“A little sinister!!” The story behind National Reconnaissance Office’s octopus logo by JPat Brown.
From the post:
When the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) announced the upcoming launch of their NROL-39 mission back in December 2013, they didn’t get quite the response they had hoped.
That might have had something to do with the mission logo being a gigantic octopus devouring the Earth.
The logo was widely lampooned as emblematic of the intelligence community’s tone-deafness to public sentiment. Incidentally, an octopus enveloping the planet also so happens to be the logo of SPECTRE, the international criminal syndicate that James Bond is always thwarting. So there’s that.
Privacy and security researcher Runa Sandvik wanted to know who approved this and why, so she filed a FOIA with the NRO for the development materials that went into the logo. A few months later, the NRO delivered.
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This is a great read and one you need to save to your local server. Especially for days when you think the U.S. government is conspiring against its citizens. It should be so well-organized.
All sorts of government outrages are the produce of the same decision making process as this lame looking octopus.
At the very least they could have gotten John Romita Jr. to do something a bit more creative:
More than “a little sinister” but why not be honest?