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What 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.
A 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 Santa shooshing: He does not give away PASSWORDS. SHOULD YOU? https://i.imgur.com/ZZDXBBn.jpg Pirate and Spy: Pirate or Thief? Respect Copyright. It's the law. https://i.imgur.com/Oa8DDeU.jpg And I took screens…
A little off-topic, but clicking imgur "direct" links on mobile redirects you to the standard m.imgur.com URL now? Eww.
What 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.
Some 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"
I’m reasonably convinced that explains a fair bit of the “we are very publicly religions”part of the 1950s.
Some of those are very disturbing.
This is creepy as fuck. These fuckers ought to be held accountable
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."
You 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…
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.
