27 Essays 1.3 David Bennewith Talks to Metahaven

Playing card, Shadowfist role-player game, From ‘The Art of Roberto Campus’ (www.robertocampus.com), featuring illustration by Roberto Campus, 2003. posted 24 May 2007, screengrab. David Bennewith: With your experience in using design to engage in political dialogue, how did you respond to the NSA documents that began to leak in 2013? Metahaven: These documents confirmed suspicions that had been around at least since 2002, when Mark Klein, an AT&T engineer, discovered that the NSA had plugged into a San Francisco AT&T data centre and could monitor everything that passed through it. That was the first public sign that the NSA was spying on ordinary people on a massive scale. Snowden’s documents went on to reveal more of the global scope and magnitude of this surveillance. They showed the extent to which almost every element of digital infrastructure can be exploited by the state. Our fascination with these documents, however, lies in what they show about the culture in which that exploitation occurs—the myths and memes with which the NSA operates.

Are these myths and memes predominantly visual? They are partly visual, but they are also ideological. For instance, take the spying alliance between the US, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. By its very name this abstract superstructure of is frozen in a metaphor, an image of what that surveillance is. Power is bound to produce such symbols and America’s cyber-enemies need to be made tangible, concrete. When Julian Assange became well-known as the WikiLeaks founder and spokesperson, he was often cast as a ‘Bond villain’, an identifiable enemy of the West personified in the flesh.

What were your first impressions of the slides? How would you characterise their visual language? The slides felt improvised. We didn’t understand the terms and structures, yet, on closer inspection, the slides seemed to be built out of familiar visual material. With previous leaks, the content of the documents had been disturbing, but this was the first time to our knowledge that the graphics of secret documents were so important. The graphic language was not sophisticated at all. The slides have all the worst aspects of Windows, CorelDR AW, Corel Painter, and PowerPoint. They were shocking, not because of their design style, but because they were so unashamedly self-congratulatory. They exposed the primitive side of surveillance culture. The NSA leaks were a really important use of the politics of technology. This is something we’ve been working on for some time. In 2010, we started working with WikiLeaks, the

NSA slide, QUANTUMTHEORY program, published by The Intercept, 12 March 2014. 28 Metahaven 29 Essays

whistleblowing website. The Snowden revelations came after we had published the first they are glistening and child-like—but it’s a tainted innocence. The video plays on the fact of our ‘Captives of the Cloud’ articles. This series investigated the way that we, as users, are that people now know the icons. They have become a pop phenomenon to recycle and digest. abstracted from our data, from where it resides, and from what happens to it when we are not watching. The Snowden revelations affirmed a very important political dimension of this. Why did you credit the NSA at the end of the video? They put forward the idea that technology is almost being ‘weaponised’ against its users. When we showed the video to people, most recognised the logos straightaway. But it’s also important that people who don’t recognise them get an ‘a-ha’ moment. So we explicitly From a designer’s point of view, why were the slides bad? credited the NSA. If everyone that helped with the video is credited, then the NSA should Probably this aesthetic judgment is based in a long-standing graphic-designer dislike of the be credited too. Windows PC and its visual forms. Most designers grew up on the Mac side, and, to us, some of the most primitive Windows presentation tools are repulsive in their colour, materiality, What’s your impression of the cultural impact of the NSA slides on graphic design? type, and treatment—and therefore somehow fascinating. All this compounds in the NSA Some graphic designers tweeted that not only was the NSA a terrible organisation, it couldn’t slides, where this aesthetic seems to be implicated in a political conspiracy. even get its design sorted. They were concerned that NSA graphics were not up to the high standards of, say, the latest Radim Peskoˇ font design or the Werkplaats Typografie. It was as In the music video you made for Holly Herndon’s song Home (2014), you used graphics if the NSA would be more acceptable if it had more Joseph Goebbels to it, more swastika, from Snowden’s XKEYSCORE slides. How does a computer search system used by the more Leni Riefenstahl, less Big Momma’s House 3. That takes us back to the old Mac/PC NSA connect with this music? dichotomy—the politics of good and bad taste—and to deeper design ideologies. All designers Holly’s song is intimate and personal. She makes her music on a laptop and composes by using seem to be, by nature, stuck with some kind of illusion about good form. That means, when technology. The Snowden revelations made her look differently at the instrument in which there’s bad form, that becomes something to comment on, separate from what the form her music and life collided. Her intimate relationship with it was now disturbed by the all- was intended to do. The criticism of the NSA’s aesthetics by designers disregards what these seeing eye of the intelligence agencies, which can monitor its ingoing and outgoing traffic. practices embody and begs the question as to whether many designers would consider deep In Home, she explores her disappointment about this technology and understands her previous surveillance okay if the slides were just better designed. naïveté in looking at it. The idea of working with the NSA graphics emerged quickly for us. We isolated icons from the slides and used them as a sort of data veil. The icons rain into the There seems to be a confusion between what the NSA does internally and how it image, partially hiding Holly from the viewer, suggesting that the NSA is everywhere. We presents itself externally. imagined a teenager’s room, with NSA icons pasted up like wallpaper. Reappropriating the The NSA works in secret and its people have developed a special language to describe what icons into a context where they’re not normally used was fun. Sometimes the icons are they are doing to one another—an internal handshake. This language is memetic; it evolves redacted; sometimes they are marbled, taking on a more fashion-like appearance; sometimes, within a closed circle of agents, who are in on the joke. When the NSA Director Keith

Metahaven, ‘The Seizure of Megaupload.com; Using Super-Jurisdiction to Allege a Global Conspiracy’, Metahaven, video clip for Holly Herndon’s Home, RVNG Intl., 2014. from ‘Captives of the Cloud, Part 1’, E-Flux, 2012. 30 Metahaven 31 Essays

Alexander talks publicly, he talks about ‘9/11’ and ‘saving lives’, not about ‘PRISM’ and Can you give us an example of how this could work? ‘XKEYSCORE’. It’s interesting to compare the NSA slides with recent election-campaign Sure. Here’s one from the British intelligence agency, the GCHQ. They developed a virus to graphics. For instance, Barack Obama used the internet to win support, and his campaigns erase or extract information from computers and they called it ‘Ambassador’s Reception’. presented the internet and government itself as open, bright, and inclusive. His campaign used The name comes from a famous Ferrero Rocher chocolate TV advertisement from the 1990s: the typeface Gotham, which has got to be the Helvetica of okay American graphic design. By at a formal reception, an ambassador sends out a waiter with a big platter of chocolates and contrast, the NSA graphics show what the government is actually doing internally. They show everyone takes one. You can see the GCHQ chose this name for their virus because the ad a culture that is not just using the internet but exploiting and owning it. There’s a huge contrast suggests the viral spread of a trojan. But that name also tells you something about when the between the transparency espoused publicly in the Obama campaign and the NSA’s secretive virus was written, and suggests that the person who named it was probably in their late operations, which were never supposed to be seen by anyone outside the circle. The NSA thirties to mid-forties at the time. So, it’s possible to identify something about the people never wanted to present itself in the way we have come to see it through the Snowden leaks. involved from their choice of references.

So what do you want people to get out of the Snowden releases? That’s what Simon Denny and I have done with Secret Power. I was researching who We would like people to be aware of their communication devices and how they depend on might have made the NSA slides when I discovered the designer David Darchicourt. companies that collaborate with the NSA. But there’s also a risk that everyone pretends to Before going freelance, Darchicourt was employed by the NSA for 18 years. He worked understand how it all works and says, ‘Oh, the NSA, oh that.’ The Snowden revelations present a his way up to be art director, and was managing the studio at one stage. In his online dangerous idea about the mandate of government—in tandem with enterprise. That idea is that Behance profile, you can see the connection between his aesthetic and the NSA’s. private communications between citizens are now a thing of the past, and that this benefits us You think he had an involvement in the NSA’s internal branding of its programmes? He’s in his all: by virtue of seeing everything, the government can prevent anything. We are asked to have early fifties, so that would make sense. He lives in Maryland, which is close to Washington. unlimited faith in the institutions and the bureaucracies of government that are, practically The use of colour is full-on and unsophisticated, as in the NSA graphics. No colour is left out. speaking, beyond any kind of democratic oversight. It’s always full-spectrum. The NSA has something like 40,000 employees—so it’s like a small city. There’s a huge internal audience for the NSA’s internal brands and it’s useful to analyse them in order to Simon and I commissioned him to make a tuatara character for Secret Power. understand the NSA better. For example, when you compare the NSA’s iconography with its The brief was vague except to say that we wanted a character for a project about recent close collaborator, the military, you find important distinctions. The NSA’s iconography is New Zealand history. While we gave him little information, we got something back softer and more ambiguous. It’s not coming from a military culture, but from an office culture, that we feel is very relevant. One thing we didn’t ask for or expect was the cyborg a desktop culture. Because of this distinct culture it might even be possible, from a forensic enhancement Darchicourt made to the tuatara. perspective, to trace documents back to the NSA agents that made them.

Gregg Masuak Ambassador’s Reception 1993, TV advertisement for Ferrero Rocher. 32 Metahaven 33 Essays That’s the basic premise of working there and you can’t question it. You give up your broader sense of citizenship to become part of the NSA, and, once you’re inside, you can probably stay there for a long time.

Of course, the NSA’s critics also use graphic language. The Guardian microsite NSA Files: Decoded aims to make this complicated material accessible to a general public in a contemporary way. How successful is it? As a newspaper, the Guardian is amazing. We read it all the time. However, its investigative reporting forms only a fraction of its content. Much of its space is devoted to celebrities, recipes, parental and relationship issues, and other liberal first-world problems. We would probably not use the Guardian website to get our facts—we’re interested in quirkier, stranger things. The Guardian has a long-term agenda. It is not just focusing on being the world’s most important investigative newspaper, it is trying to reinvent the way information is presented. It invests in data visualisation and explores the creative possibilities of video. The entire website is open, it doesn’t have a paywall, but it operates from this rather nostalgic idea of a ‘general public’—the idea that there is some general audience of citizens wanting to be fully informed. The Guardian would like to think that if there are enough people concerned about these things, governments will not be re-elected. The way the NSA revelations have been accommodated across the political spectrum, though, shows that this kind of public has disappeared.

How have you responded to this disappearance in your own work? All our work is already ideologically aligned, whether people like it or not. As designers, we have abandoned the idea of a general public, not out of a lack of belief, but out of the lack of a common vocabulary. An alternative to the Guardian approach is questioning everything, including visual language. Our absurd infographics for ‘Captives of the Cloud’ take this idea in a cartoony direction. They are not data visualisations per se. They are meant for a different audience, an audience that wants to question not only the data but also its visualisation.

You’re saying, the Guardian approach is not enough—it’s an information cul-de-sac. The Guardian is certainly concerned by how complacent the general public is when the knowledge that the internet is being spied on can be simply accommodated. But the Guardian works with the conventional assumption that if it presents the relevant information clearly, there will be no reason why people won’t change their internet practices. But, of course, It’s striking how much your tuatara looks like the initial sketches an Australian illustrator people don’t. They do the same things as before, because of habit and because of lack of made for the WikiLeaks logo. Darchicourt’s tuatara is not a product of graphic-design alternatives. The transparent presentation of information does not change the political education, but from a different vernacular. Why did he make it transparent? reality unless there are enough viable, visible, and powerful alternatives to the media and to communication platforms that are being compromised. For us the tuatara idea was inspired by a transparent lizard we saw in an NSA ‘Security’ With the Guardian site, there is a distance created. Talking heads, data visualisations, graphic on Darchicourt’s profile. Conceptually, there’s an obvious link to ‘transparency distressed, decayed ‘copied’ aesthetics, etc. It all goes to make its subject look historic, of information’. archived, studied, and filed, when the reality is that the NSA’s practices are still ongoing. This is an interesting inversion of the old idea of transparency. For governments today, Visually, that makes it hard to read its urgency. The Guardian’s current presentation, with the transparency means citizens being stripped of their privacy. That’s the opposite of an older PRISM starting slide, makes it look as though ‘knowledge’ has landed, it’s accommodated, ideal of organisational transparency that implied government honesty and accountability to and now we can build our analysis. When you see the NSA slides though, the chaos of them, citizens. That ideal, which was born after World War I and temporarily flourished after World to us this reveals more about what the NSA is doing than all the Guardian’s experts talking War II, seems to have disappeared. The postwar dream of corporate and ‘systems’ design was about it. What the slides tell you is that this is a rogue operation. It is not vetted, there is to make everything orderly and transparent, in the service of the public. But the NSA’s secret no oversight at all. graphics invert that. The paradox is that now some of the world’s most influential graphic design is made in secret and for secret purposes. What role could graphic designers assume here? They could take on a more direct responsibility for determining what kind of information, Would you characterise the NSA graphics as having a corporate design approach, what kind of evidence, should be in the public realm. If we all repeat that our governments or lacking one? are perpetuating an invisible war whose consequences are not seen or felt because of Although there’s an apparently unregulated design chaos, that chaos corresponds to deeper ignorance or complacency, we might contribute to a greater awareness of this war. For sure, rules of office culture: Windows fonts (Arial vs. Helvetica) and PowerPoint aesthetics. The NSA we need to end it. has a very mainstream office culture. When people are being employed on this scale you get an office culture that has its intimate side. You could even call it ‘cosy’. We’ve watched a lot of NSA recruitment videos. They emphasise equality, unpretentiousness, and career opportunities. The NSA presents itself as a humane employer, open to all walks of life, but with one condition. You can’t work there and think independently—that’s ruled out. That’s clear from the recruitment videos. You have to accept this crude framework, where there’s the bad guys, and the NSA tries to stop them, and, in order to do that, it potentially needs to spy on everyone.

NSA Files: Decoded, Guardian microsite, screengrab, 2015.