New US spy satellite logo features world-devouring octopus
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
The story is that the government is launching a spy satellite with a logo on it featuring a "mascot" -- a giant Kraken-like octopus taking over the planet. Whoever created it could only have been thinking of their bureau's unchecked ability to do what it wanted and not the public's perception of it because the creature, especially its eye, looks menacing, ominous, foreboding, malicious, malevolent, and borderline evil. It implies the agency is insular, unaccountable, and has an aggressive, secret agenda it cares about more than anything else, certainly more than your privacy or the consequences of its actions.
The kicker is a comment that juxtaposes the logo with a warning illustration saying "Know your communist enemy" with a nearly-identical logo, presumably implying an evil enemy from the Cold War, which we have become.
The government octopus looks like the Kraken on the top of the wikipedia page -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraken -- except the government one is planet-sized and its eyes seem to have more evil intent, to me, at least.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsNotNice?fro...
Welcome to Hacker News, where the rules are made up and the points don't matter!
Holy crap! I wish someone had told me...
https://www.fbo.gov/?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=eac39969d68f...
And how do you know that there isn't?
Besides, the use of the word "features" to mean "has a picture of on it" is pretty well established. The US coat of arms features an eagle, but that doesn't mean there is an actual eagle sitting on it.
Sadly, this title isn't provocative at all, since "nothing beyond our reach" is world-devouring! Poor octopus :'(
Edited to add clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv2XGQBcvxQ
That said, it also just goes and forgets pretty much anything about what happens when you tell a bunch of men to live together so that they can go kill other men.
It also skims over the history of that particular emblem. The death's head has been used by 'elite' Prussian and Germany military units back to the 19th century. Obviously the point is to incite a little fear, and obviously the point is that they're breaking taboos. That's the whole point is being in an army.
And finally, in this particular case, humour stripped of its context always has the possibility to offend. While you're typically expected to take that into account while making your jokes ("political correctness" / "minimize backlash"), there is definitely a tradition of ignoring such considerations. Typically in military combat arms, but often extending to related situations (this might extend to the black humour of paramedics for example).
So the point is that "Are we the baddies" is hilarious, but its not very useful to think of life in that context - well, at least the just 'evaluating your badness by your symbols' part.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Ba42Z0lCMAAfkzM.jpg
http://iranpoliticsclub.net/politics/IRI-problem/images/Iran...
http://streetsofsalem.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/octopus-ge...
http://streetsofsalem.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/octopus-ma...
Thanks, that gave me a good chuckle. I never realized the power of a cartoon eye.
No, what it implies is that those who intend to do evil against America cannot hide anywhere in the world. It's consistent with Roosevelt's Big Stick, which is something Americans have always embraced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Stick_ideology. The idea is that we're free at home, but militarily unchallengable on the world stage.
> The kicker is a comment that juxtaposes the logo with a warning illustration saying "Know your communist enemy" with a nearly-identical logo, presumably implying an evil enemy from the Cold War, which we have become.
Could we declare a moratorium on false equivalency for like just a week? Last time I checked, we still have elections and aren't sending political prisoners to siberia. Not to mention that we haven't killed tens of millions of our own people. There is that too.
Last time I checked, the elections did not significantly change policy, despite a change in the balance of power between parties. The US has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the world, mostly over Prohibition. And the millions we have killed are mostly in other countries that do not respeck our authoritah.
On top of that, the US has the clanking cojones to demand that banks everywhere in the world comply with its tax regime, and that every single packet of communication on the planet be subject to its spying.
At what point do we look down and notice that we're dressed entirely in black armor, while holding a red lightsaber in one hand, and twirling the well-waxed end of our luxurious handlebar moustache with the other? Not only have we become the bad guys, but we have become a Hollywood caricature of badguyness.
Hence the giant octopus. A normal bad guy hides his nefarious deeds behind a banal logo and seal. An over-the-top, booed-by-the-audience bad guy makes his logo into a tentacled beast devouring the entire world.
What makes you think that people want a change in policy, in some substantive sort of way? There is a reason that third parties in the U.S. are ridiculed: most people don't agree with any of their positions. Few people are far enough to the right that they want to get rid of the Department of Education like the libertarians, or far enough to the left that they want to revive the power of the labor unions, like the greens. People who opposed Iraq turned around and exerted the President to get into Syria.
> The US has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the world, mostly over Prohibition.
An interesting aspect of the original Prohibition was that it was, at the time, perceived as a triumph of Democracy. It was deeply intertwined with the women's suffrage movement, and succeeded despite the enormous power, money, and influence of the alcohol manufacturers. It succeeded despite the fact that at the time, the federal government derived 1/3 of its revenue from liquor taxes.
The drug war is bad, sure, but it's a sign of a misguided democracy not an authoritarian regime. I grew up in the suburbs in the early 1990's, surrounded by soccer moms shrieking "just say no!" This year was the first time since 1969 that a majority of Americans supported decriminalizing marijuana: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/marijuana-legalization.... Not ending the drug war, just decriminalizing the most harmless of the drugs. And not "likely voters" but a group including lots of young people who won't vote to effectuate that policy. You can't look at the drug war and call it some sort of failure of democracy, a slide into Stalinist despotism.
> And the millions we have killed are mostly in other countries that do not respeck our authority.
There is a big difference between killing people in other countries and killing people in our own country.
> to demand that banks everywhere in the world comply with its tax regime
Doesn't seem unreasonable, considering that banks everywhere transact with or through the United States.
Many people at Guantanamo Bay were not captured on any battlefield. Unless of course you define the whole world as a battlefield (as the White House does). That has the unfortunate consequence of transforming citizens into terrorists suspects too and suspending their rights.
They are not prisoners of war. Treatment of POWs is covered by all sorts of international treaties. Guess what? Waterboarding is not exactly sanctioned by any of those.
Nope, our government has defined them as "unlawful enemy combatants," whatever the fuck those are. Basically, it means that we can hold them without trial until the "Global War on Terror" is over. I will ask again, how are these not political prisoners?
"The Northern Alliance took him into custody in Jalalabad on 24 November 2001, and passed him to the Americans. The US routinely paid ransom for Arabs handed over to them."
"Status: Cleared for release in 2007. Still held at Guantanamo."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaker_Aamer
I will grant you, if you want to narrowly define political prisoner to someone who is exclusively a political dissident, you are right. How do you classify people held for over a decade without charges? The political prisoner label is expedient because it implies that the reasons for holding that person are that they are simply undesirable, and that they should not be allowed to be a part of a society; not because they are guilty of some specific act. Hell, even political prisoners get their day in kangaroo court. We have not even put up show trials for these men.
That understates the case. "Cleared for release" means that the process has already determined that they do not need to be held. Its, arguably, worse than not giving him a chance to prove that he shouldn't be held -- we've already determined that he shouldn't be held and are holding him anyway.
(And Aamer's case is particularly bad, even among Guatanamo cases, because, unlike the cases of detainees where no country is willing to accept them on release, Aamer has legal status as a non-citizen resident of the UK and the UK has repeatedly requested his release by the US.)
However, this has nothing to do with the comparison between the U.S. and Stalinist Russia. The latter detained Russian citizens because of their political opposition to the regime. Those are political prisoners. Or, for other examples, people like Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for political opposition to the South African government.
There is an enormous difference between a country's internal political institutions and its shortcomings in the conduct of war on foreign soil with respect to foreigners. You can't just pretend these are the same thing. This is a distinction that American law takes very seriously: John Walker Lindh was recognized as an American, despite being captured with Afghan fighters in Afghanistan, was never held in Guantanamo, and was given a criminal trial in the U.S.
Trials and due process are protections that Americans are entitled to when they are accused of crimes. Foreigners suspected of making war against the U.S. and captured on foreign soil are simply not entitled to these things. It's not a "crime" to wage war against the U.S., it's not something that falls within the jurisdiction of criminal courts. It's something that falls within the sovereign right of a nation to defend itself against foreign attackers. The rules and standards of conduct are totally different.
Trials and due process are protections that everyone, regardless of citizenship status, are afforded in this country. If you disagree, check out how many illegal immigrants are currently incarcerated.
I fundamentally disagree with your assessment. Terrorism is in fact a crime, with plenty of statutes covering exactly what it is. Declaring a war on terror is like declaring a war on communism, when does it end? Where do the battles take place?
I am honestly trying to wrap my mind around your position here. Are you saying that you think we should be able to lock people up -- potentially forever -- on the word of people who were compensated financially for turning over "terrorists?" How can you reconcile that with anything the US supposedly stands for?
Of course this should be used in our world by an AC 130 gunship.
Someone once said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but I don't know who.
Define "evil" and "America"? Seeing how war profiteers sending off your young into wars, and making everyone else pay for toys that are just as mind boggingly expensive as they are mind boggingly useless for anything but murder and control, doesn't seem to either count as "evil" or as perpetrating it against "America".
> we still have elections
Oh yeah. "Hope And Change! Now That I Got This Fuck You". Rinse, repeat.
> aren't sending political prisoners to siberia
No, you send them to Gitmo or black sites. Snowden is stuck in Russia. Manning got tortured right at home.
> we haven't killed tens of millions of our own people
Well, the private prison industry is more profitable, is it not? http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/blog/%E2%80%9Clockup-quot...
Indeed, why kill people when you can milk them? Murdering millions of people is very low tech, and unless, you use very expensive weaponry others pay for, just not profitable. From a capitalistic viewpoint it's plain dumb. I think that explains more than any "values" you might think are present at higher echolons of power.
Those liberals who opposed the war in Iraq and voted for Obama turned right around and cheered for intervention in Syria. It's not some failure of democracy when people get what they want.
> No, you send them to Gitmo or black sites. Snowden is stuck in Russia. Manning got tortured right at home.
One U.S. citizen was ever held in Guantanamo, and he was caught fighting against the U.S. in Afghanistan. He was transferred out. Snowden is stuck in Russia because he doesn't want to face charges for crimes he committed. Manning submitted to military justice by joining the military.
> Well, the private prison industry is more profitable, is it not? http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/blog/%E2%80%9Clockup-quot....
I very strongly oppose private prisons, but it's utterly ridiculous to compare them to the Stalinist regime. 8% of Americas prisoners are in private prisons. The number became substantially more than 0% only in this decade, while we've been imprisoning poor minorities in huge numbers since the 1980's and 1990's. In other words, they're a response to incarceration rates, not something driving those incarceration rates.
It's not really a compelling argument to point to a random list of bad things about America then say "it's just like Stalinist Russia." There's no thought or reason in your argument, just vituperative handwaving.
> It's not really a compelling argument to point to a random list of bad things about America then say "it's just like Stalinist Russia."
Then point to where someone said that? Let me quote it:
The kicker is a comment that juxtaposes the logo with a warning illustration saying "Know your communist enemy" with a nearly-identical logo, presumably implying an evil enemy from the Cold War, which we have become.
An enemy. Not "just like Stalinist Russia". Nobody was even talking of Stalin... Yes, the Soviets were also an enemy to their own people, but I read the above as the US slowly but surely becoming an evil enemy to others. That your population even is for letting people rot in Gitmo (not because there is even a shred of evidence against them, but because they might "turn terrorist"), or don't terribly mind extrajudicial killings, by drone or otherwise, or aggressive wars doesn't even matter. That it's (in your eyes) a functioning democracy isn't relevant either: it's like the Nazis aren't excused by everybody voting for Hitler or screaming for total war. If murder of foreigners is somehow less wrong to some, then that doesn't make it less of murder, it makes it worse in my books. And while you could quibble about scale, I would respond that if a friend of yours killed 1 person, you would probably not want to be their friend anymore, at all - instead of saying "at least it wasn't 10, 100 or 1000". Also, the US is not stingy when it comes to scale or brutality, either.
I believe there was a rather long coup of the US by the CIA starting with the Kennedy assassination where we saw the cabal surrounding GHW Bush, largely starting in the 70s, with Bush, Rumsfeld Cheney and many others in their circle which have been in unquestionable power for nearly 40 years now. The NSA, CIA, NRO are tools of this group, where there is effectively an "inner circle" of the intelligence community which has far more insidious motives and methods for maintaining their position of control, which allows them to direct world wide warfare and economic matters for the benefit of themselves.
The "military" is an exceptionally well manipulated tool for this end.
I am posting from my phone so I'd like to go more I detail when I get to a machine.
Cheney is largely the architect of the current government/military/contractor system where he worked from the position of sec. Of defense under Bush to change how the military was structured to make it a larger profit center for a small number of connected contracting companies.
The Clinton's are CIA assets controlled through their Mena Ar drug running activities and as such was "allowed" to run as the democratic figure head because the back end wasn't going to change.
So, if you think that there is not a nefarious group at the center of the current architecture of the military industrial complex striving to control everything, then you may have not been paying close enough attention to the action of these groups, and individuals, and been listening too much to the programming of your "news" sources.
This is not to say that the US military is all "bad" but you'd be completely nave to see it as anything more than a tool used by a very specific interest. Just look at the false "intelligence" lies that they tried to use to profit from attacking Syria. And the "punishment" they exacted by shutting down the government when they were stood up to.
You're giving these people way too much credit. Military and intelligence patches are all about bravado and "USA #1" not some sophisticated and cryptic critique of their employer. I've had a long time interest in this stuff and let me tell you, its all tasteless and dumb, with the occasional touch of humor. The patch critical of the USG simply wouldn't be approved. There's no big anti-US message here. Its exactly as it seems.
To me it shows that the people in the agency are oblivious to the rest of the world outside of the agency.
There have been a bunch of embarrassing revelations about domestic and foreign spying, but instead of being embarrassed or ashamed like they should be, they're as gung-ho and bold as ever.
It's no wonder there have been so many slip ups when they're so clueless about public perception. It doesn't take a secret spy agency to realize this logo would not go over well.
It's fairly well-established that this is by design.
[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_pa...
Can't make this shit up
Like, seriously, what if they were all like that?
Clearly, the patches are silly and I don't know why I care so much about this
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2012/09/sneake...
Cocaine Intelligence Unit: http://i.imgur.com/2RFM677.jpg Unicorn: http://i.imgur.com/QOsCRYE.jpg
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/secret-insignias-fro...
http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/top-10-most-sinist...
Patches seem more like a game of one-upmanship.
I do like this patch's story, sounds just like something a bunch of engineers would come up with:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/NROL49_pa...
> This patch for NROL-49 depicts a phoenix rising from the flames with the flag of the United States in the background. The Latin words “Melior Diabolus Quem Scies” roughly translates to mean “The Devil You Know,” as in the phrase “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know”. Cryptic. According to NASA, this saying refers to the return of the use of an old system after attempting to use a new one, which had resulted in failure.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No._617_Squadron_RAF
The so-called "Dambusters" motto was "Apres moi les deluge"
Wikipedia tells us that NROL-39's payload is actually a Topaz synthetic aperture radar (SAR) node, flying in constellation with two others already in operation, and two more to come.
This is essentially not-at-all-threatening to civil liberties, being a ground-elevation mapping platform (and to a second order, some degree of surface roughness), of not particularly good resolution, at a semi-polar low earth orbit. There are commercial counterparts to this that are presently in operation, like TanDEM-X, and an order of magnitude improvement on that constellation's capabilities would remain insufficient to track anything particularly interesting beyond the construction over time of large static structures, with a relatively long revisit time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NRO_Launches
This is an intelligence mission, it's just one of the least sinister of all the intelligence missions that can be performed from space. We are performing those missions - just not on this launch.
> the project was killed in what the Times report calls "perhaps the most spectacular and expensive failure in the 50-year history of American spy satellite projects."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reconnaissance_Office...
They spent more money than the entire GDP of about 90+ countries for a single spy satellite:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...
A big portion of that money went to Boeing:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/washington/11satellite.htm...
The previous-generation Larcosse radint satellites were capable of vehicle-sized resolution and were also tasked with post-strike damage assessment. Before-and-after action radar imagery could be collected regardless of cloud cover.
Of all the issues with surveillance, I can't believe this story is getting any oxygen.
There is a huge psychological factor in the DoD about making people believe you have the biggest stick and can see everything. Kind of like putting an alarm company sign outside of your door to prevent theives.
http://vigilantcitizen.com/vigilantreport/top-10-most-sinist...
http://www.thelivingmoon.com/45jack_files/03files/Mission_Pa...
The level of sheer insanity displayed in the latest revelations however, with yesterday's "horde of Orcs" and this sickening slogan "nothing is beyond our reach" is worse than I could have imagined.
US intelligence has not just gone beyond what is acceptable, they've completely gone off the reservation and have lost all perspective. Historically, this doesn't end well.
Doesn't end well for us the little people. Those who operate in the shadows, those have the power to play these games probably have it a lot better since they undoubtedly operate outside the rules they set for the rest of us (witness the lack of accountability shown by anyone who has ever been involved in any of these shenanigans).
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1991-08-31/news/9102020946_...
In this kind of system, nobody is safe, and nobody wins.
There is no reason to think that today's system would end up the same way without some huge counter-balancing force that I'm afraid I do not see in today's world order.
It is slapping you in the face and laughing at it just because they can. Someone said "Hey I bet I can do this and get away with it. Here hold mah beer, watch me draw a giant octupus devouring the earth!"
So yes, it is frightening, but only since colonial America.
http://www.kerbalcomics.com/2012/07/30/episode-12-fighting-s...
This guy looked in the future somehow. I'm pretty sure about it.
Just finishing "The Zenith Angle"
One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.
BTW NCIS wont need this as they have Jethro Gibbs just run every thing past him and if he doesn't hit you on the back of the head your golden.
I did have a laugh though but I would very much appreciate not needing to laugh at it at all. What I did say is that it doesn't matter if you think you are smart or not, laughing of certain things have no relation whatsoever with being smart or not.
This one will do.
F- these guys.
Seriously.
Should have gone with System X guys
Let that sink in for a minute.
It's the mindset of crazies.
Filed under "unintentional gallows humor".
Their job is not to call attention for themselves and now that attention was called, their job is not to make it worse. We all agree they have a job to do (even if we cannot agree whether the job is necessary) and this kind of publicity makes it harder to do it.
U mad bro?