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NSA posters from the 50s and 60s [pdf]
- schoen 8y agoAnd also the 70s, seemingly, even though the request didn't specify that.
- drfuchs 8y agoSpecifically, 6614806 is clearly from 1970. And that's John Travolta from 1977's "Saturday Night Fever" in 6614848. Also interesting that there are various images of paper and filing cabinets, but no computers or terminals.
- rootw0rm 8y agowhat on earth is with the black telephone hanging by a noose? some of these are pretty interesting.
- momzer 8y agoSomething along the lines of "careful what you say over unsecured phone lines, as it may come back and hang you".
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoThat's the normal phone everyone used. Today, it would be a mobile. And talking about classified info, or even unclassified, but related stuff, was tantamount to sending out a broadcast
- user982 8y ago"Hang up the phone."
- madaxe_again 8y agoSpot the person who spent their childhood watching https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchphrase_(UK_game_show) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catchphrase_(UK_game_show)
- bunkydoo 8y ago? doesnt load
- mirimir 8y agoIt's a huge pdf. Maybe just download in background.
- HoochTHX 8y agoSome of those are very disturbing.
- bigiain 8y ago" ... government of the state, by the state, for the state ... " (The more things change, the more they stay the same...)
- saagarjha 8y agoI'm pretty sure that one was meant to show communism, with "under God" cross out and people replaced with state, supposedly with the blood of the revolution.
- mikec3010 8y ago"dont talk yourself to death" https://i.imgur.com/nEh2rIU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/nEh2rIU.jpg
- walshemj 8y agoLike the way the use Big Ben (Elizabeth Tower) as an example of those dangerous subversive places where beat combos run wild.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoSome trippy posters in there. My favorite was the one where all of the NSA employees had lock mouths. I was surprised how religious some of these were, beyond just "Merry Christmas, don't forget about security" e.g "Christian ideals created freedom"
- NamTaf 8y agoTo be honest I'm not particularly surprised that there's a religious undercurrent to them. I don't exactly know how to quantify it, but as an outsider that's just sort of how I'd expect US propaganda posters to be. The US has always been particularly outwardly religious, so I guess I sort of expect it to play to those sensibilities when making these.
- hapless 8y agoToday, it's hilariously illegal to put this kind of thing in an official employee communication. No government agency would even dream it. Even in the 1960s, that kind of overtly religious appeal would have been very, VERY controversial. This kind of material _never_ appeared in military stuff, and I am very surprised to see it in NSA publications.
- closeparen 8y agoIt was the Red Scare. We added “under God” to the pledge of allegiance on the theory that undercover commies would explode if they tried to say it. I’m not surprised.
- user982 8y ago> Even in the 1960s, that kind of overtly religious appeal would have been very, VERY controversial. This kind of material _never_ appeared in military stuff... The Air Force barred an airman from reenlisting because he would not say "so help me God" in his oath, in 2014.[0] [0]: https://www.yahoo.com/news/atheist-must-swear-god-leave-us-air-force-232153866.html https://www.yahoo.com/news/atheist-must-swear-god-leave-us-a...
- Palomides 8y agojust mirrored to imgur: https://imgur.com/a/30Co0Q2 https://imgur.com/a/30Co0Q2
- Iv 8y ago"Men must be governed by God or they will be rules by tyrans" Ah... O tempora, o mores...
- jhanschoo 8y agoHeh, Cicero wouldn't have said that himself; he was a republican and would advocate for the rule and freedom of the patricians and senators, rather than mob rule or kingly rule. Theocratic rulership was definitely out of the question.
- flashman 8y agoWhat strikes me (besides NSA apparently meaning 'Non-Secular Americans') is that a lot of these posters don't have the design flair and inspiration of, say, WWII propaganda posters.
- badrabbit 8y agoThey would be using opposing themes today. Those posters were made for their time. Surely you don't think the NSA was led by religious people no more than the Donald Trump administration is led by Christians. They'd be screaming islamic chants in arabic if it helped their political goals.
- user982 8y agoThe NSA's existence was still not publicly acknowledged when some of these were commissioned (the versatile initialism then being "No Such Agency"), which may have shrunk the artist pool.
- pvg 8y agoMost of these are pretty basic workplace safety posters, they don't really have the same purpose (or attention lavished on them) as posters aimed at the public during a war.
- fenwick67 8y agoWell to be fair this is a random assortment and not a cherry-picked list of the most interesting ones.
- RoyWynn 8y agoKind of unnerving how a lot of those propaganda posters would be almost ironic to use in today's societal setting; or maybe its more unsettling how most people today don't care about having their rights infringed upon.
- badrabbit 8y agoYou know,the scary thing about the US intelligence community isn't that they all are "after out liberties" or "againsy our privacy". My experience and encounters related to the IC scare me because they genuinely believe they're the good guys who're on the right side of justice. The real scary part is that they are scared of what will happen if they don't do something (where something entails disregarding laws and the will of the people). I would rather they be "after me" than scared of me. I hope academics consider this before getting into bed with them. They don't just have a subersive mission,they're making decisions out of fear.
- whatshisface 8y agoFear brings money to security agencies like products bring money to corporations. I'm sure if you visited Apple you'd see a lot of iPhones.
- schoen 8y ago> The real scary part is that they are scared of what will happen if they don't do something In the context of these posters, the implied "what will happen" is mostly worldwide Communist revolution with the U.S. losing the Cold War. You can see that for example in the poster depicting the edited version of the Gettysburg Address, which someone commented on elsewhere in this thread. The concern is worldwide totalitarianism on the Soviet model, and that's mostly the danger that these posters are meant to allude to and frighten the NSA staff with. If you say the wrong thing at Christmas dinner, Communism may win. That sounds like a joke nowadays, but I'm sure it didn't sound like a joke to the people who created the posters or the people who saw them every day. Both sides of the Cold War fought it super-hard. One problem that the people making the posters left out is that the Cold War also led to vastly bigger, stronger, more secretive states—including on the NATO side. It led to creative people being given billions upon billions of dollars to dream ever-bigger dreams about military and intelligence capabilities. We still don't even know what some of those dreams were, partly because generations of classification holders brought up on these posters and other versions of them have taken them to heart so strongly. So, we've got states that continue to be extraordinarily ambitious and capable in some ways that they don't really want anybody to talk about. To me, that's a tragic legacy of the Cold War. If the people who made the Gettysburg Address poster were serious in their concern for the state's apotheosis, they might have done well to also consider how "war is the health of the state"—evidently, whether it runs hot or cold. We kind of know about some parts of the nuclear side of that, and we kind of know about some parts of the espionage and covert action side of that, but these parts all kind of hurt to think about and the people who've dreamt and are still dreaming those billion-dollar dreams would mostly just as soon that we didn't go too far down the rabbit holes.
- mrob 8y agoAnyone recognize the paper tape format on page 103? I wonder if they included some hidden message in it. EDIT: I manually transcribed the clearest part of the tape to binary (the start of the tape is the center of the poster, and it's viewed from behind at the part I transcribed), and pasted it into the converter at: https://v2.cryptii.com/ita2/text https://v2.cryptii.com/ita2/text Binary: "00100 00011 01100 01001 00100 00101 00111 10110 00001 01010 00110 11000 01010 00100 10010 00001 00011 01001 00001 01010 00101 10100 00110 10110 010001 00100 00010 111001 10100 111101 00110 00101 00100 00111 01100 00110 10111 00111 00001 00100 01110 11000 01100 10000 01010 00110 11001 00111 10000 00110 11000 01100 00101 00000 110101 101001 00011 01100 01001 00100 00011 01110 10100 00110 00001 11110 00001 11100 00001 01100 10000 00101 00100 11100 00011 10000 00001 01010 00110 00011 10010 10010 10101 00100 00011 00110 01001 00001 01001 00100 10000 11000" Decoded: " and superior leadership his unique contributionsand achievements materially aided to" Decoded, with the mysterious sixth bits deleted: " and superior leadership mhvis unique contributionsghand achievements materially aided to" Unless the sixth bits have some hidden meaning, this appears to be just management's praise for somebody. It's tedious to transcribe manually, and a lot of it is unreadable, so I'll stop here.
- netsec_burn 8y agoI was wondering the same thing.
- fotbr 8y agoLooks like standard RTTY (Radioteletype) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioteletype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioteletype
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- yuubi 8y agoIt looks like the sixth bit is used as rubout (even though per wikipedia, the 0x1f code, letter-shift, was normally used for that purpose).
- DonHopkins 8y agoA had a few NCSC security posters that look like they came from the same art department, which I scanned: Uncle Sam pointing: I want to protect the information in YOUR computer. https://i.imgur.com/e0a67w9.jpg https://i.imgur.com/e0a67w9.jpg Santa shooshing: He does not give away PASSWORDS. SHOULD YOU? https://i.imgur.com/ZZDXBBn.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ZZDXBBn.jpg Pirate and Spy: Pirate or Thief? Respect Copyright. It's the law. https://i.imgur.com/Oa8DDeU.jpg https://i.imgur.com/Oa8DDeU.jpg And I took screenshots from that PDF of my favorites: Magician pulling rabbit out of hat: No Trick to Security. It's Just Common Sense. https://i.imgur.com/9EvTtsI.png https://i.imgur.com/9EvTtsI.png People with safe dials in their mouths: Put Security Where Your Mouth Is. https://i.imgur.com/WAbAEuM.png https://i.imgur.com/WAbAEuM.png Hot pink poster with James Dean in a sultry pose with his arm draped around a safe: Up tight and out of sight. (I'll refrain from cracking any safe sex jokes!) https://i.imgur.com/dBv13kU.png https://i.imgur.com/dBv13kU.png
- weber111 8y agoA little off-topic, but clicking imgur "direct" links on mobile redirects you to the standard m.imgur.com URL now? Eww.
- eganist 8y agoThey started enforcing this pretty strictly in the last few weeks. It's a massive turnoff as a service, but considering they're a "social network" now and not just a reddit-specific image host, it's not a surprise.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoAh, the undending cycle of image hosting services. First they start clean and useful, then they gradually degrade in an increased effort to be profitable, then they get replaced by something new that's clean and useful...
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoOnly for as long as initial investor money lasts I guess. There's just no money to be made in 'free' image hosting without starting to do some nasty tactics, mostly involving direct (hot) linking.
- jugg1es 8y agoThese are amazing. So many to choose from.
- bunkydoo 8y agoThis is creepy as fuck. These fuckers ought to be held accountable
- schoen 8y agoI'm happy to see them "held accountable" in a number of senses, but this is mostly just Cold War security culture stuff to try to mitigate the impact of Soviet spying on U.S. spy agencies. It doesn't seem to be encouraging the viewer to be more aggressive, ambitious, extralegal, deceptive, or whatever. The mission patches that Trevor Paglen has collected are like 80 times creepier to me. They remind me of "His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono; / imperium sine fine dedi."
- dang 8y agoCould you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
- AdamM12 8y agoPretty dope. Downloading these. Might have them wide format printed to hang at my house.
- strictnein 8y agoWish I could get some of these full sized and in original quality.
- 2bitencryption 8y agowould definitely hang up a few of these in the office if they were good scans
- meric 8y agoI hope the "That this nation shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the state by the state for the state shall not perish from the Earth" (with "under God" struck out) poster meant something other than its literal meaning...
- doommius 8y agoIf the there higher res of these? I'm considering printing some and hanging around.
- nagbava 8y agoSimple question about these (great) posters : whats their legal statuts regarding IP ? Possible use for commercial purpose ? Obligation to mention the source ? I'd love to use them for presentation about security. Any link to information about that would be very welcome too.
- novium 8y agoThis should be applicable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_the_U.S._government https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_work_by_th...
- nagbava 8y ago"The U.S. government asserts that it can still hold the copyright to those works in other countries." Going a little further I read : "the U.S. Government may obtain protection in other countries depending on the treatment of government works by the national copyright law of the particular country." (from the CENDI FAQ), which is adequate with private international law. Anyway, thank you !
- madaxe_again 8y agoI was going to ask the same - and it seems they're essentially public domain. I'm going to paint a few of these on ten foot high canvasses, to adorn the lair.
- wodenokoto 8y agoIn what context did these exist? Were they posted on streets or in schools? Or were they internal posters, hung around NSA offices?
- argestes 8y agoWhat does poster on page 25 (No: 20, ID 6614809) mean and who is that guy?
- enigmango 8y agoThe man in the foreground appears to be George Washington. There's some barely visible text in the space above the cannon ("Pri"; "Lib") but I can't make out the rest (I'd guess something about liberty).
- veddox 8y agoI suspect it's meant to portray George Washington at Valley Forge (where he spent a winter with his army during the War of Independence). From Wikipedia: "Valley Forge long occupied a prominent place in American storytelling and memory. The image of Valley Forge as a site of terrible suffering and unshakeable perseverance emerged years after the encampment ended." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Forge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_Forge)
- enigmango 8y agoMore info: After messing around with the image levels, the faded text shows as "Eternal Vigilance is the price of Liberty" (a quote which has been incorrectly attributed to numerous famous figures: https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/eternal-vigilance-price-liberty-spurious-quotation https://www.monticello.org/site/jefferson/eternal-vigilance-...) (https://i.imgur.com/hkKrb8o.png https://i.imgur.com/hkKrb8o.png)
- philip1209 8y ago> "Don't TALK yourself to death!" That's macabre - I interpret it as "leak classified information and we will kill you"
- flyingfences 8y agoI think it's more of a "leak classified information and they'll find out how to kill all of us".
- jimmy1 8y agoMight be tangibly related -- and honestly I have no dog in this fight -- but it seems that a certain sect of our political parties really are trying to eliminate or counter the narrative that America was founded on Judeo-Christian values must have complete blinders on when it comes to history of this country, and just flipping through some posters from the 50's and 60s made it very apparent that it was the prevailing value in this country. Say what you want for bigotry, the patriarchy, or whathaveyounot, but you cannot deny the impact, and the unifying value system this country used to all share which is yet another reason, among many, for the large divisions in our society today.
- st26 8y agoI probably shouldn't bother, but- America was founded by a bunch of Christians, and some of the country's construction surely was influenced by that. However America was NOT founded as a Christian state. Where the left & right butt heads over this is usually when, for example, pro-lifers say "God clearly forbids abortion and America is a Christian state so our laws must follow the Bible", and pro-choicers say "Uh, no, this is not a Christian state, the Bible does not set our laws".
- jimmy1 8y agoAnd this is NOT what I am saying, I said it was founded on Judeo-Christian principles.
- st26 8y agoThen, I guess I have to ask you to be more specific about who is trying to erase that from history. I don't think many people dispute the faith of our founders.
- wnoise 8y agoIt was founded on Enlightenment principles, some of which are deliberately conflated with Judeo-Christian principles, but are actually quite distinct.
- 8y ago
- aristocles 8y agoWhat did they mean by this? https://i.imgur.com/AOpGYD2.jpg https://i.imgur.com/AOpGYD2.jpg
- apotatopot 8y agocan someone adjust the colors so printing them wouldn't take so much ink? I don't have the skill.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]