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New Prism slide
Graphic car crash … a slide from the NSA Prism presentation. Image: Guardian
Graphic car crash … a slide from the NSA Prism presentation. Image: Guardian

Prism: the PowerPoint presentation so ugly it was meant to stay secret

This article is more than 10 years old
The shock of the NSA revelations is less in the content of their slides than quite how badly they have been designed

Shock horror, America (allegedly) is spying (allegedly) on everyone (allegedly)! Last week's revelations of the top secret Prism surveillance programme might not have come as much of a surprise to anyone using Facebook, Google and Apple all day (what else are we chucking out all our own data for, if not to give the spooks a hand?), but it was a shocking story on one count at least.

"Such a leak is extremely rare in the history of the NSA," said the Guardian, "which prides itself on maintaining a high level of secrecy." And now we can see why: the NSA clearly never wanted anyone to know quite how bad they are at PowerPoint.

The slides published from the presentation have been shocking less for their content than their sheer graphic ineptitude. A car crash of clip art and bubble diagrams, drop-shadows and gradients, they look like the work of a drunken toddler, high on the potentials of AutoShapes and WordArt. There are bevelled boxes in shades of tangerine and mint, yellow blobs floating on meaningless green arrows, and that all-pervasive header choked with a congested scatter of company logos.

And what font should the NSA choose to express this secret high-tech initiative? Look no further than that classic combo of trusty and authoritative Times New Roman, with a sprinkling of laid-back Arial – all jazzed up with a liberal use of bold, italics and underlining. The designer has clearly followed that tried-and-tested PowerPoint policy: 'If in doubt, do everything'.

To top it off, this visual cacophony is presided over by the worst logo of all time – a parody of Bond baddie malevolence with the lo-fi aesthetic of a mid-90s shareware computer game, depicting the secret crystalline data machine enshrined in a wonky hexagon.

A slide from the Prism programme
Designed by a drunken toddler? Image: Guardian

These crimes against design have not been lost on the graphics community. Guru of data visualisation and Yale political scientist, Edward Tufte, took to Twitter to vent his fury, while other designers have offered their services, redesigning the NSA's slides with varying degrees of success. Others have pointed out that the Prism presentation merely continues the US government's illustrious heritage of bad graphic design, with the Department of Defence producing hopelessly complex spaghetti diagrams and unbearably naff collages of boats, tanks and planes, glowing under golden lens flare rays.

But perhaps the biggest scandal of the Prism revelations is that they use PowerPoint at all – when even the US Army has realised that, in their words, it "makes us stupid". Only five slides have so far been released, the latest possibly being the clumsiest yet – with arbitrary circles and triangles hovering over a distorted world map – so who knows what further graphic gaffes remain to be exposed. Might the names of further secret programmes be revealed in a climactic bubble of Comic Sans? And just think what transition effects might be employed – a chequerboard fade from phone-tapping to email-monitoring, or a spiralling whirlpool to unveil the extent of their evil reach? For the safety of our own poor eyes, let's hope the rest of this PowerPoint never sees the light of day.

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