The Virtual State for Tots

The CIA home page for kids is certainly worth a visit, with its loveable surveillance pigeons as mascots, dress-up disguise page, and quizzes on geography and code-breaking.

A gallery of the current offerings within the larger genre of home pages on government web sites designed for children can be viewed at http://www.cia.gov/cia/ciakids/govagency.shtml.

Each large site seems to have its own adorable cartoon mascots: from bomb-sniffing dogs at the FBI to space-age robots at the National Reconnaissance Organization.

Yet many other government websites for children are still clearly designed for research projects, like the relatively unornamented page of the ATF.