There's a whole cult of collecting military and police shoulder patches.

Machines for making those are now widely available. TechShop has CNC embroidery machines.

trevor paglen has written/spoken about this topic extensively, e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-Then-Would-Destroyed/dp/193... from 2007 and various talks on youtube, e.g. from 30c3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTVgPw7TR_k

Indeed, Paglen's been great on this. See also his Cabinet article http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/24/paglen.php which goes beyond NRO to other beloved organizations (e.g. "a secret Air Force Base near Groom Lake).

> Better the devil you know

That's a little chilling, even for the NRO.

Quite a few of these are bordering on over-the-top evil villain territory.

The Great Bear one, and its caption, just made me giggle.

My guess is that the bear is related to Ursa Major. That's a pretty obvious guess, but how it would be related to Ursa Major, I have no idea. :-/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursa_Major#Mythology

My best friend's Dad was a Nasa Engineer and would always bring back packs of NASA launch stickers for the neighborhood kids. This reminds me a lot of those.

Some of those had some really cool designs like the ones in the story.

Here's a small sampling I found on ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_sop=1&_nkw=nasa+sticker&_frs...

Oh, patches, as in insignia.

I was very confused when I got to the page....

I was confused, too. My default interpretation of "patch" is a file for modifying an existing binary. Second place goes to the swatch of material used to repair holes in fabric or plastic. The last time I thought of the kind of patch the article was referencing, it was for my scout uniform.

To upgrade to version 1.1 of the repair material for the embroidered insignia, you will need a patch patch patch.

In Canada, we called them badges, or at least that's what I remember: Scouts and Venturers were a long time ago.

But, yeah, that was exactly my confusion too. I was expecting really bizarre "diff -c" output....