the worst manner since the 1850s, the violently rancorous decade preceding the Civil War.

SNIP...

The Deep State is the big story of our time; it is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State, and its time in the sun as a rival to Rome, Constantinople, or London may be term-limited by its overweening sense of self-importance and its habit, as Winwood Reade said of Rome, to “lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face.” Living upon its principal in this case means that the Deep State has been extracting value from the American people in vampire-like fashion.

We are faced with two disagreeable implications. First, that the Deep State is so heavily entrenched, so well protected by surveillance, firepower, money and its ability to co-opt resistance that it is almost impervious to change. Second, that just as in so many previous empires, the Deep State is populated with those whose instinctive reaction to the failure of their policies is to double down on those very policies in the future. Iraq was a failure briefly camouflaged by the wholly propagandistic success of the so-called surge; this legerdemain allowed for the surge in Afghanistan, which equally came to naught. Undeterred by that failure, the functionaries of the Deep State plunged into Libya; the smoking rubble of the Benghazi consulate, rather than discouraging further misadventure, seemed merely to incite the itch to bomb Syria. Will the Deep State ride on the back of the American people from failure to failure until the country itself, despite its huge reserves of human and material capital, is slowly exhausted? The dusty road of empire is strewn with the bones of former great powers that exhausted themselves in like manner.
SNIP...

The final factor is Silicon Valley. Owing to secrecy and obfuscation, it is hard to know how much of the NSA’s relationship with the Valley is based on voluntary cooperation, how much is legal compulsion through FISA warrants and how much is a matter of the NSA surreptitiously breaking into technology companies’ systems. Given the Valley’s public relations requirement to mollify its customers who have privacy concerns, it is difficult to take the tech firms’ libertarian protestations about government compromise of their systems at face value, especially since they engage in similar activity against their own customers for commercial purposes. That said, evidence is accumulating that Silicon Valley is losing billions in overseas business from companies, individuals and governments that want to maintain privacy. For high-tech entrepreneurs, the cash nexus is ultimately more compelling than the Deep State’s demand for patriotic cooperation. Even legal compulsion can be combatted: unlike the individual citizen, tech firms have deep pockets and batteries of lawyers with which to fight government diktat.

CONTINUED w/LINKS to sources...

http://billmoyers.com/2014/02/21/anatomy-of-the-deep-state/

Thank goodness or chance for Mike Lofgren, Bill Moyers, and DU. We may yet reverse the trend of We the People paying for wars without end for privatized power and profits and its associated rich getting richer while the rest of us become Have-Nots.

PS: OP from February 2014: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024546724

[Orrex]

9. Strange aeons.

[flying rabbit]

10. All things being said...

... it is kind of badass.