Evilolive

SECRET CODEWORDS OF THE NSA: EVILOLIVE
woodblock print (mokuhanga)
6" x 6" (152.4 x 152.4 mm)
8 layers of color plus blind emboss on Kochi Kozo paper
edition: 20

E is for evilolive. The word evilolive is a palindrome, which I think reveals just how clever the NSA really is. I didn't realize that evilolive is a palindrome (reads the same backward or forward) until I carved it, because relief printmaking requires the image to be rendered backwards. But now I'm wise to them.

I'm not the only one who's gotten wise to them. Glenn Greenwald wrote about the evilolive program in one of his post-Snowden revelation articles for the Guardian. Here's a excerpt:

The NSA … intended the program, codenamed EvilOlive, for "broadening the scope" of what it is able to collect. It relied, legally, on "FAA Authority," a reference to the 2008 Fisa Amendments Act that relaxed surveillance restrictions.

This new system, SSO [Special Source Operations] stated in December, enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic. "The 1EF solution is allowing more than 75% of the traffic to pass through the filter," the SSO December document reads. "This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories."

It continued: "After the EvilOlive deployment, traffic has literally doubled." [emphasis mine]

For me, the NSA's palindrome brought to mind Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl. Google images delivered up a delicious picture of Olive Oyl stomping around like a big amazon bully, so I dressed her in red white and blue and put a cable in her hands.

Evilolive. You go, girl, but we're closing in on you.