A Single Voice guest post.
The Twittersphere is ablaze after the "broken crypto" story of NYT, Guardian, and ProPublica.
The cynics, the mindless, the staunch government defenders, the shocked, the "what's new" crowd hug the bytes while some gentle voices are trying to figure out what it all means.
One small aspect of the messages flying by is the gloating of some people: The general tone is, well, now the cat is out of the bag and you can't do a thang about it!
The K-Landnews Random Research (pronounced Arr Arr) team love their internal nickname "Sneaky Bastards", they regard it as an honorific.
It is the Sneaky Bastards who have coined the term "Gloat Machine", narrowly beating out the old Germanic standby "Schadenfreude". They uncovered a German idiom which would make the perfect new NSA logo: "Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt sich's voellig ungeniert." It means, once your reputation is in tatters you can just live a carefree life, but we wanted to keep the rhyme, if not the reason, so our translation offer is: "Once your reputation's shot, life is really hot."
More people would understand this than the often strange Latin mottos still creeping around in the world, and if Stanford University can do it, why not the NSA?
The Sneaky Bastards also came up with the catch phrase "Dismissal Engine" for those contemporaries whose first and often only reaction to any new report about agents behaving badly is "what's new" or "everybody knew this already".
The Sneaky Bastards even made a list of the main rev-er-uppers of the Dismissal Engine and were the first to point out that there is a con in the contemporary.
We don't really know what that means, which they take as a tribute to their sneakyness.
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