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foxhill
despite the severity of implications of PRISM, being able to laugh about it is important.

slides were designed excellently, i definitely did not giggle at all..

acoyfellow
One of the most clever ways I've ever seen to sell yourself.. On par with the Oreo ad during the superbowl I think. You nailed the timing of the issue, and I hope you get some awesome jobs from this. The hair still rose on the back of my neck, and it made it seem even more manipulative. A+ design/presentation skills.
EmilandDC
Aha, Thanks ;)
wwwarhawk
I love the work on your site, OP. Did you use After Effects for that French TED talk or something else?
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alieas
The fact that the slides were so disgusting is just another reason to make me think this "story" was "broke" by design. Controlled opposition.
genwin
Seems it was EmilandDC's idea all along.
swalsh
In all honesty, 20M seems like a bargain for that much value.
ShirsenduK
Flat UI. Was this iOS 7 inspired? :P
Ricapar
Sheesh. "Flat UI" now goes along with iOS 7?

It's been around much longer than yesterday. iOS 7 is late to the party.

Samuel_Michon
It was a joke. Also, iOS 7 doesn’t have a flat UI; it’s full of gradients, layers, and translucency.
josefresco
Imagine the uproar if the NSI hired a graphic designer of sorts to make their slides more attractive. I can see the moaning now "They spent HOW much of my tax money making those slides pretty?!?"

I expect the NSA's slide to be crappy, because you know, they're spies and stuff not graphic UX experts.

danso
It's not about "attractive" slides, it's about slides that are to the point and don't obfuscate information (unintentionally).

Being an analyst and being able to understand the processing of data into visual display is not an orthogonal skill set. Often, PowerPoint slides are ugly and worthless because whoever designed them thought "Oh shit, I don't understand how to best convey this...time for some clip art" and/or "Faster slide animations!"

Obligatory link to Tufte's criticism of NASA and Powerpoint: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

blantonl
Keep in mind that those slides were almost certainly developed by a contractor. Who was paid 150K/year. Who was one of thousands of other similar contractors. With little to no real world experience.
bazillion
The average pay of contractors is between 70k-100k. The only ones making more than that are typically program managers for large contracts or other administrative folk who work on winning contracts for their company.

Contractors are typically not busy making powerpoints, but busy actually working on what they're hired to do since they have to do their hours. The busy work is left to the military folk and interns as stated in the other comment.

blantonl
Government contractors with active security clearances command far more than 70k-100K - an active TS/SCI clearance can take over a year to process - and the number of hurdles to clear is daunting for the average person.

An enlisted E-7 just coming out of the military with an active clearance and some technology experience is going to bank with the contractors out there and probably do very little real actual hard work.

That security clearance really is the willy wonka golden ticket...

bazillion
There are graphic designers. I went to one to get a logo made for an internal web app I made. It's just that most powerpoints are made by interns and younger military folk.
grumps
As an ex military & civilian space contractor... there are people perfectly capable of developing slides similar to the ones posted. However - you'd be blasted by the (client) for the lack of the agency logo, program logo, and colors. The usage of colors can even be an issue. Depending on the audience the color red and variations of red will indicate that the line of communication is classified, as does purple depending on the system. For example - the army would hate the use of blue because it's an Air Force color and Navy color.

I use to try to make my slides and diagrams pretty and every time I did I was blasted which led to my disgruntled feelings towards my job. Hence why I'm no longer in this industry.

Systemic33
You should just get in contact with every governmental agency in the world, the amount of bad designed layouts is over 9000.
toyg
No, the amount of designed layouts is zero. The amount of hacked-together presentations is over 9000.

In fact, I don't understand why Powerpoint-Design-As-A-Service isn't a thing yet.

samspenc
For the same reason Web-Design-As-A-Service isn't a thing yet. I deal with non-techie friends who have trouble even with Wix and Weebly on a daily basis.
James_Duval
It is - that's what the OP offers! Or have I misunderstood you?
suppressingfire
Hah. I like how the author pluralized "targets'" while keeping all the other facts intact.
logn
Brilliant! I think, as the public, we should all re-implement an open, ethical, and fun version of this surveillance infrastructure open to the Internet as a whole. Facebook nearly implemented that goal. But we can do better.
sethbannon
I've been so infuriated with this story that I didn't think someone could make me laugh about PRISM, but this did it.
bhdz 

    "Most of the world's communications
     are flowing through the U.S.
     So is your target's data"
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toyg
Nice deck, BUT this is Hacker News, so here's the customary negative feedback:

- the "what's the plan" slide is bad: it doesn't convey the original sense that other providers will join soon or have already joined. the tagline makes it look like it's a future plan, when it's actually describing the past.

- that "$20m" slide makes it look like it's a lot of money. The original clearly wanted to contextualise it and make it look cheap. ("just 20m for all these providers!")

- seriously? I got more data-per-square-inch from the original presentation.

- thin fonts are overdone and hard to read.

- VCs don't care about presentations anymore, I got in YC20xx by <clever social engineering episode>.

Ntrails
I also object to any slides that cannot be at least readable printed in black and white. Consider the ink costs - do you think the NSA is made of money?!?
robbiep
I thought most slides these days print to more 'normal colours'? My university always has slides with dark bgs, images and crazy coloured texts but the PDF slides available to accompany them are always only just the text + any images if they have copyright, and print very well in b&w, if people still feel the need to do that
munger
The need to print in B&W is more about b&w laser vs color ink jets at the consumer level. Quality and TOC is so much better on a B&W laser than paying so much for color ink tanks if you do mostly info doc print outs.
squidi
+ I like the way each slide it headed with a question. I find that helpful in doing presentations

- On slide 13 I got a bit lost as the green circle for US & Canada stands out a lot so I read it before the text. Maybe the green circle could include the text?

Great marking!

Angostura
In addition, while using the actual company logos in the presentation may spoil the aethetic, it conveys the information much much quicker.
jeremyjh
For a government program like this, $20M looks like nothing no matter what the context is.
ExcitedByNoise
Having been in many DoD related PowerPoints, this is par for the course. Bravo though, made me laugh.
joeblau
Same. It's funny because after looking at the original slides, I immediately thought... "yeah these are legit"
drchiu
Nice slides, but I couldn't but laugh at the idea that the next time there's a leak at the NSA it would turn out to be the guy who was in charge of making the slides.
kalms
This is really great! Fast thinking there.
jacquesm
The NSA uploading their slides to slideshare would save everybody a lot of bother, I think that's the most brilliant bit in this excellent PR move. No more need to leak anything.
senthilnayagam
along with 20 Million you could have put combined worth of these companies is over 200 billion dollars, 0.0001%
andyhmltn
This seems to be an advertising ploy for a slide design service. However, I looked at their website and their stuff is amazing
milhous
"target(s)" should be replaced with "your fellow American citizens and potential foreign persons of interests" because we're all guilty until proven innocent.
crocowhile
Snowden was not in the acknowledgements.