Lol, I walk past the one on Folsom all the time. The most obvious spy building ever.
Well, yea. I'd be surprised[1] if it wasn't on the list. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Heh, see I had no idea what Room 641 was.
The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
141–150 of 192 posts
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#142The Seattle location - 1122 3rd Ave - is an interesting spot. According to Google Maps[0], next door is the FBI Seattle Division office. On street view, the building itself has a street-level office with signs for both AT&T and CenturyLink. 3rd Ave itself is slightly notorious - hosting the surface entrances for the Seattle bus tunnel, and a large number of inter-city routes, the area has a reputation for crime and t…
And the building has "reinforced concrete foundations"! Wow, sounds exotic! Just kidding... not sure if they mean something else, but "reinforced concrete foundations" might be the most commonplace thing in structural engineering. (Most foundations involve concrete, and most concrete is reinforced.) So this is a bit like saying your car has a paint job. But hey I used to be a structural engineer, and unfair ballbusting of the poor hapless journalist aside, I'm still kind of curious what feature they were actually describing.
Edit: I'll wager it's a seismic upgrade. The building's vintage is from back when they didn't have as good of a handle on the seismic stuff. And the Cascadia Subduction Zone is no joke!
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every major north american city has a legacy telco central office in downtown, in a very central location, from the days of pulse-dial and then DTMF dial analog phones. Always owned by whatever corporate entity the Bell System and then ILEC eventually became. Seattle, for example, also has the Elliot CO in Belltown: http://www.co-buildings.com/wa/206/
Yeah, you have to remember that in pulse dial days a central office station had a reach of roughly 3 miles. The longer you go, the more you're paying for cable, repeaters, or just losing quality. 90 volt AC for ringing has a limited range!
People who've never seen it in person find it amazing that things like 1200 pair phone cables exist... Here's a photo of just a 100-pair:
https://imgur.com/gallery/f1EGp
on this page is a photo of a 1200-pair: http://cityinfrastructure.com/single.php?d=RuralOutsidePlant...
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#144Is 811 10th (NYCMNY54) even interesting from an Internet perspective any longer? Yes, the building is part of AT&T’s network (AS7018), but as far as I’m aware, no peering occurs here at all. I’d look for equivalent shady racks or rooms at 60 Hudson, 111 8th and 25 Broadway. Maybe the comfortable relationship between NSA and at&t are more the driver for the location, and the fiber taps are all backhauled here. From a…
Things are slowly moving out of 111 8th as Google bought the whole building and is not renewing leases for certain tenants. Most traffic exchange happens at places like 60 Hudson for Manhattan and then a whole bunch of newer, modern, low and wide purpose built datacenters (mostly 1998 and later dotcom 1.0 boom and onwards era) in NJ across the river.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#145One wonders if a CDN might advertise, "we promise once your data enters our network at our edge locations outside of the US, it does not traverse any AT&T networks while reaching your server inside the US". Same with cloud companies' private networks across regions.
Unfortunately, traffic patterns are not straightforward, which can be seen by performing a traceroute to an arbitrary destination. How would a cdn enforce such traversal restrictions, when att is much of the internet?
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like a lot of federal agencies, NSA has its own police force to secure their buildings. A few years ago they somewhat infamously shot someone who drove through the Fort Meade gate and then refused an order to stop. They were driving a stolen car, but apparently made a wrong turn.
This also happened this year - guy drive past a checkpoint, the NSA didn't put up with it.
Its supposedly was the SOP for USAF gate guards at RAF Checksands in the UK.
And I suspect try and run a gate with a vehicle at Sellafield would lead to a similar response from the Nuke Police.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#147Lol, I walk past the one on Folsom all the time. The most obvious spy building ever.
All Big telephone exchanges look like that :-)
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a secret police The term "secret police refers to intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political opponents" [1]. We have no evidence the NSA is "used to protect the political power of an individual" or even political party. They're an intelligence agency, purely and simply. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_police
I believe COINTELPRO is now firmly in the realm of "documented fact" rather than "conspiracy theory"? That was the FBI though. More recently e.g. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/judge-orders-fbi-cia-...
Of course it's documented fact. And the CIA had a comparable program called CHAOS. Moreover, read up on JTRIG's use of sigint to conduct psychological warfare, as revealed by their own documents (GCHQ leak from the Snowden archive)-- smearing people online, destroying reputations. Presumably, they are only conducting such operations on radical terror leaders, but how do we know? And what's to stop them?
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your communication is encrypted it shouldn't matter if it passes AT&T networks. Either A. Popular and well known encryption algorithms are not broken by the NSA, and your communication is private. B. Popular and well known encryption algorithms are broken by the NSA, but the fact that it's broken is top secret and the state will not do any actions that revel the secret. Your communications are not safe, and while…
> If your communication is encrypted it shouldn't matter if it passes AT&T networks. That assumes metadata is irrelevant. The destination, time of day, and volume of the traffic all have value separately and especially so when together. The destination can be masked if you control both sides and AT&T is a go between, but timing issues are subject to analysis unless you are a large enough player to give safety in numb…
It's not that hard to anonymize metadata.
Just decide how thoroughly it must be done, and do what it takes. Plus a safety factor.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#150The article describes a lot of the buildings a fortress-like. I actually don't have a problem with that - in the event of a catastrophe, I want my telecommunications to keep working.
The rest of it - splitting data traffic and sending a copy to the NSA - I'd like to see how any international traffic is being sent through a land-locked city like Dallas, which should only have domestic traffic in it. Which the NSA shouldn't be looking at.