Sleepycatz

Of mascots & musings

I was going through and cleaning up some directories and e-mail this morning and ran across a smattering of things that have been annoying me. So here goes:

In general, it seems that if you are a large organization or have an ideology to push you need to have a mascot in order to explain yourselves to kids. Most of these are poorly rendered, pointless, or just plain silly. Yet, they are an obvious attempt to indoctrinate children into certain beliefs - no matter how complex the issues are.

First up:

Captain Copyright is the Canadian based protector of copyright holders and the nemesis of xerox machines everywhere. Captain © has his origins as a geeky teenage illustrator, whose work is stolen by the school bully. He somehow magically transforms into a muscular intellectual property vigilante. But like most vigilantes the minions of Captain Copyright seem to overstep the bounds of common sense on a regular basis.

A few weeks ago it was revealed that the RIAA was sending Cease and Desist letters to kids who posted videos of themselves dancing to YouTube. Yes, the kids were dancing to music that they hadn’t paid royalties for - so they had no right to record and post their activities. Those fiends. Thank god the RIAA can swoop in an save the rights of such unfortunates as Brittany Spears and others. If only the kids posting would have read Captain Copyright they would have learned that crime never pays.

BTW Captain Copyright, I am protected by your arch-villain Fair Use

Next:

Broadband, the morbidly obese, feline mascot of the FCC is both the most apt and pathetic of the government agency mascots. As I have been the owner of several corpulent cats, I can testify to their slothful and content nature. It is not a coincidence that this mascot should be named Broadband - as the FCC characterizes broadband connectivity as any data transmission speed exceeding 200 Kb/s. This is approximately 1/10th the speed considered acceptable in the rest of the industrialized world.

Meanwhile, it was recently announced that France Télécom is, in a pilot program, is laying fiber to homes in Paris to provide users with 2.5 Gb/s of connectivity, about 13,000 times the speed the FCC considers ‘high speed’. The French connectivity will include digital television and unlimited phone calls for about $88 per month. Meanwhile the US continues to fall behind in global connectivity rankings. Yet, nearly ten years ago we were promised higher speeds for reduced regulation, but we have only received higher bills and fewer choices. Perhaps if the FCC was more aggressive in fostering competition instead of consolidation we would not be all lining the pockets of the fat cats at the big telco and cable companies.

And:

The Crypto Kids are the NSA’s attempt to reach out to kids for acceptance and recruitment. Yes, the agency that was once so secret its very existence was denied is now represented by, among others, a fox named Rosetta Stone who is said to work as a language analyst, and a tortoise named T. Top, whose apparently suppose to signify the slacking hacker of the bunch.

In general I have great admiration for the people who work at the NSA. They perform some of the most demanding and complex work imaginable. However recent disclosures of certain NSA activities have led the administration to portray the organization as some type of shadowy security overlord. As an agency with so much power and technology that to question its activity in any way would irreparably harm national security, and label the questioner as unpatriotic. Yesterday the 11th district court handed down a ruling which could allow for the prosecution of reporters who disclose NSA activity.

I have been in recent discussions involving cryptography in which the majority of people have cited that all powerful NSA could break, or already had master keys, for any publicly available cryptographic systems (they don’t). This attitude coupled with the administration’s desire to make the NSA seem omnipresent, by limiting knowledge of its wiretapping activity, seem designed to create the perception of an ever present state security force. By focusing on particular NSA desired skills the CryptoKids suggests an organization of technocrats, simply follow orders regardless of law. No where, that I could find, does the site speak of the law, the Constitution, or the trust of the people given to the NSA. Though the characters are cute - the CyptoKids, to me, has a kind of big brother meets the Balilla overtone. One that’s a bit scarier then just odd.

Postscript:
There are a couple of other mascots I want to mention, just because I find them a little bizarre:

• Numerous people in the past have commented on Rex, the DHS preparedness mountain lion - I’ve never been able to figure out how a mountain lion equates with preparedness.
• There is something tragically sad about the DoE ARM’s (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement) Professor Polar Bear, who’s measuring the loss of Alaskan ice sheets
• And of course, there’s the DOE’s Dr.E, a monkey who espouses the benefits of alternative energy. For could take a monkey seriously?

This entry was posted by steve on Saturday, August 12th, 2006 at 10:02 pm and is filed under Misc. Ramblings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.