Nothing Escapes Us

Nothing Escapes Us—that’s the actual motto the NSA printed on their spy satellite. An octopus wrapping around the Earth. They really did that.

For months they’ve been taking heat for privacy violations so extensive and so blatant that lying about it became harder each week. The standard response from Washington was always the same: don’t worry, it’s not as bad as you think, go buy an ice cream and try to forget any of this is happening. Then they launched a satellite with a giant squid as its official emblem, the entire planet in its grip, and turned their mission statement into a joke that isn’t actually a joke.

At some point you have to figure out what’s going on in someone’s head. Is it stupidity? Is it actually possible that nobody in the room said anything about the sheer stupidity of advertising total surveillance with a monster consuming the world? Or is it something else—a kind of indifference that’s calculated, where they’ve decided the secret’s out anyway so they might as well own it. The octopus logo reads like the only honest thing they’ve ever produced.

That’s the thing about power at that scale. You don’t have to hide.