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Titanpointe: The NSA’s spy hub in New York, hidden in plain sight (2016)
- bastardoperator 5y agoI just assume every MMR in every data center/building is an NSA hub.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoThe NSA is actually it's own layer in the OSI model. They won't teach you about this in school, though, but there are even more than 7 layers.... /s
- theshadowknows 5y agois the last layer turtles?
- emptyparadise 5y agoApplication Presentation Session Transport Network Data Link Physical NSA Furry Engineers
- jrockway 5y agoI always found it very awkward working in 111 8th Ave and seeing "National Security Agency" on the building directory. It's like we weren't even pretending what was going on there. (My greatest enjoyment, however, was that Level 3 was on the 3rd floor.)
- TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
- adolph 5y ago33 Thomas Street (formerly the AT&T Long Lines Building) is a 550-foot-tall (170 m) windowless skyscraper in Tribeca, Lower Manhattan, New York City. It stands on the east side of Church Street, between Thomas Street and Worth Street. The building is an example of the Brutalist architectural style. It is a telephone exchange or wire center building which contained three major 4ESS switches used for interexchange (long distance) telephony, as well as a number of other switches used for competitive local exchange carrier services. However, it is not used for incumbent local exchange carrier services, and is not a central office. The CLLI code for this facility is NYCMNYBW. The building has also been described as the likely location of a National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street
- yodon 5y agoA fifty story windowless concrete building that's genuinely attractive. Not at all what I expected to discover on the Wikipedia page.
- ginko 5y agoHow 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.
- quantum_state 5y agoIndeed it looks very oppressive, reminding people of the Big Brother and other similar regimes in history …
- boomskats 5y agoAttractiveness is entirely subjective by definition. I personally find it a very attractive building. Much like the Barbican Estate or the National Theatre in London.
- Lammy 5y ago
- dang 5y agoDiscussed (a bit) at the time: The NSA’s Spy Hub in New York, Hidden in Plain Sight - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12970683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12970683 - Nov 2016 (3 comments)
- tata71 5y agoThank you for your hard work, and happy holidays, dang!
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoAnyone who has played Control will have a bit of deja-vu.
- smoldesu 5y agoThe architecture in that game is really beautiful, though I admit the brutalist look isn't for everyone. Neither was the gunplay or story, in my opinion, but I did have a load of fun exploring the moody, minimalist interiors of the game. It reminded me of the stark, arena-styled level design of old-school shooters like Half Life and Quake with much more modern lighting and linear storytelling. Quite a bit of fun! Getting it to run on my aged GTX 1050Ti, on the other hand...
- JumpCrisscross 5y agoDescribing 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.
- amarshall 5y agoNote this is (2016), at the time it wasn’t sensational.
- low_key 5y agoIf you zoom into it on Google maps, it's labeled as "NSA Building".
- TheOtherHobbes 5y agoMaybe the real one is hidden, and Titanpointe is the expensive decoy.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- fnord77 5y agowhen I lived in NYC in the 90s there were rumors I heard from telecom guys that the NSA was in that building.
- airstrike 5y agoI'm more appalled by the need to lousily tape this 72pt Calibri label on what is indubitably an intercom at the entrance of an "intelligence" agency: https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/11/stills-seq-12.jpg?auto=compress%2Cformat&q=90 https://theintercept.imgix.net/wp-uploads/sites/1/2016/11/st...
- bobthepanda 5y agoIt's also an AT&T building. It's possible that under it is a Ma Bell logo or something ancient from the long, crazy corporate history of American telecoms.
- Waterluvian 5y agoSomeone needs to go find out.
- dangus 5y agoBasically every telecom office building I've seen looks run down, in my opinion. I remember walking by the AT&T building (one with windows) in my city and noticing how it looked basically abandoned at street level despite being in active use. I think telecoms just don't spend money on stuff like that because it has no return on investment for them. They're like your neighborhood dive bar that owns the land with no plans to sell/leave/lease out space (since the building is physically attached to their product), therefore has no financial incentive to improve the building. Plus, their customers have no choice but to use them even if walking by the building makes them think negatively of the company. Nothing a half-funny commercial with an overused spokesperson can't fix! That intercom buzzer still works so there's no reason to replace it. There's no money in the budget for a nice sign, so the employee printed something out and taped it there, because that's what's in the supply cabinet.
- LegitShady 5y agoAll the intercoms are labelled 'trap'. The one in the image is a trap.
- labster 5y agoThere’s a great piece of Ghostbusters fanfic about this building: NYNEX, Embedded Angel of New York City https://www.bldgblog.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new-york-city/ https://www.bldgblog.com/2009/06/nynex-embedded-angel-of-new...
- LatteLazy 5y agoOff 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.
- BitwiseFool 5y agoRemember the "Nothing is Beyond Our Reach" mission patch? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-247 I sense the people running these things don't care as much as they used to about blending in.
- tenebrisalietum 5y agoSo what if the name leaks and some hapless computer-unsavvy person happens to call John's Computer Services to help him get rid of the 32 rows of IE toolbars on his Pentium IV-based PC running Windows Vista? At least Titanpointe sounds like a government codename and something vaguely menacing that you shouldn't really mess with.
- kobebrookskC3 5y agohow about an actual computer services shop as a front?
- thomasjudge 5y agoAND they could install spyware on the PCs....vertically integrated, as it were
- Lammy 5y agoBut ALL-CAPS SCIENCE TERM is such a cool aesthetic, like STELLARWIND.
- IAmGraydon 5y agoEver 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaze https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
- victorbstan 5y agoThe Oldest House
- peter303 5y agoSort of like the Blue Cube in Silicon Valley. Even knows its a bullseye in nuke war.
- IAmGraydon 5y agoI’m pretty sure blue cube no longer exists.
- peter303 5y agoSort of like the Blue Cube in Silicon Valley. Even knows its a bullseye in nuke war. It closed in 2011.
- ww520 5y agoI 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.
- jcrawfordor 5y agoNike 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.
- ww520 5y agoThat’s excellent historic facts. It’s amazing to mention something puzzling and got detailed information and perspectives here. Thanks!
- emuneee 5y agoAnd I thought this building was where E(vil) Corp was staging paper records to rebuild their database this whole time. Who knew?!
- jcrawfordor 5y agoI dislike this article whenever it comes up in that it conflates the NSA activity at the site (TITANPOINTE) with the building in a very confusing way. The building is not an NSA building, it is an AT&T building. The NSA is a tenant, along with many other organizations who use the building for meet-me and internet exchange purposes. It's absolutely true that the NSA has a concerning relationship with AT&T that has evidently allowed them to conduct widespread surveillance at telephone switches, but this article seems to be making a case that the building itself is an edifice of the NSA... which is no more true than an Amazon data center. It is interesting that the building is nuclear-hardened, but it was started in 1969, which was about five years after it became standing policy for AT&T to nuclear-harden all major long-lines facilities. It's not at all unique to this building and is unrelated to the NSA, nuclear-hardened AT&T exchanges can be found from major cities to small towns across the United States (Farmington, New Mexico, for example), and a large portion of surviving microwave relay sites are hardened. The general standard was roughly for a 100KT detonation at five miles, but some facilities were built for more. The motivation was survivable telecommunications after a nuclear attack, which was primarily a requirement of the US Government which relied on AT&T to build out AUTOVON as a survivable C2 and continuity of government system (and AT&T was generously paid for this work). Alongside AUTOVON, AT&T designed and operated systems like ECHO FOX which provided telephone connections to Air Force One and other national emergency command post aircraft. The end-user client here was mainly the POTUS and Strategic Air Command (later Army and Navy components of the triad), not intelligence. The choice of architect was a fairly simple one, he was, at the time, a notable architect who was friendly with the federal government (who was in part the client due to AUTOVON and other C2 programs, not intelligence) and had prior experience working on hardened facilities like embassies. It feels like the author chose this rather confusing way of presenting the issue, conflating the physical building with NSA activity that occurs in it, mostly just to weave in the architecture criticism. The building itself is very interesting, but really does nothing to advance the NSA story and rather seems to suggest that the scale of NSA activity is far larger (the whole building!) than it really is (generally thought to be a single suite on one floor, and far from the only suite occupied by staff of AT&T tenants). What the NSA has seems to basically be an office space, cage, and cross-connect agreement, which tons of other tenants also have... the NSA is just unusual in that the cross-connects go to interfaces configured for lawful intercept (which is more a telecom term of art and not a judgment of the legality).
- CPLX 5y agoThis discussion is bizzare. It’s not a NSA building it’s a telecom building. So the NSA goes there to tap into telecom. That doesn’t make it an NSA building though it’s still primarily a telecom hub. It’s not the only giant windowless building of its kind in Manhattan either. There’s the Verizon one next to the Brooklyn Bridge on Pearl (which added some windows decades after being built) among others not to mention the Western Union building in Tribeca and so on.
- Sebb767 5y agoA bit off-topic, but why would one build a nuclear-hardened skyscraper? I can't think of any structure more vulnerable towards extreme winds. Wouldn't a house or bunker be far more practical? Especially when you skip the windows anyway.