5 ms·

Room 641A

248 points by llambda 13y ago

jblock 13y 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 13y ago
  Is this the building? http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-8/611-folsom-street-nsa.jpg 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?
  - sim0n 13y ago
    That's the place. On the corner of 2nd and Folsom.
  - icegreentea 13y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street, another telephone exchange in NYC. It is literally a window-less skyscraper.
    - dm2 13y ago
      33 Thomas Street is an awesome building, self-sufficient, radiation hardened, and 18 foot ceilings.
    - nostromo 13y ago
      Most big cities have a communications building like this. My favorite one is in NYC: 33 Thomas Street. It looks like it was designed to be the capitol of a dystopian megalopolis. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thomas_Sidewalk_View.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thoma... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thomas_Street_December_1991.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thoma... Speaking of dystopia... I bet it houses a spy room just like the one in SF!
      - sneak 13y ago
        Everything about this comment is perfect, down to your username.
      - cavemanklaus 13y ago
        Reminds me of the film Equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film) very imposing building!
- sim0n 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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_program) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PRISM_(surveillance_progra...
- skore 13y 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 13y ago
This suite was just below Twitters main HQ for years
- johns 13y 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 13y ago
The EFF is protecting us more than the NSF. Donation sent.
- harryh 13y ago
  Strictly speaking it's not really the job of the National Science Foundation to protect us.
austenallred 13y 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 13y 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.
- anigbrowl 13y 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.
  - mtgx 13y ago
    But the government can still be sued over it, right? At least if they don't request sovereign immunity...
    - anigbrowl 13y ago
      Sure, but it would be a bit of an uphill struggle. You'd need to show standing for starters, which is quite difficult in the wake of Twombly and Iqbal (two recent and important cases address this key aspect of civil procedure, which I don't feel up to explaining). Bear in mind that the judiciary does not want to be in the business of micro-managing the executive branch, both because it jeopardizes its independence and because its rulings would almost certainly be circumvented on a technicality, thus weakening its actual reach. Among other factors, this is why the courts often decline to hear matters that are political questions (that is to say, questions of policy) and invites plaintiffs to work through Congress instead. EDIT: well, political derives from polity rather than policy, but given the context, I hope my meaning is clear. this is not to say it might not be worth filing a lawsuit to draw attention to the issue or to put the Executive branch on record as to what its position is; often change does result from some gestural litigation. But you want to be careful to separate the issue you care about (mass surveillance in the age of technology) from the long and bumpy road of legal procedure; it would be a mistake to express one's understandable frustration with the latter as a malign consequence of the former.
gggggggg 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_decl.djvu&page=17 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_de...
drivebyacct2 13y 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.
- drivebyacct2 13y ago
  [joke]Now the slide that needs to leak is the one that lists compromised root CAs.[/joke,sorta]
ancarda 13y 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.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- abrichr 13y ago
  What do you propose people do?
ChrisAntaki 13y 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.
- mtgx 13y 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 13y ago
  Aside from getting encrypted data, PRISM can also get historical, structured, and non-transmitted data.
detcader 13y 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/ http://www.mattbors.com/blog/2013/06/07/prism-thoughts/
- AlexeiSadeski 13y ago
  PRISM is dramatically less interesting than this.
  - detcader 13y 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-surveillance-prism-idUSL5N0EJ31S20130607 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...
    - AlexeiSadeski 13y ago
      This thread concerns unlimited access to the entire internet. PRISM concerns limited access to a few massive internet companies.

248 points by llambda 13y 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 13y ago
Is this the building? http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds-8/611-folsom-street-nsa.jpg 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?
- sim0n 13y ago
  That's the place. On the corner of 2nd and Folsom.
- icegreentea 13y 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street, another telephone exchange in NYC. It is literally a window-less skyscraper.
  - dm2 13y ago
    33 Thomas Street is an awesome building, self-sufficient, radiation hardened, and 18 foot ceilings.
  - nostromo 13y ago
    Most big cities have a communications building like this. My favorite one is in NYC: 33 Thomas Street. It looks like it was designed to be the capitol of a dystopian megalopolis. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thomas_Sidewalk_View.JPG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/33_Thoma... https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thomas_Street_December_1991.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/74/33_Thoma... Speaking of dystopia... I bet it houses a spy room just like the one in SF!
    - sneak 13y ago
      Everything about this comment is perfect, down to your username.
    - cavemanklaus 13y ago
      Reminds me of the film Equilibrium http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equilibrium_(film) very imposing building!
sim0n 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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_program) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:PRISM_(surveillance_progra...

skore 13y 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 13y ago

This suite was just below Twitters main HQ for years

johns 13y 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 13y ago

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

harryh 13y ago
Strictly speaking it's not really the job of the National Science Foundation to protect us.

austenallred 13y 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 13y 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.
anigbrowl 13y 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.
- mtgx 13y ago
  But the government can still be sued over it, right? At least if they don't request sovereign immunity...
  - anigbrowl 13y ago
    Sure, but it would be a bit of an uphill struggle. You'd need to show standing for starters, which is quite difficult in the wake of Twombly and Iqbal (two recent and important cases address this key aspect of civil procedure, which I don't feel up to explaining). Bear in mind that the judiciary does not want to be in the business of micro-managing the executive branch, both because it jeopardizes its independence and because its rulings would almost certainly be circumvented on a technicality, thus weakening its actual reach. Among other factors, this is why the courts often decline to hear matters that are political questions (that is to say, questions of policy) and invites plaintiffs to work through Congress instead. EDIT: well, political derives from polity rather than policy, but given the context, I hope my meaning is clear. this is not to say it might not be worth filing a lawsuit to draw attention to the issue or to put the Executive branch on record as to what its position is; often change does result from some gestural litigation. But you want to be careful to separate the issue you care about (mass surveillance in the age of technology) from the long and bumpy road of legal procedure; it would be a mistake to express one's understandable frustration with the latter as a malign consequence of the former.

gggggggg 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_decl.djvu&page=17 http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:SER_marcus_de...

drivebyacct2 13y 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.

drivebyacct2 13y ago
[joke]Now the slide that needs to leak is the one that lists compromised root CAs.[/joke,sorta]

ancarda 13y 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.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
abrichr 13y ago
What do you propose people do?

ChrisAntaki 13y 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.

mtgx 13y 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 13y ago
Aside from getting encrypted data, PRISM can also get historical, structured, and non-transmitted data.

detcader 13y 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/ http://www.mattbors.com/blog/2013/06/07/prism-thoughts/

AlexeiSadeski 13y ago
PRISM is dramatically less interesting than this.
- detcader 13y 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-surveillance-prism-idUSL5N0EJ31S20130607 http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/06/07/europe-surveillanc...
  - AlexeiSadeski 13y ago
    This thread concerns unlimited access to the entire internet. PRISM concerns limited access to a few massive internet companies.