My wife was working for the NRO's agency-private data center for applications that couldn't be hosted atop Amazon's cloud service in C2S, and it somehow ended u

My wife was working for the NRO's agency-private data center for applications that couldn't be hosted atop Amazon's cloud service in C2S, and it somehow ended up with the initials "RC" which nobody really knew what it meant, so they either called it "Rodeo Clown" or "Rogue Central," depending on who you asked. When they had a renaming contest put to a vote, I can't remember what actually won, but #2 was "Totally Not a Government Death Ray Facility." Believe it or not, the hackers working for spy agencies are exactly the same nerds as the hackers working for wherever the rest of you work. They have senses of humor. My personal favorite piece of NSA software was "Bilbo Badger." A sibling comment mentioned the NROL39 Octopus mission patch. The latest next great vehicle they launched late last year had a motto written in Elvish. I remember when they first showed it to us before the launch, I thought it might have been the Black Tongue of Mordor, but it took maybe 20 minutes to find someone on the program who recognized it and could translate it. The program I was on at the time, which ran the ground processing for that vehicle, was code named "Lateralus," which is a Tool album, and my wife's old program after the RC one, was code named "Rush," the old Canadian prog rock band. It was the program that ran the Sentient software, the thing people get all freaked out about as some government AI autonomous control system like Eagle Eye or Enemy of the State or some shit. When they renewed the contract in January, the new code name became "Cyberdyne," in honor of all the public paranoia over what they're doing. If you think it's embarrassing to have nerd names for stuff, you should see what the people look like. My first boss there had purple hair, never wore shoes, and wore a different wolf shirt every day of the week. I'm not sure who you think goes to work at places like this. There's a reason 80% of the NRO mission patches are wizards and dragons.