Vintage US security posters range from bizarre to terrifying

Jun 14, 2018

NSA notices warned staff about the dangers of everything from drugs to car-pooling

Formed by a secret presidential memo in 1952 amid growing Cold War tensions, the fledgling National Security Agency commissioned posters to remind its employees to keep mum about their top-secret work.

Government Attic, a website that requests historical government documents under the Freedom of Information Act and then shares them online, first made the request for the vintage posters in 2016.

Two years on, the US government has released more than 100 security flyers produced between the 1950s and the 1970s.

The images paint a world of Cold War paranoia, American values under threat and ill-judged pop culture parody.

The informational flyers “were created in-house”, NSA spokesperson Chris Augustine told Quartz. Updated versions “are still used at water coolers, cafeterias, restrooms at NSA’s buildings today”.

Here are some of the most imaginative - and bizarre - retro posters from the newly released archive:

NSA

Early motivational posters hammered home employees’ solemn duty of secrecy
The earliest posters often put religion front and centre, emphasising America’s Christian faith in contrast to “godless” Communist states
Agents were reminded that foreign travel was full of potential security pitfalls
As the Swinging Sixties got underway, the NSA attempted to harness the “groovy” vibe in the name of national security
A valiant but tenuous attempt to link Flower Power romance to security clearance levels
The growing popularity of mind-alternating substances was felt to be worth a psychedelic anti-drugs warning
Even more ill-advised was the agency’s attempt to cash in on disco fever in the 1970s
Culminating in this shameless appropriation of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever
But, despite the changing times, the core message remained: the NSA’s secrecy was paramount
The posters could get extremely specific, as with this flyer warning against car-pool gossip
Leaving coffee cups and spare change in filing cabinets was apparently also a problem
But the overall message was clear - take your eye off the ball, and prepare for pestilence, famine, war and death