Room 641A

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

by llambda • 13 years ago

248 44 13 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

jblock• 13 years ago

I had never been to SF before last summer. This building was right across from the bus I took home every day. And every day I wondered: what was in that windowless building? Never was it not an imposing sight.

Even after I found out about this, it freaked me out; especially that it's right in the heart of downtown.

PavlovsCat• 13 years ago

Is this the building?

http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-8/611-folsom-street-nsa.jpg

Is that just very horrid architecture, or some kind of shielding? Perhaps both?

sim0n2• 13 years ago

That's the place. On the corner of 2nd and Folsom.

icegreentea• 13 years ago

It's a bit a lot of things. I can't find when the building was built, but I'm guessing the 60s/70s, so pretty much the height of brutalist architecture. Basically, very hard geometric forms, heavy on repetition, lots of concrete. There's a lot of that type of stuff sitting around, especially on university campuses.

It appears to be have been actually designed for use as a telephone switching center, for which windows actually are mostly useless. Should take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street, another telephone exchange in NYC. It is literally a window-less skyscraper.

sim0n2• 13 years ago

Same here! I moved to Lansing St. 2 years ago and so I always walked past the building. The fact it had no windows was pretty weird and concerning and so I often joked that it was probably a spy agency/wire tapping operation. I was pretty surprised when I read that it pretty much was built for that purpose.

You honestly couldn't have designed a building that could have stuck out and raised more suspicion than this one.

flomo• 13 years ago

No, sorry, but there's absolutely nothing "weird" about a windowless telephone exchange building. At one time, every single neighborhood in this country had one.

This building was not created for this, it's just an old Bell building that had some empty space which could be repurposed.

timr• 13 years ago

"I often joked that it was probably a spy agency/wire tapping operation. I was pretty surprised when I read that it pretty much was built for that purpose."

The building wasn't built to be a spy agency or a wire-tapping operation. It's an AT&T switching center. Among other things, it's the terminus of a number of important trans-Pacific fiber cables, and it's been around for longer than the NSA has been rumored to have a room inside of it.

ihsw• 13 years ago

The talk page for the PRISM article[1] is also very interesting.

Why is it all caps? Some other reason? It should be noted in the article somewhere...

And:

Everyone is losing their minds over this thing, but as far as I can tell, data is only provided with a "legally binding order or subpoena". This isn't the NSA reading through every inbox in the world. Or am I wrong?

Once more:

The denials by the participating companies are not surprising and may, in fact, be a requirement under the National Security Letters, which the NSA and FBI use to give quasi-legal cover to their signals collection.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PRISM_(surveillance_progra...

skore• 13 years ago

The page itself notes, curiously:

A related program, a big data or data mining system based on cloud computing and Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) technology known as "Boundless Informant", was disclosed in top secret documents leaked to the Guardian and reported on June 8, 2013.

(my emphasis)

So, after we've had licenses claim (in one way or another) "do not use this software to wage war", will we see a rise in "do not use this software for secret intelligence gathering or processing" licenses?

Still, both are rather pointless when the entity you're trying to subject to the terms of your license has a standing army and heaps of nukes. Seriously. This is why we can't have nice things.

samstave• 13 years ago

This suite was just below Twitters main HQ for years

johns• 13 years ago

Different building. Twitter was at 795 Folsom (at 4th) which was also an AT&T building. This building is at 2nd and has very few windows and does not appear to be occupied by any office tenants (I walk by it every day).

escaped_hn• 13 years ago

The EFF is protecting us more than the NSF. Donation sent.

harryh• 13 years ago

Strictly speaking it's not really the job of the National Science Foundation to protect us.

austenallred• 13 years ago

[The class action lawsuit against AT&T] was dismissed on December 29, 2011 based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government.

What an overreach of power on the part of Congress. Something goes to court to discuss its legality, and then Congress retroactively declares it to be legal? Yikes.

rdtsc• 13 years ago

I already mentioned this and sorry for repeating but our beloved liberal / transparent / change-and-hope-loving president Obama voted for the retroactive immunity back when he was still a senator.

anigbrowl3• 13 years ago

Well no: Congress is well capable of granting retroactive immunity. The constitution restrains it from retroactively criminalizing things, so that you can be prosecuted for something that wasn't illegal when you did it; but retroactive decriminalization happens fairly frequently and is an essentially liberal action. Why should a private actor be burdened for the perceived misdoings of government? It's not up to corporations or individuals to regulate the government, from a legal standpoint.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

But the government can still be sued over it, right? At least if they don't request sovereign immunity...

weland2• 13 years ago

Why should a private actor be burdened for the perceived misdoings of government?

But why does this have to be ensured through the action of the Congress? If the misdoing was the Government's, it is up to the courts of law to absolve the private actor of guilt.

Granting immunity of private actors for government illegalities is a very dangerous precedent. Imagine if the same was to be done if a private security company fires on civilians on behalf of state orders, and is then absolved of responsibility through an act like this one.

When a private authority does something on behalf of state authority, the state effectively gives away some of its responsibility; when it decriminalizes it later, the part of responsibility that it has given away is now vanished. In some cases, of course, the state can still be sued over the initiative, but such a measure ensures that companies are sheltered in case the whole thing goes awry, so there's little incentive in not collaborating.

What does suck about this in terms of ethics is that it's hard to draw a line between when retroactive decriminalization is beneficial and when it isn't. After abolishing slavery, it obviously makes sense to decriminalize slaves' attempted escapes. But does it also make sense to decriminalize racist behaviour?

Edit: just to be sure, I'm arguing over principles here, and all I have to bring is historical arguments, not judiciary ones, since I neither am a lawyer, nor do I reside in the US. If I missed something due to unfamiliarity with the US law, I apologize in advance :-).

notdrunkatall• 13 years ago

Retroactive immunity should itself be illegal, no exceptions.

gggggggg• 13 years ago

From that link, the guy who leaked it was a "computer technician" for twenty years. Is that real, or was there a effort to discredit him or something. Twenty years is a long time in the same role.

ktsmith• 13 years ago

Yes it's real. It's amazing to me how quickly this room, ECHELON, Carnivore and all the rest have been forgotten. There seemed to be a small but vocal technical uproar over this rooms existence when it was discovered but the public at large ignored it. Then Congress retroactively made it legal so there was nothing we could even do about it at that point.

jlgreco• 13 years ago

I think it is basically a form of semantic satiation. Mention something controversial enough times and eventually the public stops understanding that it was real. I wager that if you took a poll of Americans, most would believe that ECHELON is a fictional plot device in spy movies that "conspiracy theorists" think is real because they are dumb.

e3pi• 13 years ago

"...The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 15 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.

Author James Bamford raises the suspicion question of an Israeli backdoor to the Israeli Narus in The Shadow Factory 2008.

fishcakes• 13 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_de...

drivebyacct22• 13 years ago

It's surreal to watch all of this old stuff get drudged up here and elsewhere.

I almost wish I watched mainstream news to see how much of this depth is covered or if it's just PRISM and not anything about how bullshit FISA warrants are or how crazy insane National Security Letters are (and how many hundreds of thousands of them are issued)... OR that they regularly wiretap the internet.

Between:

- this (which we've known about)

- the new leaked slide that indicates they do massively, widely wiretap fiber

- PRISM (which I suspect were simply the dates that the companies brought up infrastructure to be able to quickly and easily comply with FISA warrants. Which means "direct access" is true, but it also means that "we were forced to make it easy to give the government what they want as soon as they need it")

They basically have real time access to HTTP data (and HTTPS if a CA is compromised or controlled by them [is it really even that crazy of a theory at this stage]). They also can get organized, categorized access to my data with a FISA warrant (please, read up, they are as rubber-stamp as they're referenced in these articles).

Sigh.

drivebyacct22• 13 years ago

[joke]Now the slide that needs to leak is the one that lists compromised root CAs.[/joke,sorta]

ancarda• 13 years ago

I've been saying this for years. Pretty much all I've said over the last few days is "I told you so".

My biggest concern is come a week everyone will go back to not caring and I'll go back to pestering people to give a shit.

abrichr• 13 years ago

What do you propose people do?

oceanstone• 13 years ago

The discovery of Room 641A is more profound than PRISM. Every web request, text message, phone call... it goes through these hubs where the data is copied and saved. PRISM is just about getting access to data sent over secured HTTPS connections, from what I can tell. It's not (currently) economical for them to use computing power to break (all of) those codes, and it's easier to apply pressure to tech companies to just hand them the keys.

mtgx2• 13 years ago

Yes, that must be exactly what they're doing. Siphon all the unencrypted data at the ISP level, and gain access to the rest of the data that is encrypted from the biggest companies - and then expand the "program" to more companies in the future.

And to think that they rejected the idea of UN doing the same thing (the ITU debacle last year). It was only so they are the only ones doing it, all along.

dasil003• 13 years ago

Aside from getting encrypted data, PRISM can also get historical, structured, and non-transmitted data.

_bfhp2• 13 years ago

From Matt Bors:

"There’s a line I’ve seen trotted a few times now that goes, “Ah, we knew all this was happening, you idiots!” We didn’t know. If you knew about PRISM you should have scooped The Guardian and made a name for yourself. The fact is, this story is mammoth and is bringing an incredible amount of attention to a program that’s been operating in total secrecy for a decade. But, yes, you’re smart and get a pat on the head for not being a “sheeple.” "

http://www.mattbors.com/blog/2013/06/07/prism-thoughts/

AlexeiSadeski2• 13 years ago

PRISM is dramatically less interesting than this.

_bfhp2• 13 years ago

Care to enlighten us as to how? And by "us" I mean President Obama (who was pretty much forced to comment on it and certainly didn't say anything like you did), those in the administration going after the leaker(s) (for if this is uninteresting, the leakers aren't in the wrong at all), and those people who marked the slides as TOP SECRET. Oh and the German data protection and freedom of information commissioner [1]

What of the others programs in the slides? Two even had to be redacted out because of the potential of the fallout against NY-based Guardian US

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...

Room 641A

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