The story behind National Reconnaissance Office's octopus logo | Hacker News Reader

The story behind National Reconnaissance Office's octopus logo

muckrock.com

60 pointsmorisy21 comments

The NRO has a history of interesting patch designs.

This one in particular has always felt pretty apt: "Better the devil you know" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NROL49_patch.jpg

There's also:

"We own the night" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NRO_L11_missionpatch.jpg

Earth in eagle talon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USA200patch.jpg

Earth being humped by dragon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NROL19_USA171_patch.jpg

Space devil with wrench https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NROL49_2_patch_sml.jpg

Full list here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_Launches

Here's my personal favorite mission patch:

Which states, "Omnis Vestri Substructio Es Servus Ad Nobis", or in translation "All your base are belong to us."[0]

These logos are a bit tongue-in-cheek.

[0]http://vigilantcitizen.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/015.pn...

And then there is NROL10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NROL10_USA155_patch.jpg

> "We own the night"

That has such an 80's, "The Lost Boys"-esque flavor to it (reference for the uninitiated: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lost_boys/)

Sweet patches with a gigantic octopus devouring the Earth

"Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach"

"Full Spectrum Dominance"

"Total Information Awareness"

"Five Eyes"

This is the culture of a whole generation of career bureaucrats. I'm afraid even major legislative victories for privacy will struggle to change the culture.

I suspect it was already like this in the Cold War but the public heard much less about it.

The flip side of this is the bureaucratic jargon that uses relatively neutral, even innocuous terms for spying on people, imprisoning them, or killing them.

There have been generations in the west who freely and easily enjoyed rights like privacy and freedom of speech by inheriting the fruits of their predecessors' hard-fought battles. The next generation will not be among them.

Hank... are we the baddies?

Er, doesn't a very similar octopus/earth image make up the main body somebody's squadron patch? Said differently: I'm pretty sure I've seen this image somewhere before!

As others have mentioned, a lot of patches are downright creepy.

Why? Well, I always assumed that it was a manifestation of the terrible power that these young men and women have been ordered to wield, and create for that matter.

Before you reject that outright since I said it maybe a little too poetically, consider this:

Which member of the team gets asked to design a patch? The guy who can draw. The guy who thinks too much and reads too much. The warrior poet.

When you are asked to build something that you KNOW must never fall into the wrong hands, you take your job seriously. That weight is what is going to come to mind when you're asked to make an image to represent your work.

NB. I am completely confident that the hardworking defenders of our nation generally believe in their missions. They know that their work would be evil IFF it wasn't all being carried out by good people, like themselves.

tl;dr: it's a geeky reference to an issue which arose during testing (the testing team's joke was that the 'octopus harness' had taken over the world).

A harmless instance of esprit de corps.

Evidently such geeky awesomeness might destabilise the national security of the United States. I mean, the news article that explained the origin of the patch was deemed "Top Secret". The patch, however, is not.

Makes me wonder at what point a classification of secret or top secret will be entirely devalued. If this is a state secret, then anything could be a state secret.

> I mean, the news article that explained the origin of the patch was deemed "Top Secret".

No, it wasn't. The original article, as you can clearly read in the picture, was Secret.

That's not absurd: see all those black boxes in the unclassified version of the article? Those are redactions, which would have contained classified information of one sort or another. A collection of information is classified as the union of all individual classifications of information within it. E.g. the sentence 'the sky is blue, and the D-Day landings take place in Normandy' would have been classified Top Secret (or whatever) back in 1944, since the location of the landings would have been Top Secret (or whatever); it would not have been marked unclassified due to the statement that the sky is blue.

This makes perfect sense. How could it be otherwise? The inclusion of your mailing address (public information) doesn't make your bank statement public information.

The classification system has been abused to the point of devaluing classified contents for decades. I think there's only one real reason for this: only a very few things are real state secrets, but there's a ton of budget overruns, bad ideas, career ending blunders, "favorite" vendors, vendors that hire close relatives, "independent" consultants, and similar mixes of incompetence and borderline embezzlement. It's far too easy to just classify some episode, and keep it from blowing up into a rebuke or termination for cause. There's little to be gained by carefully examining something and classifying it appropriate, and a lot to loose by under-classification.

Just to underline this point, here's a very modern (incident in May, 2014, reporting apparently Jan 23, 2016) nuclear weapon mishap that was hidden: http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/air-force-nuclear-missile-...

I will grant you that the Air Force tried double-speak and obfuscation to hide the incident rather than over-classification, but they did refuse a FOIA request about it and hid the incident from a Secretary of Defense appointed commission.

Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn

Sinister or not, that's an awesome logo.

A nice book about patches from the "black world" of the US military:

http://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-Then-Would-Destroyed/dp/193...

Some more memorable ones:

http://cl.ly/0p2g1H3y1p0P

http://cl.ly/473h003u0f0z

http://cl.ly/0M3h331s0d0j

Interestingly, though not at all surprising, is that the octopus' forward tentacle appears to land right at the intersection of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran. Meanwhile, the octopus' body is climbing over the North Pole from the US to Russia (I've seen that in a bunch of these patches), and has a tentacle heading toward the Bering Straight.

This book is pretty interesting: http://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-Then-Would-Destroyed/dp/193...

The organization is really a front for Hydra.

About half the time the NRO has been mentioned in my lifetime, it's in relation to some story about a UFO that got away (but was tracked by NRO radar)

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