Sort of like the Blue Cube in Silicon Valley. Even knows its a bullseye in nuke war.
I’m pretty sure blue cube no longer exists.
Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
41–50 of 80 posts
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
They could have put some fake windows to make it look normal. They do this with data center buildings in my city.
A jail I was held in has tinted glass windows all the way around it to make it look like a modern office building, but behind the glass... 99% wall.
Username checks out.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#43Off topic but... If I ran an NSA secret spy hub, it wouldn't be called Titanpointe. It would be called something less ridiculous and more mundane like "John's Computer Services". I'd be embarrassed when a name like that kept appearing on documents or for brought up in meetings.
Ever read Focault? Perhaps they want you to feel that their powers of surveillance are nearly infinite so that you believe you could be observed at any time. You comply because you never know when you’re being watched. A self-inflicted oppression.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#44I was hiking in a trail along the Pacific coast in the Bay Area and came upon an abandon missile launch site. There were a barrack, observation post, communication poles, and clearly underground missile silos. Not sure whether there're still missiles buried underground. It's pretty close to residential area, too. Very interesting. It's probably from the Cold War. Nowadays missiles are mobile.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#45Off topic but... If I ran an NSA secret spy hub, it wouldn't be called Titanpointe. It would be called something less ridiculous and more mundane like "John's Computer Services". I'd be embarrassed when a name like that kept appearing on documents or for brought up in meetings.
My wife was working for the NRO's agency-private data center for applications that couldn't be hosted atop Amazon's cloud service in C2S, and it somehow ended up with the initials "RC" which nobody really knew what it meant, so they either called it "Rodeo Clown" or "Rogue Central," depending on who you asked. When they had a renaming contest put to a vote, I can't remember what actually won, but #2 was "Totally Not a Government Death Ray Facility."
Believe it or not, the hackers working for spy agencies are exactly the same nerds as the hackers working for wherever the rest of you work. They have senses of humor. My personal favorite piece of NSA software was "Bilbo Badger." A sibling comment mentioned the NROL39 Octopus mission patch. The latest next great vehicle they launched late last year had a motto written in Elvish. I remember when they first showed it to us before the launch, I thought it might have been the Black Tongue of Mordor, but it took maybe 20 minutes to find someone on the program who recognized it and could translate it.
The program I was on at the time, which ran the ground processing for that vehicle, was code named "Lateralus," which is a Tool album, and my wife's old program after the RC one, was code named "Rush," the old Canadian prog rock band. It was the program that ran the Sentient software, the thing people get all freaked out about as some government AI autonomous control system like Eagle Eye or Enemy of the State or some shit. When they renewed the contract in January, the new code name became "Cyberdyne," in honor of all the public paranoia over what they're doing.
If you think it's embarrassing to have nerd names for stuff, you should see what the people look like. My first boss there had purple hair, never wore shoes, and wore a different wolf shirt every day of the week. I'm not sure who you think goes to work at places like this. There's a reason 80% of the NRO mission patches are wizards and dragons.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#46Describing it as “hidden” is a bit sensational. I don’t think I can walk past it in a group without someone throwing out this factoid. It’s also unapologetic about what it is—no fake windows or any of that garbage.
Note this is (2016), at the time it wasn’t sensational.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#47I was hiking in a trail along the Pacific coast in the Bay Area and came upon an abandon missile launch site. There were a barrack, observation post, communication poles, and clearly underground missile silos. Not sure whether there're still missiles buried underground. It's pretty close to residential area, too. Very interesting. It's probably from the Cold War. Nowadays missiles are mobile.
Nike Hercules, it was an urban-scale air defense system widely deployed on the coasts against potential Soviet bombers. While there had been plans to upgrade Nike to Nike Zeus and later Nike X, which were nuclear and anti-ballistic missile systems, these were cancelled for various reasons and the Nike system went out of service in the '80s. The launch complex vaults, in which the missiles were stored, have mostly since been filled in for safety reasons (those that haven't are almost always flooded). Fortunately there's one in Marin County preserved as a museum by a historic society.
Fortunately, being an air-defense system, Nike never had a combat engagement. Nike X, while it never came close to achieving its goals, did serve as the birthplace of modern phased-array radar and several advancements in real-time, networked data processing. Overall the Nike system is one of the America's most visible military artifacts of the Cold War. At the apex there were nearly 300, mostly coastal but also inland around certain priority targets like SAC bases and ICBM fields.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#48And I thought this building was where E(vil) Corp was staging paper records to rebuild their database this whole time. Who knew?!
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#49Off topic but... If I ran an NSA secret spy hub, it wouldn't be called Titanpointe. It would be called something less ridiculous and more mundane like "John's Computer Services". I'd be embarrassed when a name like that kept appearing on documents or for brought up in meetings.
My wife was working for the NRO's agency-private data center for applications that couldn't be hosted atop Amazon's cloud service in C2S, and it somehow ended up with the initials "RC" which nobody really knew what it meant, so they either called it "Rodeo Clown" or "Rogue Central," depending on who you asked. When they had a renaming contest put to a vote, I can't remember what actually won, but #2 was "Totally Not…
> the hackers working for spy agencies are exactly the same nerds
They’re really not, but I can see why you might think that.
Re: Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
A fifty story windowless concrete building that's genuinely attractive. Not at all what I expected to discover on the Wikipedia page.
How is it attractive? It looks extremely oppressive. I remember coming by that building while walking through Manhattan by chance and thinking this must be some government surveillance center or something.
It's an equipment shed. Most telephone exchanges are pretty bland boxes. In this case the brutalism is functional rather than a soul crushing architectural circle jerk.