ARTWORK > Secret Codewords of the NSA

Woodblock print, image of olive oyl, by artist illustrator Annie Bissett depicting a secret code word of the NSA called evilolive
EVILOLIVE
Japanese woodblock (mokuhanga)
6" x 6" (15.24 x 15.24 cm)

E is for evilolive.

The word evilolive is a palindrome (spelled the same forwards and backwards). Glenn Greenwald wrote about the evilolive program in one of his post-Snowden revelation articles for the Guardian:

"The NSA … intended the program, codenamed EvilOlive, for broadening the scope of what it is able to collect… This new system enables vastly increased collection by the NSA of internet traffic… This milestone not only opened the aperture of the access but allowed the possibility for more traffic to be identified, selected and forwarded to NSA repositories."

"Olive" made me think of Popeye's girlfriend Olive Oyl. Google images delivered up a delicious picture of Olive Oyl stomping around like a big amazon bully, so I dressed her in red white and blue and put a cable in her hands.

Eight applications of color, with blind emboss
Kochi Kozo paper
edition: 20