Quantumhand

 

SECRET CODEWORDS OF THE NSA: QUANTUMHAND

woodblock print (mokuhanga)
6" x 6" (152.4 x 152.4 mm)
5 layers of color plus blind emboss on Kochi Kozo paper
edition: 20

Pickings were slim for the letter Q when I first began working on this project, but luckily Glenn Greenwald offered a wonderful Q word from the Snowden files in March of 2014: Quantumhand. Quantumhand, a program which the NSA denies vigorously, is an initiative whereby an NSA computer pretends to be a Facebook server in order to infect targets with surveillance malware. You may have read articles recently about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg calling President Obama to complain about this. The revelation comes from several Snowden files, including the interesting (and typically ugly) powerpoint slide contained in this article on Greenwald's web site.

Hmm. And I thought that one of the jobs of American security agencies would be to protect Americans from hackers…