If you worked for the CIA, I’ve always wondered: How in hell do you explain to your kids what you do for a living? Well, these days, you just send ‘em to “The CIA’s Homepage for Kids” — one of the many sites that spooks created after Bill Clinton signed a 1997 law demanding the US’s trench-coat set be more accomodating to the public. In the current issue of Wired, Noah Shachtman reviews the various offerings:

Imagine a world where Teletubbies pack heat and Spongebob goes undercover. That’s apparently what US government designers had in mind when they followed President Clinton’s 1997 order to add child-oriented Web pages to government sites. Today, the results are bizarre - cryptographic coloring books, drug-sniffing dog cartoons, and spy-satellite sing-alongs. Are they giant inside jokes? Coded messages? Only Uncle Sam knows for sure.

Above, that’s Ginger the blue teddy bear visiting CIA headquarters — without a security badge (“Lucky the guard knows me!”)