NSA's CryptoKids and /b/'s PedoFriends: Separated at Birth?

Noah Shachtman from Danger Room points us to a newly discovered collection of NSA mascots, designed to promote "cybersecurity awareness" to young citizens of the motherland.

The NSA CryptoKids poster lacks names, though, so Rob Beschizza added them, below...

Above, the "corrected" version of the NSA poster (thanks, Beschizza!).

And below, all of this reminded me of a "PedoFriends" graphic of /b/ provenance, shared earlier by my friend (and frequent Boing Boing guestblogger) Sean Bonner.

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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Anonymous

“CryptoKids have been around for a few years at least. The FBI and CIA also have some similar kids’ pages. I’m really not sure what they’re trying to accomplish?”

simple, waste tax payer money on shitty propaganda so as to relive the mistrust that children may develop for those money holes you call “agencies”
Brainspore

Yeah, Gargoyles was actually pretty OK. I was thinking of the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth in the early ’80s, which were of decidedly lower quality.
Anonymous

What the hell does Wired have against Assange?
millrick

i wanna be ‘obedience opossum’ when i grow up
- millrick
  
  or ‘obedient opossum’
  it doesn’t really matter. i’ll just do what i’m told
TooGoodToCheck

I don’t even know what 4 of the pedo-friends’ names refer to. . . but I think I am old and wise enough not to look it up.
- Donald Petersen
  
  I got that beat. Fully half of the PedoFriends are outside my realm of familiarity.
  
  And I feel perfectly happy in my ignorance of all things FutaShotaYuriGuroYaoiVore.
  
  One does wonder, however, what Warrantless Wombat keeps in his satchel, if not a sheaf of presigned-but-otherwise-blank warrants…
- Nelson.C
  
  I can see five with names derived from Japanese words that might give someone trouble. I’m now wondering which of those is the one you’re familiar with.
Anonymous

They did actually have names. There was a website with character details for each of them, and back stories, all sorts of crazy stuff.

I forget their names but as I recall the two in the middle are navajo code-talkers.
- jackie31337
  
  Yep, here are the official character bios:
  Crypto Cat
  Decipher Dog
  Rosetta Stone
  T. Top
  Joules
  Slate
  CSS Sam
  
  CryptoKids have been around for a few years at least. The FBI and CIA also have some similar kids’ pages. I’m really not sure what they’re trying to accomplish. Maybe it was some kind of government mandate.
  - turn_self_off
    
    Heh, t. top actually got a point about the good and bad about computers.
grimc

You had me at ‘Chickenhawk’.
Rob Beschizza

The intro sequences were good; the episodes, not so much.
Anonymous

I’d like to point out that the characters are originally from 2chan, where they aren’t associated with pornography at all.

pedobear, for example, stands for bravery and manliness in japan.
Robert

Rob wins +1 Internets for the Assange joke!
Gregory Goldmacher

Political “art” is ridiculous.

And cartoons are silly, but we don’t know any better when we’re kids.
Nadreck

Yes, all of the intelligence agencies and other US “Alphabet Agencies” have darling Kid’s Websites. The CIA’s is particularly nifty.
nataliefrey

what a rip
i am a turtle
retchdog

Holy hell, that labeled version of the CryptoKids (at least it wasn’t “KryptoKids”) was hilarious. Thanks boingboing!
Anonymous

Scat = crap, Futa = shemale (futanari), shota = young boy, yuri = lesbian, guro = grotesque (organs removed, that kinda stuff), vore = eat or being eaten, S&M = sado masochism, furry = bestiality or similar, pedo = obvious, yaoi = gay (male), hetero = also obvious, watersports = peeing

Don’t ask how I know these things.
- Anonymous
  
  #13, the same basic rules apply to who gets to use the word s—— as to who gets to use n—–. A lot of the people consider s—— a slur.
- Anonymous
  
  Futanari, if I remember correctly, translates as roughly “two forms”. So by the literal translation it could mean any person bearing sexual characteristics from both genders, but I’ve been given to understand that in the Japanese ero market, it typically refers specifically to women with at least aspects of both types of genitalia.
  Newhalf is used to refer to people with bodies of one sex (eg, the secondary sexual characteristics) but the genitalia of the other.
  
  Guro can mean both gore and grotesque; gore referring to sexualized depictions of murder and mutilation; grotesque referring to sexualized depictions of, ah, “rarities”, eg, conjoined people, people with extraordinary numbers of piercings, people with multiples of limbs but who not otherwise fantastic, etc.
- Anonymous
  
  #13: Oh no you don’t, You ain’t getting away from that one.
  The rest are correct, but I’d like to note that Furry != Bestiality. http://www.wikifur.com.
  
  No flames, just a correction.
andyhavens

I let my kid watch “Dora the Informer,” until he called me in for what I still contend is fair-use of copyrighted materials in a research project. Kid just kept chanting, “Zero tolerance!” and squeaking a plastic judge’s hammer.
The Hamster King

I never realized Pedobear was part of the Chinese zodiac. That’s something they don’t tell you on your chopstick sleeve!

When is the next Year of the Pedobear?
ClintonD

I loled hard at “Julian Assange”
Stefan Jones

That’s not an oppossum. It’s clearly a fox. FISAless Fox, maybe?
penguinchris

OK, ignoring the fake names and the PedoFriends for a moment, is anyone else curious whether or not kids actually respond to these kinds of things?

It seems like the only way anyone knows how to get kids interested in things like this is to make cartoon characters. But they look like they were drawn by Pam in marketing, not a professional artist, and that they were designed by a committee. In other words, they look *really lame* and not something kids would actually be interested in.

Or… maybe that’s their filter. If the kid does actually like this, then that means they’ll fit in to the government agency culture (not to say anything bad about the NSA – I have applied to work there).
- TooGoodToCheck
  
  I dunno man, my kids seem to have just an unspeakable tolerance for shitty cartoons. hulu started running the old Super Mario show, and my kids loved it; I found it to be completely horrible and cheesy.
  
  I. . . I honestly have never seen them encounter art, voice acting, or a plot so bad that they wouldn’t spend some time watching. Kids TV is 85% a wasteland of complete drek, with a few unexpected gems.
  
  so, in my opinion, it’s totally reasonable to think that kids between 4 & 8 would be content to spend some time on the CryptoKids thing. Not sure how much they’d actually be influenced by it, but I do think that slick presentation and interesting character design are not prerequisites for getting some attention.
  - Ted8305
    
    Try watching an old episode of Thundercats or Transformers or (insert favorite nostalgic cartoon here). Dude, they’re not as good as we remembered. The magic of childhood, I guess.
    - Donald Petersen
      
      Boy, you said it. Season 3 of Land of the Lost seriously does not hold up.
  - Brainspore
    
    I dunno man, my kids seem to have just an unspeakable tolerance for shitty cartoons.
    
    What Ted8305 and Donald Petersen said- if you’re still remembering ’80s cartoons as non-shitty works of art then you probably haven’t watched any of them lately. Leaving aside the fact that most of them were 20-minute toy commercials (periodically punctuated by 30-second toy commercials) the writing and production values sucked. About 40% of each episode of Voltron was recycled footage and the last time I saw an excerpt of “The Smurfs” I realized that the characters’ high-pitched voices hit my adult ears like nails on a chalkboard.
    
    Compared to what we were watching at that age Spongebob Squarepants is Citizen freakin’ Kane.
    - Promethean Sky
      
      I was a young’un in the late 80s and early 90′s. Ninja Turtles were the shizz. And I challenge anyone to claim that the first two seasons of Gargoyles didn’t rock. (let’s pretend there was no third season)
Beelzebuddy

In my (limited) experience, children come equipped with fairly sophisticated bullshit detectors. They know that the creepy bear with the van [i]probably[/i] shouldn’t be trusted. They know that after-school specials (do they still have those?) and school PSA posters are manipulative in a cheesily unsubtle way, though they might not express it in those words. Kids’ priorities tend towards the immediate and their entertainment expectations are [i]really[/i] low, but they’re pretty damn savvy regardless.

So long as the government makes propaganda with characters like Snitcheroo the Kangaroo, I have hope for society.
Anonymous

Well yes, if you want to get down to semantics everything can be boiled down to more pinpoint descriptions, but keep in mind the list is more watered down for people that aren’t really in to these kinda things. As for the furry thing, in ways it can be considered bestiality, but note the “or similar” part, referring to sexy fur and humanoid animals. I stated it in a sexual manner since, well, it’s a list from the chans that is sexual in nature, but I digress.
Beelzebuddy

Huh. I knew those [] tags looked out of context somehow.