Apparently I'm grumpy beyond my years but I find these lighthearted jabs at the NSA counter-productive as they just trivialize what happened. I'd much rather see creations that will help bring about change, like shining a spotlight on the representatives that support these programs.<p>For instance Dianne Feinstein, <i>chair of the Senate Intelligence committee</i>, who said "the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future."
Nice deck, BUT this is Hacker News, so here's the customary negative feedback:<p>- the "what's the plan" slide is bad: it doesn't convey the original sense that other providers will join soon or have already joined. the tagline makes it look like it's a future plan, when it's actually describing the past.<p>- that "$20m" slide makes it look like it's a lot of money. The original clearly wanted to contextualise it and make it look cheap. ("just 20m for all these providers!")<p>- seriously? I got more data-per-square-inch from the original presentation.<p>- thin fonts are overdone and hard to read.<p>- VCs don't care about presentations anymore, I got in YC20xx by <clever social engineering episode>.
Imagine the uproar if the NSI hired a graphic designer of sorts to make their slides more attractive. I can see the moaning now "They spent HOW much of my tax money making those slides pretty?!?"<p>I expect the NSA's slide to be crappy, because you know, they're spies and stuff not graphic UX experts.
One of the most clever ways I've ever seen to sell yourself.. On par with the Oreo ad during the superbowl I think.
You nailed the timing of the issue, and I hope you get some awesome jobs from this. The hair still rose on the back of my neck, and it made it seem even more manipulative. A+ design/presentation skills.
Feedback from the client:<p>Thanks for sending this over, it looks great. Could you just add a few tweaks?<p>- Add the seal<p>- We need the "top secret" stamp on each slide<p>- We think the grey is too bland. Could you make it pop more?<p>- Did you get the PRISM logo from us? I am attaching the Word doc in case you missed it<p>- I am not sure you left enough room for the bullets -- will they go on separate slides? We need to see those.<p>[edited for line breaks]
Brilliant! I think, as the public, we should all re-implement an open, ethical, and fun version of this surveillance infrastructure open to the Internet as a whole. Facebook nearly implemented that goal. But we can do better.
These slides are certainly prettier and less crowded than the NSA slides, but they are, if anything, less readable. Unless the slides are intentionally informed by the principle that hard to read text is easier to remember (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/health/19mind.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/19/health/19mind.html?pagewan...</a>), I think these slides are a classic case of form over function.<p>• The main font is too thin.<p>• The first few slides are white text on a neutral gray background, which is inexcusably low contrast. Ditto for the green text on the blue background on the following slides, and the gray axis labels on the blue background, which I can barely read even on my computer screen. The white text on blue background is good.<p>• The text in the graph on the "How can we monitor everything?" slides is too small to be readable from the back row (but this was also a problem in the originals).
The NSA uploading their slides to slideshare would save everybody a lot of bother, I think that's the most brilliant bit in this excellent PR move. No more need to leak anything.
i worked Lockheed Martin R&D for a couple years and slides like this are par. they are written by the principal investigator for an audience who doesn't give a shit about glitz and glam. these aren't marketing slides.
Have you considered creating something that would help tie the content to the person viewing the slides? Might be really useful for any security sensitive organization. For example, if the color scheme on certain graphics was programmatically modified slightly for each person who viewed the content, then the next leaker could be immediately identified (if they don't decide to voluntarily publish their name). Something like this would survive screenshots/resizing/etc. You could also enable them to put tags where the software can fill in identifying info in the content. For example a link in the slides might be modified to include a number identifying the viewer, and if that link pops up anywhere, it's off to Gitmo.<p>Can't believe NSA doesn't already do this stuff.
Nice slides, but I couldn't but laugh at the idea that the next time there's a leak at the NSA it would turn out to be the guy who was in charge of making the slides.
The fact that the slides were so disgusting is just another reason to make me think this "story" was "broke" by design. Controlled opposition.
despite the severity of implications of PRISM, being able to laugh about it is important.<p>slides were designed excellently, i definitely did not giggle at all..
"target(s)" should be replaced with "your fellow American citizens and potential foreign persons of interests" because we're all guilty until proven innocent.