6 ms·

Room 641A

182 points by paimapi 22d ago

smalltorch 22d ago
Hi NSA. I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.
- hollow-moe 22d ago
  It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
- kvuj 22d ago
  > A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem. The problem is that the NSA violates everyone's privacy without a care in the world. This makes it pretty easy for them. Stockpile a bunch of vulnerabilities and go to town. When you cannot even know what their budget is (since it's classified), can you even know what their capabilities are?
- lern_too_spel 22d ago
  They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down. Mining public forums like this one is likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
  - monocasa 22d ago
    > They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. > In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down. That was private fiber they had spliced into, not anything routed across public Internet. That's why the DCs weren't encrypting it to begin with.
    - lern_too_spel 22d ago
      > Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing. > That was private fiber they had spliced into, No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.
      - monocasa 22d ago
        > No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing. The utah data center is their buffer. And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their diffie-helman hack. > No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber. I've talked to Google engineers about this. They spliced private fiber. Google was smart enough to encrypt anything routed over public internet, but thought that their private WAN was safe until the disclosures.
- wat10000 22d ago
  It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.
Cider9986 22d ago
9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.
- EvanAnderson 22d ago
  I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<) In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away. I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched. I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
  - krapp 22d ago
    Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.
    - EvanAnderson 22d ago
      I totally agree. I was there helping fix it, too. The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
    - nabbed 22d ago
      Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.
Charly_HW 22d ago
9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.
- justin66 22d ago
  Hey now. We turn against each other, too.
- leonidasrup 22d ago
  " In 2003, majority of Americans believed Iraqi-links to 9/11 conspiracy theory, which facilitated the Bush administration's agenda for the invasion of Iraq. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.” https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/ https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juha...
- georgemcbay 22d ago
  > 9/11 was the starting point I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale. Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11: I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building. I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.
Lammy 22d ago
These days they call it Cloudflare and make you pay for it lol
- pluc 22d ago
  Enter the .ca registrar: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/ https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/ I wonder if the NSA had done a "everyone, get behind this firewall" type of campaign if it would have been more successful/less leaky
- cco 22d ago
  You'll be happy to know that Cloudflare's headquarters is about three blocks away from the very room that this thread is about.
deleted 22d ago
[deleted]
tedd4u 22d ago
Covered many times before. How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt] (https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-uncovered-the-nsas-big-brother-machine/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc...) 710 points | the-mitr | 4 months ago | 254 comments Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 333 points | hourislate | 6 years ago | 70 comments Room 641A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 248 points | llambda | 13 years ago | 44 comments Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 207 points | mimsee | 10 years ago | 75 comments Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 51 points | jihadjihad | 2 years ago | 5 comments
- wilkystyle 22d ago
  Good. I hope it gets covered many times in the future as well, and that we never forget that the moment we stop fighting tooth and nail to protect our privacy is the exact moment it goes away.
  - sbseitz 22d ago
    it has been gone lmao.
    - Cider9986 22d ago
      Defeatist totally wrong attitude. People are fighting back against flock and winning for example. Signal reached 100 M MAU. GrapheneOS has reached 500k estimated users. Privacy is more of an issue today than ever before with more people caring about it. Fisa 702 expired. Cell network area searches determined to require a warrant by supreme court. https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/17/privacy-is-not-dead/ https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/17/privacy-is...
      - mitxela 22d ago
        How are people winning against mass surveillance cameras? There are a few fewer Flock cameras... because municipalities are switching to Axon and Motorola.
sippingabonedry 22d ago
Gotta wonder how many OUTRAGED about the days when they had to splice into pieces of glass, wrote the tools to make this easier. Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.
nzoschke 22d ago
Crazy I just walked by this building last night and discussed how ominous it looks with a friend
yreg 22d ago
These things were obviously always concerning but I feel the situation has taken on an entirely different dimension now that they could feasibly use whisper + LLM to actually review _all_ the communication. That's crazy.
godwinson__4-8 22d ago
> On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. "Retroactive grant of immunity" is a nice reminder that the law is ultimately about power. Amass enough power and the law is yours.

182 points by paimapi 22d ago

Hi NSA. I don't envy the NSA position. I mean honestly it seems like an impossible task to sniff all the packets and find anything useful. A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem.

hollow-moe 22d ago
It's not a "hard problem" it's impossible, it would be a typical trying to solve a social issue with technical solution. Bad actors encrypt their comms anyway so only the unaware layman gets caught in the net.
kvuj 22d ago
> A mission to secure the people whilst not infringing personal rights in today's world is a really really hard problem. The problem is that the NSA violates everyone's privacy without a care in the world. This makes it pretty easy for them. Stockpile a bunch of vulnerabilities and go to town. When you cannot even know what their budget is (since it's classified), can you even know what their capabilities are?
lern_too_spel 22d ago
They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information. In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down. Mining public forums like this one is likely fair game and seems not to be a secret, but it doesn't require anything in Room 641A.
- monocasa 22d ago
  > They don't sniff all the packets to find anything useful. Snowden showed that they intercept certain packets flowing between particular sources and destinations that might contain useful information Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. > In Snowden's leaks, one such application was email inbox backup transfers for big Internet companies that did not (at that time) encrypt their WAN traffic, from which they mined the sender and recipient to build a social graph, a program that the leaks said had already been shut down. That was private fiber they had spliced into, not anything routed across public Internet. That's why the DCs weren't encrypting it to begin with.
  - lern_too_spel 22d ago
    > Their legal argument was that it was actually ok for them to grab and store all packets, and that it wasn't a search until they ran an actual search that matched against that stored traffic. No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing. > That was private fiber they had spliced into, No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.
    - monocasa 22d ago
      > No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing. The utah data center is their buffer. And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their diffie-helman hack. > No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber. I've talked to Google engineers about this. They spliced private fiber. Google was smart enough to encrypt anything routed over public internet, but thought that their private WAN was safe until the disclosures.
wat10000 22d ago
It’s a position they chose. They could say, mass surveillance is unconstitutional and wrong, but we’d be happy to continue with our mission of targeted intercepts and providing secure communication to our people.

Cider9986 22d ago

9/11 was used as an excuse to create more mass spying on Americans even though 2,977 people died while 42,116 died from car accidents that same year.

EvanAnderson 22d ago
I'm an American turning 50 in the next year. Today made me aware of the fact me that I've now lived in a "post-9/11" world longer than before. (Time gets away from us, doesn't it... >sigh<) In the years immediately following the attacks I thought the country's collective paranoia would subside. I thought the encroachments on civil liberties would fade away. I didn't understand how much money there was in fear-based capitalism (and I really should have, seeing as how I lived thru the fear and hype around Y2K) and how quickly the interests profiting from keeping Americans afraid would become entrenched. I feel like people who were young when the attacks happened developed a normalized view of mass surveillance. Likewise, I feel like they have a stronger deference to authority. As today's early-to-mid 30's-aged people assume the reigns of power I think we'll have even less of a shot to see a return to pre-9/11 attitudes about civil liberties.
- krapp 22d ago
  Y2K was potentially a real problem. It didn't materialize as such because we actually fixed it.
  - EvanAnderson 22d ago
    I totally agree. I was there helping fix it, too. The occasion of Y2K was used by merchants of hype and fear to make a quick buck with people who had "prepper" tendencies. I can't believe I didn't expect them to glom-on to 9/11 the way they did with Y2K.
  - nabbed 22d ago
    Here! Here! This always annoys me. My company hired a bunch of older programmers to fix many Y2K problems in our legacy but critical systems. Even the (then) new-fangled thing I was working on needed some amount of Y2K work, which I did myself, to avoid disaster.

Charly_HW 22d ago

9/11 was the starting point for profiting from many places, but mainly for keeping Americans afraid and prompting them to turn against people from outside the country to justify military spending.

justin66 22d ago
Hey now. We turn against each other, too.
leonidasrup 22d ago
" In 2003, majority of Americans believed Iraqi-links to 9/11 conspiracy theory, which facilitated the Bush administration's agenda for the invasion of Iraq. " https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_the_War_on_Terror “Of course it’s about oil; we can’t really deny that,” said Gen. John Abizaid, former head of U.S. Central Command and Military Operations in Iraq, in 2007. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan agreed, writing in his memoir, “I am saddened that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.” Then-Sen. and now Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said the same in 2007: “People say we’re not fighting for oil. Of course we are.” https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juhasz/ https://edition.cnn.com/2013/03/19/opinion/iraq-war-oil-juha...
georgemcbay 22d ago
> 9/11 was the starting point I'd amend this slightly to say that it wasn't really a starting point for anything, but certainly an extremely efficient accelerant for many things that various people already wanted to do or were already doing on a smaller scale. Random anecdote somewhat related to the topic of 641A, but pre-9/11: I remember visiting the temporary FSF offices when they were sharing space with the MIT AI Lab back in what must have been 1993 or 1994, and someone (since deceased, RIP) was showing me some of the server rooms including the Thinking Machines CM-5, which was kind of a big deal at the time (so many blinking lights) and during the tour they casually pointed to a locked door across the hall from one of the larger server rooms that looked like a cleaning closet or something from the outside (completely nondescript) and claimed it housed a room where the government taps into all of the network traffic routing through the building. I kinda just thought it was a joke at the time, but it wasn't delivered as one. Was it a joke? or a serious statement but driven by an unreliable rumor mill? I have no idea, but given what we do know since, I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it having been at least somewhat true.

Lammy 22d ago

These days they call it Cloudflare and make you pay for it lol

pluc 22d ago
Enter the .ca registrar: https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/ https://www.cira.ca/en/canadian-shield/ I wonder if the NSA had done a "everyone, get behind this firewall" type of campaign if it would have been more successful/less leaky
cco 22d ago
You'll be happy to know that Cloudflare's headquarters is about three blocks away from the very room that this thread is about.

deleted 22d ago

[deleted]

tedd4u 22d ago

Covered many times before. How Mark Klein told the EFF about Room 641A [book excerpt] (https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-uncovered-the-nsas-big-brother-machine/ https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-unc...) 710 points | the-mitr | 4 months ago | 254 comments Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 333 points | hourislate | 6 years ago | 70 comments Room 641A (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 248 points | llambda | 13 years ago | 44 comments Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 207 points | mimsee | 10 years ago | 75 comments Room 641A (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A) 51 points | jihadjihad | 2 years ago | 5 comments

wilkystyle 22d ago
Good. I hope it gets covered many times in the future as well, and that we never forget that the moment we stop fighting tooth and nail to protect our privacy is the exact moment it goes away.
- sbseitz 22d ago
  it has been gone lmao.
  - Cider9986 22d ago
    Defeatist totally wrong attitude. People are fighting back against flock and winning for example. Signal reached 100 M MAU. GrapheneOS has reached 500k estimated users. Privacy is more of an issue today than ever before with more people caring about it. Fisa 702 expired. Cell network area searches determined to require a warrant by supreme court. https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/17/privacy-is-not-dead/ https://www.privacyguides.org/articles/2025/02/17/privacy-is...
    - mitxela 22d ago
      How are people winning against mass surveillance cameras? There are a few fewer Flock cameras... because municipalities are switching to Axon and Motorola.

sippingabonedry 22d ago

Gotta wonder how many OUTRAGED about the days when they had to splice into pieces of glass, wrote the tools to make this easier. Now all they gotta do is ring up Google or Meta or the other usual suspects and they get the data on a platter in cheerleader font with the I's dotted with hearts.

nzoschke 22d ago

Crazy I just walked by this building last night and discussed how ominous it looks with a friend

yreg 22d ago

These things were obviously always concerning but I feel the situation has taken on an entirely different dimension now that they could feasibly use whisper + LLM to actually review _all_ the communication. That's crazy.

godwinson__4-8 22d ago

> On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011, based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear the case. "Retroactive grant of immunity" is a nice reminder that the law is ultimately about power. Amass enough power and the law is yours.