You remember that post I shared in June 2014 about the CIA’s Twitter account, right? It seems it’s not improved in the intervening six years.
The CIA’s Twitter account is a war crime – The Outline
Social media obscures the realities of the entity using it, instead allowing it to represent itself as the more-abstracted notion of “a brand.” The public opinion of an occupation that requires one to partake in “forced sodomy for prisoners who refused food” gets confusing when that same entitity is posting pictures of adorable deer, joking that they’re just as stealthy as its employees. This isn’t just its social media team: the CIA hires a litany of employees, “operations officers, to analysts, to librarians and public affairs,” whose roles’ banality upholds the whole operation. Maybe the CIA intentionally runs this account knowing we’d be all, “WTF, CIA?”. Worse, maybe it’s really such a “normal” workplace that most individuals who work there are just as far removed from its conduct as you or I, which leads them to believe this kind of thing is completely fine.
I wonder if they refer to their style guide when drafting those tweets.
Writing tips from the CIA’s ruthless style manual – Quartz
As revealed in the manual, the CIA is a prescriptivist scold, a believer in the serial comma, and a champion of “crisp and pungent” language “devoid of jargon.” It takes a firm stand against false titles used attributively and urges intelligence writers to lowercase the w in Vietnam war (“undeclared”).
Perhaps they just need another coffee.
At CIA Starbucks, even the baristas are covert – Washington Post
The new supervisor thought his idea was innocent enough. He wanted the baristas to write the names of customers on their cups to speed up lines and ease confusion, just like other Starbucks do around the world. But these aren’t just any customers. They are regulars at the CIA Starbucks.
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