The U.S. military’s new Cyber Command is headquartered at Fort Meade, Maryland, one of the military’s most secretive and secure facilities. Its mission is largely opaque, even inside the armed forces.
Mission Statement
The United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) plans, coordinates, integrates, synchronizes, and conducts activities to:
- direct the operations and defense of specified Department of Defense information networks and;
- prepare to, and when directed, conduct full-spectrum military cyberspace operations in order to enable actions in all domains, ensure US/Allied freedom of action in cyberspace and deny the same to our adversaries.
Cyber Command logo
But the there’s another mystery surrounding the emerging unit. It’s embedded in the Cyber Command logo. On the logo’s inner gold ring is a code: 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a
“It is not just random numbers and does ‘decode’ to something specific,” a Cyber Command source told. “I believe it is specifically detailed in the official heraldry for the unit symbol.”
“While there a few different proposals during the design phase, in the end the choice was obvious and something necessary for every military unit,” the source adds. “The mission.”
Cracking the Code
When the code is turned into a bar code and scanned, what comes out is Poder Cybernetico. Depending on your translation, particularly thinking in terms of latin like most military logo motto’s, it comes out to something like “To regulate and control (cyber systems).” Sounds pretty heavy for a service that says it doesn’t want to protect the internet.
Kryptos
All this secrecy reminds us of Kryptos, the elusive computer code on an encrypted sculpture by Jim Sanborn, commissioned on the grounds of the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.