The “Soylent Green is people” cable easter egg is a long-running Central Intelligence Agency case-officer in-joke in which the line “Soylent Green is people” is hidden inside operational cables as an arrangement of incongruously lowercase letters.[1]
Mechanism
CIA cables are, by convention, written exclusively in capital letters — a typographic norm carried forward from the agency’s 1950s teletype-era infrastructure that has never been updated. “It’s like some thing from the 50s. They just never changed it.”[1]
This convention makes any lowercase letter visually anomalous. Case officers writing the obligatory blow-by-blow, minute-by-minute account of an operational meeting would scatter individual lowercase letters through the otherwise all-caps text such that the lowercase letters, in sequence, spelled “Soylent Green is people.”[1]
Detection
The cable easter egg almost always made it through the CIA’s review and distribution system without remark. “It would always make its way through the system. Nobody would pay any attention, until like the one guy is reading it and he’s like, ‘Oh, they did it again.’”[2]
Cultural reference
The hidden line refers to the climactic revelation of Soylent Green, the 1973 American science-fiction film starring Charlton Heston. In the film, set in an overpopulated near-future where most of the public subsists on government-issued nutritional wafers, Heston’s character discovers that the green-colored wafer is manufactured from the bodies of citizens scooped up at protests and at suicide centers. His final, screamed line — “Soylent Green is people!” — is the source quoted by the cable easter egg.[3][1]
Why the film stays with him
Kiriakou returns to Soylent Green repeatedly as a portrait of a world on the brink rather than as a joke, and treats the single thing it got wrong as instructive about the limits of foresight: in a future imagined complete with floating cars, the policeman at the centre of the story still has to pull over and step into a phone booth to make a call. “I guess there are just some things people don’t see.”[4][5]
He pairs the observation with an episode from his own service. On temporary duty at a Middle East station for a week or so, he watched a technical team from headquarters install the station’s first email programme, gathering everyone around a single computer to demonstrate that one could type a colleague’s name, hit refresh, and write to them. The station chief’s reaction was to grasp the implication and reject it: “Wait a minute. Are you saying that my people can have access to anybody they want? … I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit” — and he decreed there would be no email in his station.[6][7] Kiriakou offers it not as stupidity but as the same blindness the film displays: “Sometimes you just don’t see it. Your brain can’t comprehend it.”[7]
See also
- Central Intelligence Agency
- Charlton Heston