On children's website, NSA puts a furry, smiley face on its mission

Handout via The New York Times

In an undated handout image, a navigational menu on the National Security Agency's CryptoKids website.

Washington:  The turtle wearing a hat backward, baggy jeans and purple sunglasses looks just like other cartoon characters that marketers use to make products like cereal and toys appealing to children.

But the reptile, known as T. Top, who says creating and breaking codes is really "kewl," is pushing something far weightier: the benefits of the National Security Agency.

"In the world of diplomacy, knowing what your enemy is planning helps you to prepare," the turtle says. "But it is also important that your enemies do not know what you have planned. It is the mission of the National Security Agency and the Central Security Service to learn what it can about its potential enemies to protect America's government communications."

Such an enthusiastic endorsement of the NSA's mission might seem particularly timely given the criticism directed at the agency since one of its former contractors, Edward J. Snowden, began leaking documents he had stolen from it. But T. Top and a troupe of eight other smiley-faced cartoon characters have been busy promoting the NSA's mission for the past nine years as part of a governmentwide attempt to make agencies more understandable to the public. With cartoon characters, interactive games and puzzles, the NSA's CryptoKids website for "future codemakers and codebreakers" tries to educate children about spying duties and recruit them to work for the agency.

As the website says: "It is never too early to start thinking about what you want to do when you grow up."

To enter the "How Can I Work for the N.S.A." section of the site, children click on a picture of a bucktoothed rabbit, who says in his biography that he likes listening to hip-hop and rock. In his free time, the bunny says, he participates in cryptography competitions with other cartoon characters named Decipher Dog and CryptoCat.

"As a signals analyst, you will work with cutting edge technology to recover, understand and derive intelligence from a variety of foreign signals found around the world," children are told in the future employment section. "You will also attempt to identify the purpose, content, and user of these signals to provide critical intelligence to our nation's leaders."

Civil libertarians, not surprisingly, said the website was propaganda. Experts on early childhood education and marketing to children said the tactics used by the NSA were similar to the way McDonald's puts toys in its Happy Meals.

"This is the NSA putting on its best face and the way it wants to present itself without anyone else providing their opinions or making noise - and for children, it may make them feel good about what the NSA does," said Nina Huntemann, a professor at Suffolk University who studies the social impact of new media.

"Is that necessarily bad? I'm not that pessimistic; it happens all the time," Huntemann said, referring to efforts by the government, companies and educators to promote messages to children through cartoons and games. "But these sites have been shown over and over to be ineffective at actually connecting with people."

Vanee Vines, a spokeswoman for the NSA, said that "like many government agencies," the NSA "has a special website for children."

"The site," she said, "is designed to help children learn about cryptology and NSA's mission to defend the nation." The site complies with a policy memo from President Bill Clinton that called on all federal agencies to develop ways to educate children about government. The FBI and the CIA are among the other government agencies that have their own sites to try to educate children about their missions.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to oversee intelligence agencies, hosts a website that links "kids, parents and teachers to U.S. government information and services on the Web from government agencies" that are "geared to the learning level and interest of kids." Other government agencies and departments that have websites for children include the Energy Department, State Department, Treasury Department, National Counterterrorism Center and National Reconnaissance Office.

Electronic games have also been popular. In 2002, for example, the Pentagon released the video game "America's Army" to encourage people to enlist.

The NSA started CryptoKids with seven characters, according to a news release in 2005, "to make researching America's cryptologic heritage and learning about NSA/CSS fun."

In 2010, the NSA added two more characters, the CyberTwins Cy and Cyndi, to educate children about "staying safe while enjoying cyberspace."

"Both are world travelers," the NSA said in a news release about the new characters, "taking turns accompanying their Dad (a computer scientist in the U.S. Army) on his business trips around the world."

The CyberTwins are now the first cartoon characters visitors to the website see.

Although the Internet is a "great" place, Cy advises children, "there are people out there who don't have your best interests in mind - stop and think before sharing private information, especially on social networking websites."

After reading Cy's message, children can enter the website and begin to "Meet the Gang" and play the games that allow them to make secret codes. 

Yale students tangle with University over website

(Christopher Capozziello/The New York Times)

From left: Students Harry Yu, Sean Haufler and Peter Xu are in a dispute with Yale University over a version of an online course catalog called Yale Blue Book.

The idea did not seem controversial at first: Peter Xu and Harry Yu, twin brothers who are seniors at Yale University, set out to build a better, more user-friendly version of the university's online course catalog. But as Mark Zuckerberg found when he decided to build a better version of Harvard University's undergraduate student directory, these things can take on a life of their own.

Yale shut down the brothers' website last week, helping to turn a local campus issue into something of a civil rights cause. Now, after a few days of controversy, a similar tool is up and running, and it appears to be Yale that has gotten a schooling.

The brothers said they were tired of the university's "clunky" online catalog, which made it hard to see how students from previous semesters had evaluated courses. So in December 2012, Xu and Yu, both computer science majors, came up with their own version.

They called it Yale Blue Book , or YBB, a reference to the Yale Blue Book, a course selection website that other students had developed and sold to the school a couple of years ago.

"We wanted it to be faster to use," Xu said. On his site, he continued, "You can click on a course, you can see its description, you can see what other students have said about it - all in a few clicks." In particular, students could sort courses by numerical ratings given by students in previous semesters and see what courses their Facebook friends were looking at.

It was a success: Last semester, 1,840 students - more than a third of the undergraduate student body - used it to choose their courses, the brothers said. Which is why they were shocked when they got a letter Jan. 7 from the registrar describing YBB as "a big problem."

University administrators said they were concerned that the site was available to people who were not Yale students, that it gave undue prominence to the numerical ratings without including the descriptive evaluations that went with them, and that it infringed on Yale trademarks. Xu and Yu wrote to the registrar offering to fix those three things, along with "4. Anything else you want."

But Yale opted for more decisive action: It shut the site down.

To Xu and Yu, that seemed like a violation of free speech - a right held dear by both academics and Internet activists, many of whom rallied to the brothers' cause as the Yale Daily News, The Washington Post and other news organizations reported on the shutdown.

Brad Rosen, a lecturer in Yale's computer science department who teaches "Law, Technology and Culture," said the debate got at a central tension of contemporary life.

"Different stakeholders have different assumptions about how information is going to flow," he said.

As petitions circulated, Sean Haufler, another senior in computer science, built a workaround that made the administration's disapproval effectively irrelevant.

Over the course of 12 hours, Haufler figured out how to give users of the older Yale Blue Book all the same functions that YBB offered - in a way that the university had no power to block. While he was at it, he wrote a blog post that began, "I hope I don't get kicked out of Yale for this." The post went viral. Since then two advocacy groups, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have posted messages of support on Twitter, as have officials at Harvard, Columbia University and MIT, among others.

On Monday evening, Yale backed down.

"In retrospect," Mary Miller, the dean of Yale College, wrote in an open letter to the Yale community, "I agree that we could have been more patient in asking the developers to take down information they had appropriated."

She said that Yale had not violated anyone's free speech, but "questions of who owns data are evolving before our very eyes. Just this weekend, we learned of a tool that replicates YBB's efforts without violating Yale's appropriate-use policy, and that leapfrogs over the hardest questions before us. What we now see is that we need to review our policies and practices."

Haufler said the experience had been unexpectedly educational. After graduation, he intends to work at a startup. As for what project he has in mind, which is one idea he is keeping under his hat.