The
freaky Dark Side of the Moon-style design looks like something a Bond
villain would use – but it does sum up the surveillance program pretty
neatly
The Prism logo.
What does
a top secret surveillance program need, aside from the ability to spy on virtually every
internet
user, and the sense not to mention it to anyone? If you answered: "a
really freaky logo", there may be a job for you at the National Security
Agency.
Some people may question the wisdom of going to a lot of
trouble to create a design – especially one that owes a tremendous debt
to
Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover
– for a $20m spy initiative that no one is meant to know about. But the
Prism logo certainly illustrates the programme's undisclosed mission:
we collect the white light of the world's personal data – all of it –
and refract it into an array of information we can use to keep America
safe. One colour is evil foreigners plotting terrorist atrocities, the
other is your Facebook photos and your internet dating profile. We never
get them mixed up. The whole logo is surrounded by an irregular polygon
that vaguely resembles a key. It's like something a Bond villain might
put on his website.
The Information Awareness Office logo
The Prism logo is slightly more opaque than the one used by the US
government's Information Awareness Office, which boasted an all-seeing
eye atop a pyramid, casting a golden light across an adjacent planet
Earth. They might just as well have used the motto "We Spy on Absolutely
Everybody". It's more than a little disturbing to think that someone of
influence within the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency once
looked at a rough sketch of that and said: "Yeah, cool."
The eye-on-the-pyramid scheme came from the Great Seal of the
United States
– it's on the back of the dollar bill – and is still beloved of
conspiracy theorists all over the world. It's meant to be the all-seeing
eye of God, but it's also commonly associated with freemasonry, the
occult and a shadowy New World order presided over by the Illuminati. To
deploy it in a logo for a creepy-sounding spy agency simply justifies
the paranoia of people who think the world is run by lizard-shaped
aliens. David Icke's next podcast will write itself.
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