At a time when all US surveillance agencies have come under fire for spying on everybody's private business, you might think it's time for a little rebranding. And yet the intelligence has just shot into orbit a spy rocket with an insignia badge depicting a mean-looking octopus which seems to be stuffing its mouth on our entire planet, along with a tagline that reads "Nothing is Beyond Our Reach."

The Atlas V rocket was launched late Thursday night on the NROL-39 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, an intelligence agency which is often overshadowed by the notorious National Security Agency (NSA), only it scoops data via spy satellites in outer space.

The rocket is believed to be carrying a radar imaging satellite, which is yet another asset in the agency's current radar reconnaissance fleet.

But back to the octopus. Stories about it have spread across the Internet, prompting NRO spokeswoman Karen Furgerson to defend the logo.

She said: "NROL-39 is represented by the octopus, a versatile, adaptive, and highly intelligent creature. Emblematically, enemies of the United States can be reached no matter where they choose to hide," adding the "Nothing is beyond our reach" line "defines our mission and the value it brings to our nation."

But the NRO's globe-munching octopus looks a bit less evil when compared to other insignia badges that are used in covert Psyops and Black Ops as a way to subtly describe a mission's goal. These badges tend to be enigmatic and dark and represent a sort of inside code to mirror the military's "black" missions that don't officially exist.

Among missions' logos that have been released to the public is the symbol of the US Navy's stealth drone program... the Grim Reaper. A crazed-eyed dragon with American flags for its wings which is clutching the globe stands for a program with the National Reconnaissance Office, the US "black" space agency, whose existence was a secret until the early 1990s.

One more serpentine monster from legends, vaguely reminiscent of the hydra, adorns a badge used by the crew of yet another program of the National Reconnaissance Office. The inscription underneath translates as "Never before, never again."

So what can we derive from the Earth-sucking octopus? Aside from the mission's classified primary payload, the Atlas V also carried a bunch of mini-satellites that that are cheap to build and can use solar radiation to fly through space longer than rocket-propulsion satellites. This virtually means that the tentacles of America's World Octopus are spreading across the globe to coil around everything within their grasp, which is, well, everything.

Source: Voice of Russia