PRISM logo violated the English photographer's copyright

English programmer Damon Hart-Davis recently saw a NSA presentation slides on the spyware project PRISM - and immediately noticed something very familiar to them, namely, a photograph of a prism on the official PRISM logo.



Damon looked closely at the prism. It turned out that it almost completely coincides with the photo, which was made by David's father , and which was published on his website in 1998 .



To make it easier to compare, here is the work of NSA designers, rotated 180 °.

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And here is the original photo .







The NSA spent $ 20 million on spying on Internet users, but found no money to buy a commercial photo of a prism. This picture since 1998 lies in the free collection, but the conditions require the mandatory indication of authorship and reference, so that the intelligence services really violated the conditions for the use of the work of authorship.



“On the other hand, I’m not sure that we really want any attribution in this case,” says Damon Hart-Davis.



Abilities of NSA designers are not the first time criticized. The same PRISM presentation provoked criticism from info design gurus Edward Taffy ( 1 , 2 , 3 ), and one of the designers, on his own initiative, made a better version of this presentation , edifying his colleagues at the National Security Agency.