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Button Loose Lips, Again
NSA Ads Harken Back to WWII-Era Security Campaign
 Listen as William Bird and Alex Chadwick discuss the revival of national security-related ads.
 See more of the new ads, and several from the World War II era.
The NSA has produced four print advertisements aimed at warning military personnel to keep information to themselves.
Photo: National Security Agency |
June 8, 2002 -- The U.S. government is mounting a campaign the likes of which hasn't been seen since World War II.
In the tradition of the "Loose Lips Sink Ships" exhortations of those days, the National Security Agency has produced a set of four print advertisements warning against too much idle chatter about national secrets.
Unlike the posters of WWII, these ads are aimed at government personnel, particularly those in the military. The ads, which look strikingly similar to the '40s-era posters, can be found mostly in military magazines.
That contrasts the ads with the propaganda of World War II, which was aimed at the general public. Back then, the government "wanted to blanket the country like snow" with posters, says William L. Bird Jr., co-author of Design for Victory: World War II Posters on the American Home Front.
"A good poster is to the eye what a shout is to the brain," says Bird, a curator at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. And in that way, both the posters of the earlier era and the NSA ads are a lot alike, he tells NPR's Alex Chadwick for Weekend Edition Saturday.
In both cases, "you don't have to do much work" to figure out the message, he says.
Other Resources
See more WWII propaganda posters at the New Hampshire State Library site
And yet more, at the National Archives and Records Administration site
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