FOIAWEAR — THE CODED CEILING / Hidden in Plain Sight Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 009

The CIA Museum tells the Agency's history beside a timeline of world events — and the ceiling above each section tells a story of its own, through graphics and text that hide messages in plain sight.

The museum's coded ceiling is made of six panels, each one a different form of covert communication: Morse code above the exhibit on the Agency's origins; a dice cipher designed to look like dominoes above the exhibit on conflict in Southeast Asia; foreign languages; binary code; a tap code of the kind American prisoners of war used to talk without detection; and a ciphertext inspired by the Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters.

When the museum shared the six panels for the first time, it invited visitors to try their hand at decoding the messages — while making clear that the Agency will not confirm or deny the solutions.

This artwork is a bold, flat-poster interpretation: a field of domino-style tiles and code marks in the spirit of the dice-cipher panel. It is decorative and is not a transcript of any particular panel, and no specific hidden message is claimed.

The QR code on the front opens the CIA Museum's "The Coded Ceiling" exhibit, the source for everything above: https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/the-coded-ceiling/

This shirt is offered in both dark and light garment colours — the artwork in its light print on Black, Navy, Espresso, and in a matching dark-ink print on Island Reef, Grey, Ivory.

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Offered here in Black, Espresso and Navy, sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency or the United States government.