They called it Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the middle of New York City. It would have no windows, 29 floors with three basement levels, and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.
But the building’s primary purpose would not be to protect humans from toxic radiation amid nuclear war. Rather, the fortified skyscraper would safeguard powerful computers, cables, and switchboards. It would house one of the most important telecommunications hubs in the United States — the world’s largest center for processing long-distance phone calls, operated by the New York Telephone Company, a subsidiary of AT&T.
The building was designed by the architectural firm John Carl Warnecke & Associates, whose grand vision was to create a communication nerve center like a “20th century fortress, with spears and arrows replaced by protons and neutrons laying quiet siege to an army of machines within.”
“Project X,” a short film by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras. This article is the product of a joint reporting project between The Intercept and Field of Vision.
Construction began in 1969, and by 1974, the skyscraper was completed. Today, it can be found in the heart of lower Manhattan at 33 Thomas Street, a vast gray tower of concrete and granite that soars 550 feet into the New York skyline. The brutalist structure, still used by AT&T and, according to the New York Department of Finance, owned by the company, is like no other in the vicinity. Unlike the many neighboring residential and office buildings, it is impossible to get a glimpse inside 33 Thomas Street. True to the designers’ original plans, there are no windows and the building is not illuminated. At night it becomes a giant shadow, blending into the darkness, its large square vents emitting a distinct, dull hum that is frequently drowned out by the sound of passing traffic and wailing sirens.
For many New Yorkers, 33 Thomas Street — known as the “Long Lines Building” — has been a source of mystery for years. It has been labeled one of the city’s weirdest and most iconic skyscrapers, but little information has ever been published about its purpose.
It is not uncommon to keep the public in the dark about a site containing vital telecommunications equipment. But 33 Thomas Street is different: An investigation by The Intercept indicates that the skyscraper is more than a mere nerve center for long-distance phone calls. It also appears to be one of the most important National Security Agency surveillance sites on U.S. soil — a covert monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data.
Early model of the entrance of 33 Thomas Street as designed by John Carl Warnecke & Associates.
Still from “Project X”
Documents obtained by The Intercept from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden do not explicitly name 33 Thomas Street as a surveillance facility. However — taken together with architectural plans, public records, and interviews with former AT&T employees conducted for this article — they provide compelling evidence that 33 Thomas Street has served as an NSA surveillance site, code-named TITANPOINTE.
Inside 33 Thomas Street there is a major international “gateway switch,” according to a former AT&T engineer, which routes phone calls between the United States and countries across the world. A series of top-secret NSA memos suggest that the agency has tapped into these calls from a secure facility within the AT&T building. The Manhattan skyscraper appears to be a core location used for a controversial NSA surveillance program that has targeted the communications of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and at least 38 countries, including close U.S. allies such as Germany, Japan, and France.
It has long been known that AT&T has cooperated with the NSA on surveillance, but few details have emerged about the role of specific facilities in carrying out the top-secret programs. The Snowden documents provide new information about how NSA equipment has been integrated as part of AT&T’s network in New York City, revealing in unprecedented detail the methods and technology the agency uses to vacuum up communications from the company’s systems.
“This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.”
The NSA declined to comment for this story.
The FBI occupies the entire 23rd floor of 26 Federal Plaza, seen here behind 33 Thomas Street.
Still from “Project X”
The code name TITANPOINTE features dozens of times in the NSA documents, often in classified reports about surveillance operations. The agency uses code names to conceal information it deems especially sensitive — for instance, the names of companies it cooperates with or specific locations where electronic spying is carried out. Such details are usually considered “exceptionally controlled information,” a category beyond top secret and thus outside the scope of most of the documents that Snowden was able to obtain.
Secret NSA travel guides, dated April 2011 and February 2013, however, reveal information about TITANPOINTE that helps establish its connection to 33 Thomas Street. The 2011 guide, written to assist NSA employees visiting various facilities, discloses that TITANPOINTE is in New York City. The 2013 guide states that a “partner” called LITHIUM, which is NSA’s code name for AT&T, supervises visits to the site.
The 33 Thomas Street building is located almost next door to the FBI’s New York field office — about a block away — at Federal Plaza. The 2011 NSA travel guide instructs employees traveling to TITANPOINTE to head to the FBI’s New York field office. It adds that trips to the site should be coordinated with AT&T (referenced as “LITHIUM”) and the FBI, including an FBI “site watch officer.”
Intercom at 33 Thomas Street.
Still from “Project X”
Upon arrival at TITANPOINTE, the 2011 travel guide says, agency employees should ring the buzzer, sign in, and wait for a person to come and meet them. The Intercept visited 33 Thomas Street and found a buzzer outside its entrance and a sign-in sheet on a desk in the building’s lobby, which is manned by a guard 24 hours a day. There are also parking bays in front of the skyscraper designated “AWM,” a traffic code for federal agencies.
A 1994 New York Times article reported that 33 Thomas Street was part of AT&T’s “giant Worldwide Intelligent Network, which is responsible for directing an average of 175 million phone calls a day.” Thomas Saunders, a former AT&T engineer, told The Intercept that inside the building there were at least three “4ESS switches” used to route calls across phone networks. “Of the first two, one handled domestic long-distance traffic and the other was an international gateway,” said Saunders, who retired from his role at the company in 2004. The NSA’s documents describe TITANPOINTE as containing “foreign gateway switches” and they state that it has a “RIMROCK access.” RIMROCK is an NSA code name for 4ESS switches.
The NSA’s documents also reveal that one of TITANPOINTE’s functions is to conduct surveillance as part of a program called SKIDROWE, which focuses on intercepting satellite communications. That is a particularly striking detail, because on the roof of 33 Thomas Street there are a number of satellite dishes. Federal Communications Commission records confirm that 33 Thomas Street is the only location in New York City where AT&T has an FCC license for satellite earth stations.
The man behind the design of 33 Thomas Street, John Carl Warnecke, was one of the most prominent architects in the U.S. between the 1960s and 1980s.
Warnecke’s high-profile projects included producing designs for the U.S. Naval Academy in Maryland, the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., and the Hawaii State Capitol. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy’s administration commissioned Warnecke to preserve and restructure buildings at Lafayette Square, across from the White House. And following Kennedy’s assassination, Warnecke was asked to design the president’s eternal flame and gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery. He also helped construct a new embassy complex in Washington for the Soviet Union, in which the Soviets claimed they found eavesdropping equipment embedded in the walls.
But it was not only governments that trusted Warnecke — who died in 2010, aged 91 — with major construction projects. He cultivated a close relationship with telecommunications companies, too, possibly helped by family ties to the industry. Warnecke’s father-in-law had been a director at Pacific Bell, a California-based AT&T subsidiary. In the 1960s, Warnecke was asked to design a telephone exchange building for Pacific Bell in Oakland. He would subsequently receive a series of other major commissions from AT&T: Aside from the 33 Thomas Street building, he also designed a telephone exchange in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and an AT&T facility in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Some of Warnecke’s original architectural drawings for 33 Thomas Street are labeled “Project X.” It was alternatively referred to as the Broadway Building. His plans describe the structure as “a skyscraper to be inhabited by machines” and say that it was “designed to house long lines telephone equipment and to protect it and its operating personnel in the event of atomic attack.” (At the time the building was commissioned and built, amid the Cold War, there were genuine fears in the U.S. about the prospect of a Soviet nuclear assault.)
Sketch of the plaza at 33 Thomas Street.
After it was built, the unusual style of 33 Thomas Street attracted a lot of attention. Its dark, somewhat dystopian appearance contrasted dramatically with other buildings in lower Manhattan. Yet it proved popular, particularly among architecture buffs.
In a 1982 piece in the New York Times, architecture critic Paul Goldberger praised 33 Thomas Street as “one of the neighborhood’s few pieces of good modern architecture,” adding that it “blends into its surroundings more gracefully than does any other skyscraper in this area.”
“Other telephone company buildings from that era, designed solely for equipment, all look like horrible boxes,” Goldberger told The Intercept. “This one has an allure of its own to it. … There’s something about that shape. You see it and you don’t see it at the same time.”
Photo: Henrik Moltke
In 1975, just a year after Warnecke’s 33 Thomas Street building was completed, the NSA became embroiled in one of the biggest scandals in the U.S. intelligence community’s history. Following revelations about domestic surveillance operations targeting anti-Vietnam War activists, a congressional select committee began investigating the alleged abuses.
The inquiry, led by Democratic Sen. Frank Church, published its findings in April 1976. It concluded that U.S. intelligence agencies had “invaded individual privacy and violated the rights of lawful assembly and political expression.” Surveillance programs operated by the NSA through this period, it was later revealed, had targeted “domestic terrorist and foreign radical” suspects, including a host of eminent Americans, such as the civil rights leaders Martin Luther King and Whitney Young, the boxer Muhammad Ali, Washington Post columnist Art Buchwald, and New York Times journalist Tom Wicker.
The Church Committee recommended that new and tighter controls be placed on intelligence gathering. And in 1978, Congress approved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, requiring the executive branch to request warrants for spying operations from a newly formed court.
Diagrams showing NSA-controlled equipment inside TITANPOINTE.
Document: NSA
BLARNEY leverages “commercial partnerships” in order to “gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks,” the document states. It carries out “full take” surveillance — a term that refers to the bulk collection of both content and metadata — under six different categories: counterproliferation, counterterrorism, diplomatic, economic, military, and political.
As of July 2010, the NSA had obtained at least 40 court orders for spying under the BLARNEY program, allowing the agency to monitor communications related to multiple countries, companies, and international organizations. Among the approved targets were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of Japan, the European Union, the United Nations, and at least 38 different countries, including U.S. allies such as Italy, Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, and Cyprus.
The program was the NSA’s leading source of data collection under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an April 2013 document disclosed, and information gleaned from the communications it intercepted was a top contributor to the president’s daily briefing.
Notably, TITANPOINTE has played a central role in BLARNEY’s operations. NSA documents dated between 2012 and 2013 list the TITANPOINTE surveillance facility among three of BLARNEY’s “core sites” and describe it as “BLARNEY’S site in NYC.” Equipment hosted at TITANPOINTE has been used to monitor international long-distance phone calls, faxes, voice calls routed over the internet (known as Voice-Over-IP), video conferencing, and other internet traffic.
In one case that may have involved 33 Thomas Street, NSA engineers with the BLARNEY program worked to eavesdrop on data from a connection serving the United Nations mission in New York. This spying resulted in “collection against the email address of the U.N. General leading the monitoring mission in Syria,” an April 2012 memo said.
Mogens Lykketoft, former president of the U.N.’s general assembly, criticized the surveillance. “Such spying activities are totally unacceptable breaches of trust in international cooperation,” he told The Intercept.
Logo for the NSA’s satellite communications exploitation program SKIDROWE.
NSA
At the TITANPOINTE site, the NSA equipment is stored inside a secure room, known as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility.” Top-secret diagrams dated April 2012 show that within the secure space there is “NSA controlled” equipment linked to the routers of its “access partner,” referring to AT&T. Intercepted internet data was collected from the “backbone,” then processed at TITANPOINTE, before being passed to NSA for storage. Phone calls that were intercepted were collected from TITANPOINTE’s “foreign gateway switches” before being routed through the partner’s “call processor.” They were then forwarded to NSA’s headquarters in Maryland through an interface shared with the partner.
Much of the surveillance carried out at TITANPOINTE seems to involve monitoring calls and other communications as they are being sent across AT&T’s international phone and data cables. But the site has other capabilities at its disposal. The NSA’s documents indicate that it is also equipped with powerful satellite antenna — likely the ones located on the roof of 33 Thomas Street — which monitor information transmitted through the air.
The SKIDROWE spying program focuses on covertly vacuuming up internet data — known as “digital network intelligence” — as it is passing between foreign satellites. The harvested data is then made accessible through XKEYSCORE, a Google-like mass surveillance system that the NSA’s employees use to search through huge quantities of information about people’s emails, chats, Skype calls, passwords, and internet browsing histories.
Fletcher Cook, an AT&T spokesperson, told The Intercept that the company does not “allow any government agency to connect directly to or otherwise control our network to obtain our customers’ information. Rather, we simply respond to government requests for information pursuant to court orders or other mandatory process and, in rare cases, on a legal and voluntary basis when a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence, like in a kidnapping situation.”
Cook added that NSA representatives “do not have access to any secure room or space within our owned portion of the 33 Thomas Street building.” When pressed on whether any room within 33 Thomas Street contains equipment used for the purposes of NSA surveillance, an AT&T spokesperson pointed to a 1983 deed and declaration filed with New York City indicating that Verizon’s predecessor company maintained ownership of three floors and a basement floor in the building. The New York City Department of Finance said the predecessor company has an easement for the space and pays utility taxes, but insisted that AT&T owns the whole building. The AT&T spokesperson declined to comment further.
The NSA’s documents do not state that it can “connect directly to” or “otherwise control” AT&T’s networks, but they do make clear that the agency has placed its own equipment inside TITANPOINTE to tap into phone calls and internet data. It may be the case that the secure room where the equipment is installed is overseen by AT&T’s own engineers or technicians who have a security clearance. One NSA document dated from March 2013 suggests such a relationship, noting that the “corporate sites” the agency collects data from “are often controlled by the partner, who filters the communications before sending to NSA.”
As in 1983, AT&T may not be completely alone at 33 Thomas Street. Earlier this year, a technician working at the building — who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to the media — told The Intercept that a handful of Verizon employees were still based inside. However, the NSA’s documents do not suggest that Verizon is implicated in the surveillance at the TITANPOINTE facility, and instead only point to AT&T’s involvement. Verizon declined to comment for this story.
Still from “Project X”
AT&T is far from the only company that has a relationship with the NSA. The agency has established what it calls “strategic partnerships” with more than 80 corporations. But some companies are more cooperative than others.
Historically, AT&T has always maintained close ties with the government. A good example of this came in June 1976, when a congressional subcommittee served AT&T with a subpoena demanding that it hand over information about its alleged role in unlawful FBI wiretapping of phone calls. President Gerald Ford personally intervened to block the subpoena, stating that AT&T “was and is an agent of the United States acting under contract with the Executive Branch.” Ford said the company was in a “unique position” with respect to telephone and other communication lines in the U.S., and therefore it had been “necessary for the Executive Branch to rely on its services to assist in acquiring certain information necessary to the national defense and foreign policy.” The details sought by the committee could not be shared, Ford asserted, because they could expose “extremely sensitive foreign intelligence and counterintelligence information.”
In more recent decades, as the New York Times and ProPublica reported last year, AT&T has allowed the NSA to access billions of emails, exhibiting what the agency called its “extreme willingness to help.” These revelations were foreshadowed in 2006 by allegations made by Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician. Klein stated that the company had maintained a “secure room” in one of its San Francisco offices, which was fitted with communications monitoring equipment apparently used by the NSA to tap into phone and internet traffic. Klein’s claims formed the basis of a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation on behalf of AT&T customers (Jewel v. NSA), which remains ongoing today.
Mark Klein at 33 Thomas Street in 1988. Klein worked as an AT&T employee at that location for 10 years.
Photo courtesy of Mark Klein
According to the Snowden documents, AT&T has installed surveillance equipment in at least 59 U.S. sites. And on any given day, NSA employees may be working at the company’s facilities. Classified memos dated from April 2013 describe one- to four-day deployments of NSA technical staff to TITANPOINTE and other buildings. Most AT&T personnel at these locations, however, are unlikely to have knowledge of the agency’s presence. NSA staff are encouraged to wear clothes that make them “blend in to the environment.” Even the car hire company the agency uses for its trips to AT&T facilities is kept in the dark. “Some personnel are aware of the FBI link,” states the agency’s travel guidance, “but [they] have no knowledge of NSA’s involvement.”
This article is the product of a joint reporting project between The Intercept and Field of Vision. “Project X,” a Field of Vision documentary directed by Henrik Moltke and Laura Poitras, will screen at IFC Center starting November 18.
———
Documents published with this story:
I honestly feel sorry for Government (NSA) employees. Reading through this dreg – I would want to jump off the nearest building if forced to live my life in this insanely rigid lunatic asylum.
You *know* these little government scietologists would just watch you until your corpse had rotted a 1,000 years in the grave.
Crazy
Why couldn’t Al Qaeda take this building out?
Yada yo asshole
The NSA having a domestic site linked to AT&T would make sense given what the Snowden docs reveal.
The whole point of programs like STELLAR WIND and PRISM was to intercept international communications going through the US. Many of the early media stories about PRISM claimed that NSA had “direct access” to the servers of the telecoms, although this turned out to be untrue. The telecoms basically retained control of their sites and, based on the controversially broad FISC warrant, forwarded the messages that NSA thinks it has the legal authority to collect.
(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/us/politics/att-helped-nsa-spy-on-an-array-of-internet-traffic.html)
And, of course, the above article notes that this is the only site in New York where AT&T has an FCC license for such stations. TITANPOINTE also seems to be home one of America’s biggest “gateway switches” routing international calls from the US.
In 2013 the government released some FISC opinions; according to them, “upstream collection” involves “the acquisition of internet communications as they transit the internet backbone facilities of [redacted, but presumably the telecoms].”
(https://fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fisc0912.pdf)
The location is also interesting. Perhaps this facility is used for NSA’s operations against the UN, the IMF, the World Bank or the dozens of foreign consulates in New York.
This is a war over public opinion. The NSA hires mathematicians, scientists, engineers and computer scientists. These bright people tend to be left leaning politically. Their jobs cannot go away because even our allies spy on us:
https://vimeo.com/72660891
The difference is using that same apparatus in warrant-less wiretapping by the FBI or using the NSA’s knowledge and background to crack encryption on US citizens.
The NSA cannot spy on someone unless that signal moves in or out of the US. This is why Snowden was in Hawaii where there is a major undersea cable hub. This is why companies like facebook and google keep servers in countries to protect the privacy of those users while following the privacy laws in that country. The NSA employees cannot confirm or deny what they do or they could be arrested so they have no defense in the court of public opinion. The whistle blower laws in place to protect them and us from abuse are avoided by using private contractors. These contractors are not protected by federal law and this is why Snowden had to flee the country.
If we want privacy then we need to let the NSA focus on their job of protecting us from state actors and have the FBI get back to doing actual police work without having access to state of the art warfare technology they can expose for relatively minor crimes.
https://www.wired.com/2015/10/stingray-government-spy-tools-can-record-calls-new-documents-confirm/
Americans are focused on the wrong agency. If we want privacy then we should pay for subscriptions instead of using freeware that sells our information. High speed VPNs with strong encryption that do not leave the continental US should become an industry standard. Most importantly we should work to restore the laws that prevented over sharing of intelligence and repeal warrant-less wiretapping laws which will only lead to fraud, political abuse and persecution.
Wait so the NSA monitors foreign signals incoming to the US and that might accidentally include Americans using a VPN routed through Austria to torrent pornography? Uh I can explain that. Also this building is a gateway and they all look like that. They are all windowless buildings because it helps the mole people like to work in the dark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_uvdPDXaBPc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHgUN_95UAw
Obliged as usual for this wonderful piece.. :) Keep going
How much did this BLARNEY Stone cost?
This is beyond frightening…
National Security is like sausage. Everyone likes eating sausage but nobody wants to see it made. That’s why Big Brother can shove enormous rat turds like the Patriot Act into their sausages and get away with it on a regular basis, while everyone says, “Mmmm. Mmmm. Good!”
Well the Patriot Act is a sausage itself, not a mystery ingredient. You can find people who will defend the Patriot Act in the news, they sign their name and everything.
40 court orders link doesnt work????????
“33” street, what are the chances
Thanks for bringing more insight to the workings of deep state, which are undoubtedly, as much against the good of the people, as it is for its own, insect-like, survival.
Typo: TITANTPOINTE
“The 2011 NSA travel guide instructs employees traveling to TITANTPOINTE to head to the FBI’s New York field office.”
Thanks for flagging this. It has been fixed.
The tipoff with all these private buildings is pretty damn obvious — they are always within a couple hundred meters of a known government surveillance agency. It’s no accident you can see the FBI from there. It’s no accident that if you look at George Mason University’s technology park you’ll see a Northern Virginia FBI building surrounded by cable and telecom facilities like a mama rat suckling her pups. It’s no accident that the spies owned a building on one side of the Dulles Toll Road in Reston in the 1990s when AOL built its facility on the other side.
Now why do spooks who love doing everything on the QT put these surveillance buildings in such an obvious place? I think it’s because light is so damn slow. It only goes 300 million meters a second, which is to say, 300 meters a microsecond. And there’s a lot of equipment out there that can count microseconds.
The interesting part of that is that it wouldn’t matter if all they wanted to do was spy on your data. They could record it to a tape and have it sent to them in snail mail if all they wanted to do was prosecute you a month later over something. But it would be very, very important not to change the latency if they want to change your data. You think you’re getting a software upgrade and you’re getting their software upgrade instead, you send a message that urges someone to join your noble campaign and what they get is a dick pic. I can’t really guess what they change, to be honest, but they’re doing more than just looking.
Alot of pro-unconstitutional-government lackeys on this thread need to spend a week in the Intercept, Washington Post (Gelman primarily), New York Times (Before Abramson was canned) and Guardian Archives.
And then there’s Wnt :-)
“The interesting part of that is that it wouldn’t matter if all they wanted to do was spy on your data. They could record it to a tape and have it sent to them in snail mail if all they wanted to do was prosecute you a month later over something.”
But it would be VERY, VERY important not to change the LATENCY if they want to CHANGE YOUR DATA (location data, financial data, health data, the contents of your hard drive, the contents of your correspondence, your call detail records or even create a criminal history for you if it suits them) .
Wnt EXAMPLE: You think you’re getting a software upgrade from COMPANY X and you’re getting their software upgrade instead, you send a message that urges someone to join your noble campaign and what they get is a dick pic.”
STANDARD “JTRIG” TACTIC(S) EMPLOYED BY SPOOKS, PALANTIR, HB GARY AND OVER THE LAST TEN YEARS OR SO EVEN YOUR LOCAL LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES THROUGH FUSION CENTERS.
“I can’t really guess what they change (anything), to be honest, but they’re doing more than just looking.”
Exactly. They can frame anyone for anything at any time, foment discord and disunity among or between activist groups, damage your personal relationships, limit your or your loved ones economic opportunities, foment insurrection, or very easily plot to assassinate Occupy leaders. They can NOW do any one (and all) of us just like they did Martin Luther King, Leonard Peltier, Abbie Hoffman, Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, Julian Assange (assassinate, frame, frame, frame, frame, frame) for a nickle a day.
They SPECIALIZE in framing, vilifying and prosecuting squeaky (and not so squeaky) clean passionate advocates with “nothing to hide” specifically for having the courage of their convictions.
BREAKING NEWS: A developing story that has inspired to Donald A. (a for amazing) Trump to get pointers from Erdogan….
Turkey’s Free Press Withers Under Erdogan’s Crackdown
She was sentenced to 14 months in prison, suspended on the condition that she not repeat any offensive remarks.
The government and its supporters are behind a wave of demands to Twitter to remove offending posts, more than all other countries in the world put together, according to Twitter’s Transparency Report (of 20,000 Twitter accounts affected worldwide this year, 15,000 were Turkish.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/18/world/europe/turkey-press-erdogan-coup.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news
I want Turkey out of NATO and a free and unified Kurdistan to take its place. It’s about time our allies were allies for a change.
The existence of this building explains why the 911 traitors were able to demolish Building 7, the command center for the attacks. They simply moved operations to 33 Thomas Street.
In addition to the FBI’s active involvement in elections, the NSA’s vast, secret resources will ensure that political processes proceed according to corporate and deep state directives.
Corey Lewandowski Credits FBI Director James Comey With Helping Donald Trump Win Election
source: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/corey-lewandowski-tells-protesters-to-respect-donald-trumps-election-victory_uk_582c77dce4b0311a3da28fbf
Corey Lewandowski Credits the FBI for Trump Win
By Eric Levitz
That said: There’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that the director of the FBI just swung a presidential election to a right-wing demagogue. This seems like a detail worth dwelling on.
Or so former CNN commentator (and erstwhile Trump campaign manger, infamous arm-grabber, and likely future White House official) Corey Lewandowski seems to think.
source: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/corey-lewandowski-credits-the-fbi-for-trump-win.html
“In fact, exit polls highlighted by the Washington Post Thursday morning suggest that late-deciders provided the entire margin of Trump’s victory:
Absent those last-minute gains, Clinton would have won all four states.
Internal polling from both campaigns showed a significant tightening immediately after the FBI director’s letter.
Whatever his intentions, Comey appears to have demonstrated that federal law enforcement can use its investigatory powers to swing close elections.
Corey Lewandowski shouldn’t be the only “media professional” dwelling on this fact.
(hello Intercept?, anyone home?
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/corey-lewandowski-credits-the-fbi-for-trump-win.html
” If we grant that the numbers are all spot-on — a hefty “if“
right… good point.
can’t acknowledge that just about all polling has elements of informed speculation….
let’s just imply the whole thing is false… a DNC meme?
Isn’t that the party line around here?
windowless concrete sky scraper??? NSA Disguised as low income housing…
Obama’s surveillance state is terrifying. Thank God he is a lame duck.
LOL@Obama. Yeah you keep on thinking the president is in charge. Or trying to convince others…whichever.
You think that was terrifying? Wait til we get a load of President Trump’s surveillance state.
please laugh at this dupe
I guess my comments were a bit scary because they are not showing up. Got a bit too close, I guess.
they couldn’t handle your incendiary truths morpheus
Now you know why your establishment government allows At&T to do its dirty work… Officials take your property and obstruct prosecution to recover your property… 10 years & counting http://bit.ly/2eJqNkq http://www.medicalsupplychain.com/pdf/
Those of us born b4 1972 have seen this comin since we started storing water & weapons. We didn’t however , anticipate the muslim angle. It’s gonna b exciting ! God bless Americans
Hey Intercept, what’s next? A blockbuster reveal that the Romans used trebuchets? 4ESS switching was outmoded 15 years ago… Nothing to see here. Moved right along.
Out of curiosity, what mode of switching do they use nowadays instead of 4ESS?
Howie is being a bit grumpy…
AT&T still has 4ESS switches in operation. They are indeed on the way out, being either augmented with 5ESS switches or replaced with next-gen stuff from Lucent (?).
They have been doing this for years. I once worked for a radio station in Mesa AZ that was a former Safeway market with a huge warehouse behind it. There was a monstrous amount of cabling behind it that was a remnant of a subrosa monitoring station in which all ATT long line traffic routed East-West through Phoenix was tapped. Although the facility was decommissioned, there was still dial tone and conversations on some of the lines. I checked with a butt set just out of curiousity. This was in the 1970s. Oddly enough, the warehouse was later used by Toyota who in conjunction with a GM dealer owned by a Middle Eastern family to bring new GM vehicles in from the dealer and surreptitiously tear them apart analyze their electrical and mechanical construction, reassemble them and sell them to unsuspecting buyers. The dealership was family connected to the Lebanese consulate.
Old news if you listened to the NoAgenda podcast. They brought this building up probably 6 or 7 years ago.
How is this news to anyone? This article is a joke. This has been well known and joked about for the 30 years I’ve been in NYC by everyone I’ve ever walked by the building with.
And what’s that? Absolutely no commentary about how the building is being repurposed for residential living now? All the upper floors are open and windows are being in stalled. Go anywhere near it and you can see the changes.
The building is past its prime and no longer being used for these allegedly nefarious purposes. This is a sad example of journalism.
I guess you mean 375 Pearl Street (the Verizon , Building by Brooklyn Bridge) when mentioning that the building is being repurposed.
Otherwise the 4ESS is obsolete and Verizon did retire their switch in 2010, by migrating to a 5ESS at 204 Second Avenue.
Read the FCC notice here https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-300460A1.pdf
That’s Pearl Street, another building.
If the Secret Service, DHS, the Government, do not immediately start ARRESTING & CHARGING those making death threats against Trump, they are setting the PRECEDENT that we can make death threats against democrats and anyone else we don’t like. There are all sorts of threats being made and not a DAMN THING being done.
You pay $BILLION$ for “homeland security” but it is NEVER around.
DHS an agency with approximately 240,000 employees and a budget of nearly 100 billion dollars. But they cannot actually STOP Domestic Terrorism that is right there on TV !!!
Where are the SELF PROCLAIMED “heroes” of Homeland Security that should be arresting the DOMESTIC TERRORISTS who are using violence and the threat of violence in the furtherance of their political aims ……. which is the exact definition of TERRORISM ?! They are padding their overtime, counting their perks, dreaming of their “double dipper” retirements at YOUR expense.
DHS is always around with it’s hand out for money
but NEVER around to stop terrorists.
Meanwhile, how much of that EXPENSIVE emergency equipment You paid for, has moved to basements & garages?
Under the USAPATRIOT Act, violence or threats of violence to coerce a change in political views is defined as an act of terror.
There is another building like it, South West of Orlando next to the turnpike. It is entirely underground, a huge building that I worked on for years. It is coated with many layers of tar, paper, sheet copper, and other materials. It is many stories down, even though the water table is near the surface. Huge telecommunication cables come into it ( said to have come from the Miami area, and the outgoing heading North ) Now, few know that it is there as it looks like a field with a slight bulge, sort of to mimic the general area, and has a single small antenna in the middle. As we were working on it, it was generally know as the AT&T site. I’ll bet that few people even know it exists, even though they are living near it.
“(At the time the building was commissioned and built, amid the Cold War, there were genuine fears in the U.S. about the prospect of a Soviet nuclear assault.)”
Genuine was your only descriptor, and what a terrible sentence it is because of it. Good God, it wasn’t merely “genuine”, it was also “terribly-valid”.
I can understand the criticism of the program, etc., but at least write sentences that aren’t a *side-note, when they are of *vast importance, and *definitely don’t write them with such nonchalance, devoid of crucial fact(s). It’s disrespectful to the American people, and your readers.
investigative reporting the likes of which haven’t been seen since … ever
It would be nice to see some evidence of the effectiveness of this portfolio of windowless skyscrapers. Perhaps the NSA could release some anecdotal evidence, such as how it is able to use these capabilities to hack Russian elections, that would demonstrate they were not just wasting money on fancy real estate and thinking up cool code names for their data collection programs.
For example, the article mentions that TITANPOINTE focuses on Greece. Did the NSA help to re-elect Syriza in the latest election? If yes, why are they aiding a leftist political party? If no, what good is all this surveillance? I look at most of the world leaders, and if they were picked by the NSA, that’s a harsh condemnation of the NSA.
Perhaps they are accomplishing great things, behind their windowless walls. But I secretly hope Mr. Trump will turn 33 Thomas Street into an NSA themed hotel called the Trump Titanpointe Tower.
Do you really think they would release such information? Or that it would be believable? If they did, it would be done for the same reason federal bureaucrats do anything else; to further their OWN interests.
Did the commentators not read that this facility is on an international switch? This is exactly what we’d expect to see if the NSA was monitoring foreign threats to the US, not if the NSA secretly had a mass domestic-targeted surveillance program to control the masses and keep the elite in power. This article is evidence that the NSA really doesn’t care about what Joe in Milwaukee had for breakfast this morning, or what kind of porn Keven in San Fransisco likes to watch at 2am. The facility is a major international exchange. Where else would you expect NSA to monitor foreign communications?
Exactly. Some of these people are so very paranoid, it’s a wonder how they function in their real lives.
It stands to reason that for most if not all of these international calls there is an American on one end, at least. Plus, as the article that you claim to have read observes:
Now, that’s “New York City air,” in case you need it spelled out.
Furthermore, your belief that foreigners do not deserve the dignity of privacy makes you reprehensible.
Why on earth would this be needed, who authorized it, who uses it and what is the purpose for spying on Americans with out consent?
Anti human reptoids
it is not a secret- this is one of many sites to watch us and not the muslims- watch us- good luck idiots- come after what you want and there is a price for everything too- a price for everything in life
There is another one in Miami
Let’s not let the cat out of the bag umkay?
As an IT person I knew this a long, long time ago. Nothing to see here…
Who KNEW the United States – the American Government – was so fragile; so very, very timid and frightened and cowardly, that they fear their own fat, ignorant, slug-like peoples. A Country of paranoid, superstitious, festering imbeciles will certainly fail on its own and deserves to. Fear not the Barbarians, America, unless you mean the one in the mirror. QUICK!!! FEAR!!! Have another Bacon Double Jesusburger…
If we’re fat, ignorant and slug-like, why do we lead the world, and why isn’t Mexico building a wall to keep US out?
What a complete ass you are.
Oh, GFY, Mr. Smarmypants.
A JesusBurger…….where can I get one? By the way, the extra weight makes pushing me around more difficult. Hard to carry off a fat person to jail. Being fat makes gang rape by fellow prisoners more difficult and less appealing. Would you have sex with Java the Hut?
Perhaps it’s time for you to take your pom poms and go home. Hillary lost. It’s going to be OK.
I love you
It primary purpose is in economic espionage, to maintain a commercial edge for the corporate and financial sector. And terrorists if they disrupt & inhibit those areas.
like the terrorist business in florida that made better beer for much cheaper and the wallstreet thieves felt their profits were terrorised so they got their elected whores to outlaw the success of the local beermaker.
who’s the terrorists now?
Beer makers, distributors, and retailers almost always make a point of being very involved in local politics; what did you expect?
Ma Bell a lyin beotch? YUGE newz.
“The Snowden documents provide new information about how NSA”
You mean the documents you’ve had for several years now? So we could have known about it, but because Eddie chose to give it to a gay Jew who has steadily been profiting from it… But you’re working for the public and are the good guys right? hahaha. There’s probably five years worth of information you’ve sitting on that we have to wait for, because you have a penchant for long lunches with expensive wine.
New to “The Intercept.” It would appear that this site -“news outfit” moderates its comments to the extreme left, and are pretty much ingrates toward a govt entrusted to protect their lives let alone a Nation. Not speaking of this article generally, but obviously they do not allow differing viewpoints.
Not expecting my comment to be posted here, but to state that you’ve just tuned-out thousands of potential readers,… as such welcome to our spam filter and site blocker!
is anyone at this point just still super confused as to whether electronic communications are truly private or not? i mean this is newsworthy but just in general its I think semi assumed this is happening..no?
What’s wrong with spying on the UN, the IMF, and other globalist rats? The Chinese and Russians do it without domestic whiners. Foreigners do not have Constitutional right to privacy.
Thanks for helping our enemies?
These places are all the same. Even the present generation of stone age weapons will go through it like it isn’t even there. What a complete waste of money that could be better spent on people’s education and health.
the INSECT COLONY MINDSET
3rd World USA
Wow you guys hate America! And go that far to expose such knowledge on the internet! You are anti americans or the most dumb naive people on earth!
Not dumb, not naive. Just victimized.
We don’t hate America, we love America. We just hate the bullies that continue to victimize America -in the name of America and get paid from our taxes to do it.
Isaw it last week. I thought it was a Federal Gvmt. Bldg.
It’s called minilove, in newspeak.
This immediately made me think of “The Citadel”, the sleekly-steeled skyscraper the oppressive 1984-esque “Combine” aliens used as their central headquarters to spy on and conspire to subvert mankind in the 2004 video game Half-Life 2. I never thought that 12 years after playing a video game I’d be staring at the real thing.
ncie
Freedom has always been and today continues just to be an illusion. The “Freedom” we are given consist of choices which a pro or con do not really effect our Government in any ways. Revolution by force is quelled by suffarage, but the choices in voting are usually either unopposed or between 2 candidates that at the END of their political career, are indistinguishable from the ideology ran upon. As “Freedom” is understood, this is a choice to live in an illusion that allows us to change the constraints in which we live by. The “free” South Sudanese do not have to live by the constraints of the Sudan, but the people are adopting their own constraints. The “free” for them is “separating” from another government. Although laws and rules will change, the philosophy remains the same, what can and can’t be done will boil down into the same thing, but done in a way that conforms to ever changing religious beliefs.
With this being said, we have to ask ourselves if this infringes on our concept of our “freedom” illusion. On one hand someone can argue that the government does not care when Edna tells Melissa we are going shopping. On the other hand, the “freedom illusion” allows us to maintain that if Edna or Melissa want to go into important positions in politics, then their “Freedom” will be besieged by “leaks” to the media. Very few of us know Trump or Clinton. We pick our ideological view and we get our news filtered. With the control of intelligence, a person threatening the “complex” will have their private calls leaked out to these media outlets out of context, which provides fodder for opposition, an Orwellian citizens censor citizens move, and all of which provides cognitive dissonance to our version of “Freedom” if the constraints aren’t allowed to be changed. Freedom has to be realized for what it is. It is not always an agent to make society livable for everyone. Freedom does not teach tolerance, and absolute freedoms allows for discrimination, name calling, drug usage. What we should be arguing is this “True Freedom” and how it exists among individuals and groups. We also should be examining and implementing how much “True Freedom” we give to the United States government. Right now we are in an imbalance which puts self imposed constraints on the citizens and has given “True” freedom to the government. So to answer the “Freedom” initiative, this article shows what happens when true freedom is given at the top and constraints are forced upon the citizens underneath, but the ideology, dictated through the top is “gov’t works for the people.”
I would like to volunteer to be on the Edward Snowden firing squad. Our enemies attempt to hack us every day. Computers working 24/7 with upwards of 30,000 break in attempts per hour. The Chinese are tge number 1 culprit and the asshole of the millennium, Edward Snowden gave away our surveillance abilities because he and only he knew better than anyone else. He thought of himself as our judge and juror. Now we are not as safe as we once were. If we get our hands on him, execute him. He is no American hero and anyone that thinks differently is naive enough to believe that he did something great when in fact, he may just have secured our collapse.
What a conspiratorial mountain-out-of-a-molehill article and a waste of time.
Please take your conspiracy theories to Daily Kos or somewhere else.
Not to burst everyone’s bubble but the RBOCs or regional bell operating companies (as they were called after the breakup of AT&T) have fortified, highly secure, nondescript windowless private buildings housing sensitive telecommunications equipment in every town across the country, they’re called central offices (COs) and they’re not really a secret. You probably drive by one every day you just don’t notice it.
Isn’t that “Secure Compartmentalized Information Facility?”
AT&T operated as a near-paramilitary organization throughout the Cold War. The L3 system was the nerve network for much of the C3I of Armageddon. There’s a still-active Yahoo Group called “coldwarcomms” that is fascinating.
I have mixed feelings on these types of privacy concerns.
It’s probably safe to say that most of us have seen or said something online that fell short of our proudest moments. That’s the part of me that appreciates the illusion of privacy.
On the other hand, I don’t bother with firewalls and anti-virus software because I’m not frequenting the unsavory places where malware and whatnot are distributed. Nor is there anything on my computer that I’m ashamed of. That’s not to say that I haven’t been there and done that, and for that reason I appreciate our laws. But those same laws protecting my right to make stupid mistakes are also protecting thousands of truly dangerous repeat offenders.
It would be considered grossly negligent for them to not be monitoring. They probably see a million crimes a day but can’t act on them because of our laws. Is that a good thing? Do we want serial rapists and killers to enjoy that privacy? If we’re living upright, do we even need privacy? When I’m being awesome, I want everyone to know about it, and I certainly am not trying to hide it.
If it were me, I’d secretly be watching all of you shady people, but I’d only ever act on that information if I believed a human life was going to be endangered. I suppose that’s probably what they’re doing.
Are these strange sentiments for a red-blooded freedom loving American to be having?
“They probably see a million crimes a day but can’t act on them because of our laws. Is that a good thing? Do we want serial rapists and killers to enjoy that privacy?”
Serial rapists and killers generally do not write or talk about their crimes, ever. If they did, catching them would easier than stealing candy from a baby. And, I’m not sure what crimes you think they are seeing by collecting metadata in which they are using algorithms to locate phrases and words they consider to be threatening to national security. This isn’t SkyNet, and there is no possible way they are seeing “millions of crimes per day.”
“If we’re living upright, do we even need privacy?”
Do you lock your your doors at night? Would you mind if I visited your place and rooted around in your stuff? If you could just pass me along your banking information, that’d be great. Oh, I could probably just grab it through your entirely unprotected PC. Never mind. I mean I doubt you’d be able to recognize a phony email from a legitimate company versus a real email from a legitimate company.
“On the other hand, I don’t bother with firewalls and anti-virus software because I’m not frequenting the unsavory places where malware and whatnot are distributed.”
Do you use Windows or Apple? Obviously, yes. You have a firewall.
Do you use WiFi outside your home, such as at hotels and airports? Yes? Then you visit “unsavory places” where your information can be easily stolen.
Do you even know what anti-malware software does? I don’t even know why I asked this question because the answer is obviously a resounding no.
FWIW: “$16 billion were stolen from 12.7 million U.S. consumers in 2014, according to The 2015 Identity Fraud Study released by Javelin Strategy & Research. That’s a new identity theft victim at every TWO seconds. 15% of all identity thefts are carried out online. The number of people falling victim to online theft in the UK grew by 31% to 32,058 in the first three months of 2015, compared to the same period in 2014.”
Excellent, we need more secure facilities like this to protect our communications infrastructure. Good job AT&T.
and none of this information is important to the Russians
So much for, “freedom.”
America is a sad joke.
This is just a conspiracy article. What’s next? The global finance cabal?
Please, do us all a favor and move your kneeling-during-the-anthem butt to Canada.
Buncha idiots building that thing like that. The giant slab of windowless concrete in the middle of the city is a bit of a tipoff. The days of cleverness are over, I guess.
Holy shyte, literally ALL of our personal communications are being intercepted, analyzed and stored! My father told me 30 years ago that the government listened in and recorded all of our phone calls 24/7 and I laughingly dismissed him as a kook. Who’s the kook now?
Y’all a bunch of snitches. For real. Everyone in the comments crying like children, but if true then this site won us the Cold War and countless other obscure issues that never came up because we were able to resolve them before it blew up. We live in uncertain times and something like this is an insanely valuable asset… and yet here you are snitching like some west side smack peddler. Totally Unreal the lack of patriotism and self preservation some people have today.
So should I assume the New York Times will ignore this story?
You should also investigate whether or not hedge funds have listening devices aimed at lawyers and investment bankers in Manhattan in search for inside info on pending deals.
The building is eerily similar to the description of the Ministry of Love Building in Orwells’ 1984.
Eisenhower, McCarthy, and Nixon tried to warn us.
mccarthy? no
nixon? hell no.
Actually the KGB exonerated McCarthy. That’s a bit of history leftists don’t like to tell. When the USSR collapsed, much of what McCarthy supposed was confirmed and it was revealed that McCarthy was a HUGE problem for Russian espionage.
Yeah, definitely hell no on Nixon.
Big Brother’s Big Sister.
The Pentagoon and the NSA learned well from the SS and the Gestapo!
Its a fact Actual Nazis became the leaders of NASA, FBI, CIA, etc..
People just want to pretend its not real for some reason.
There’s another of these between 10th Ave and 11th Ave over in the mid 50s.
I like the fact that it’s address is ’33’….
Simple coincidence I’m sure.
“… and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.”
And they have the GALL to ridicule preppers.
“…and enough food to last 1,500 people two weeks in the event of a catastrophe.”
And they have the gall to ridicule preppers.
Drain the swamp, baby!
Investigate 4100 Bryan Street in Dallas.
Oh my God, the government is watching us? Image that? Makes one wonder who else is watching us? Come get some Tank! Come get Some!
Oh who the hell is kidding who. They’re ass-deep in spooks at the place, hell, they probably stack the creepy little bastards floor to ceiling in every room, there’s hardly space for their Dr. Strangelove spy gizmos, they’re so filled up with f*cking spooks. I mean, Je$us H. For real.
AT & T superspies – I don’t think so. They sent my mother monthly statements for telephone calls she made for almost a year after she died.
You people would poop your pants if you knew what was going on in the TELCO world. CALEA started it all. And now with the major phone companies going to VOIP things are so much easier for big brother. Think parallel IP routes, but not for redundancy sake…
We can’t help it, we are regulated, so we do as told.
I think you can probably sue them for this, if you get resourceful. The kind of immunity wash they have put on has its limits. It’s time for those country lawyers to start punching holes in the paper wall. There is some part of what this is that appears way out of conference with both the US Constitution and existing privacy law.
https://www.fpc.gov/resources/federal-privacy-programs/
I knew it . I just want to vomit. I despise about 95% of humanity. But you people just keep kissing Obama’s ***, because that’s what you are. Don’t disappoint me now…get to it !
Sociopathic weirdo. Comport yourself like the man your father once hoped you would become.
The irony is, if you knew what that 5% thinks of you…you’d hate them too.
Total massive waist of time and money.You’ll never catch a big fish like a Gorge Sorrows with a system like this. Arch criminals do things the old fashon way, such as face to face one on one meetings in secure undisclosed location ,the use of trusted and well vetted couriers, secret money drops,secret unnamed bank accounts, body doubles, private security firms,body guards and goons, huge amounts of cash ,lawyers,private investigators,buffers and intermediaries to insulate them from criminal acts,and list can go on and on and on.Do you stupid and mean STUPID son of a bitches at he NSA CIA FBI and the rest of you alpha bit idiots rally think you are going catch a big luge terrorist or a multi billion dollar criminal enterprise on a all ready in plan site the hole world knows about system like this. Flush out your head gear and stop spying on us.Get off your lazy asses and physically get out in the field, and infiltrate these organizations and do some real police work for a change. Stop playing around on the internet.
Why all the hate on an agency who protects National Security and its citizens from foreign govt powers beyond our control?!? They protected us from many attacks, and averted 911 …oh wait!
Oh my God! The NSA monitoring the communications of people associated with the UN? OH NOES!
Years ago, a Chinese diplomat was chest thumping on ABC’s This Week. He got into it with George Will and indignantly shouted, “Do you admit here before the world that the United States is openly engaged in foreign espionage against the Chinese people?” To which Will calmly replied, “I hope to God we are.”
If somebody wants to shout from the rooftops when the US government misuses its powers to wrongly act against our own citizens, I’ll gladly join in and contribute to the defense fund. This place has never been a secret to anyone poking around for it, and AT&T especially had a monopoly on communications systems for decades, so of course the NSA would be embedded in this place. But even if the NSA moved out 20 years ago, this place remains vital to the city and the country just because of what it legitimately contains. So I’m really not comfortable with painting a target on a sensitive location that we absolutely need to have in the modern world for any idiot with a personal vendetta and a truck bomb in the loading zone.
Brand me a useful idiot all you like. But yes, like George Will, I absolutely hope to God we have the capability to intercept potentially threatening communications from anyone seriously interested in doing this nation harm. I honestly don’t want to watch any more footage on my TV of weeping Americans covered in the dust of wreckage. Call me crazy.
(Just as an aside, as a 33° Scottish Rite Mason, I find the address of this place particularly hilarious, and fully expect a raft of paranoid emails for the next few days. The laugh value is priceless.)
we have this one in houston
http://images1.houstonpress.com/imager/u/original/6753536/418219038_e5f18139c5.jpg
And when there’s a problem, AT&T repair is there in a month
How long until Anonymous cracks it wide open??
Geclowicz is a member an Israeli private spy agency, Black Cube, which refers to itself as a “select group of veterans from the Israeli elite intelligence units,” and lists the former Mossad director, Meir Dagan, who died earlier this year, as its honorary president.
Ron Weiner, also a Black Cube employee, is currently awaiting sentencing in the case while an arrest warrant has been issued for a third employee.
members of the orchestration, B7, ecommcon
gmo embedded BT toxin
slow mass genocide.
When you see a building in any big city that has no windows, it’s just a building with no windows. Move along…nothing to see here.
Check out Chicago’s Creepy AT&T Building: http://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/steinberg-the-technology-has-changed-quite-a-bit/
That number 33 sure does come up a lot.
Just sayin’.
AT&T needs some Anti Trust Actions against them. They are too big and a Branch of the Government. Too bad they were not more effective in ACTUALLY picking up Terrorists… As Snowden said, they are just looking at people’s webcams to spy on them while they undress and PERV out.
with their exclusive secret spy club membership it should be obvious why they want time-warner.
3rd World USA
murdering people who are deprived of life support is going to be good sport for the thieves that deprive and rob populations
https://www.yahoo.com/news/report-cities-boost-policies-criminalize-homelessness-160415727.html
new law….
coming soon
New laws courtesy of our new president I assume is what you are so proudly telling us will be coming soon, right?
Well don’t hold your breath…
The only new laws that will be passed will be to strengthen the hold of Big Brother.
That man is a false Messiah.
new laws, of for and “by” the people.
dont wait. start writing.
:)
The government realized during Prohibition the value of eavesdropping. It sent mobsters to jail like no other tool could. During WW2 eavesdropping and subsequent code breaking played a huge part in our victories against Japan and Germany. My Dad worked for ATT after the war at NJ Bell and Bell Labs for 30 years and I did my 30 starting in the early 70″s before taking my skills to the “private” communications industry. Trust me when I tell you that the government has the goods on us all. Everything you now say or type is likely recorded and no matter what law is passed preventing it “they” will NEVER stop. It is what it is so be careful.
Interestingly, Ed Snowden actually exposed this fact – but The Media™ has chosen to erect a wall of silence on the matter, insisting on mentioning only “metadata” being collected. He said it plainly and clearly, that ALL data was being collected (i.e. “full take”) and stored. That is a clear indication that The Media™ colludes with the US government in hiding information from the American people and burying stories in pursuit of that end.
“metadata” is many different kinds of data. Internet, phone, texting, even the U.S. mail.
So when ‘they’ say only “metadata” is being collected, it usually means everything ‘they’ can get their hands, or keyboards/servers on.
All those people who were called kooks just a year or two ago who claimed all communications were monitored by the government have been vindicated.
Next up… the people who are called looks for sugesting the Clinton’s are murderous thugs who are simply puppets of the George Soros cabal fomerly named SPECTRE.
If your brain deduces that the plural word Clintons must be a contraction of some sort, what do you figure the omitted letter(s) might possibly be?
There are some really far out comments here. Fuk this and fuk that….LOL…well I say, fuk all of you who are bothered by this story.
Hilarious how the supposed “logo for the NSA’s satellite communications exploitation program SKIDROWE” includes the registered trademarked logo of the heavy metal band “Skid Row” (circa 1987) with an “E” added on the end. Haha Everything in this article is totally questionable at best. What a joke.
what, you don’t like rawk? What kind of American are you?
“It has long been known that AT&T has cooperated with the NSA on surveillance…”
So this is how AT&T has stayed in business?
A guarantee by the NSA and its predecessors.
If AT&T were to go out of business, then the jig would be up.
So all this time the U.S. Gov made sure that any challenge to AT&T’s monopoly in the telecom industry would be neutralized.
And the American consumer never was the wiser that deregulation would never come about. Until 1983.
Along the way…
AT&T Inc. began its existence as Southwestern Bell Corporation, created in 1983 in the divestiture of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (forced by [of all entities] U.S. govt by an antitrust lawsuit in 1982 [United States v. AT&T). Southwestern Bell changed its name to SBC Communications Inc. in 1995. Then in 2005 SBC purchased its former parent AT&T Corp, took on its branding, renaming itself back to AT&T, retook its stock symbol, and now reconstitutes much of its former self with 10 of its original 22 Bell Operating Companies, along with its long distance operations.
Is it supposed to be such a great surprise that the U.S. Gov has been complicit in the survival of one of the icons of corporate America?
Fast forward to today from 1974 (when construction of the Long Lines Building was completed), now that Keith Alexander (former Director of the NSA) has been campaigning for corporations to let the USG have access to its servers and duping them to be stoolies (under the guise of spying on the American public to fight terrorism). How can any U.S. corporation have confidence that its secrets and proprietary data will not be compromised and shared to competitors (who are on its most favored -or more favored corporations list), especially now that the favoritism of AT&T (& who knows how many other corporations) is now blatant?
NOTE:
At DEF CON 2012, Alexander was the keynote speaker; during the question and answers session, in response to the question “Does the NSA really keep a file on everyone, and if so, how can I see mine?” Alexander replied “Our job is foreign intelligence” and that “Those who would want to weave the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people, is absolutely false…From my perspective, this is absolute nonsense.”
-On June 6, 2013, the day after Snowden’s revelations, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper released a statement admitting the NSA collects telephony metadata on millions of Americans telephone calls. This metadata information included originating and terminating telephone number, telephone calling card number, IMEI number, time and duration of phone calls.
Keith B. Alexander is now CEO & president of IronNet Cybersecurity.
IronNet Cybersecurity’s mission statement:
-Every day, cyber threats grow more sophisticated, intrusive, disruptive and costly. Hundreds of billions of dollars worth of corporate secrets, private customer information and brand reputations have already been lost, or are at risk.
And every day, the gap between traditional cybersecurity approaches and this rapidly evolving threat grows wider.
IronNet Cybersecurity is uniquely positioned to fill this gap.
Of course the are positioned to fill this gap. By selling other corporations’ proprietary data/secrets to the highest bidder.
The collusion of AT&T, the USG and Keith Alexander is on the table for all to see.
Thank you Ryan & Henrik, for the expose’.
I’m surprised that it still stands what with all the past…irregularities committed by the security agencies over the years. I wonder if this building was prewired during construction with state approved explosives so it could mysteriously come crashing down like some other buildings in New York that had Govt occupants (plenty of gold, non-traditional “financial instruments” and cash too) around mid September in 2001 in that same general area?? Like I said…I’m surprised it still stands.
Seriously?Dude?
As Infowars says…the answer to 1984 is 1776. Man is fallen and without ‘true’ checks and balances, power will always end up being used for tyranny.
Yes, governments have always used surveillance to control its people while convincing them it is for their own protection from “others”. Terrorism, IMO, has always been used as a necessary catalyst to convince us we need it… at least when secrecy fails.
Technology has taken this to a whole new level, however, where governments (with the obvious aid of many corporations like AT&T literally control the flow of information through omniscient surveillance, censorship and in some cases intimidation and propaganda. The description of the building sounds fitting for our very own Ministry of Truth.
It’s no wonder Trump won, the government no longer adheres to the Constitution (which all the elected officials swore to uphold), and has been using us as a cash cow for themselves. There are so few in Congress who object to this, and they deserve our support, while others like Clapper who lied under oath should be prosecuted and jailed. That would be the American way. Unfortunately, we’ve lost our freedoms. Hopefully Trump will give them back, but I don’t believe he will. I hope I’m wrong.
Interesting article. Reminds me of that old saying: hidden in plain sight. Right in the middle of NYC, too.
I hope they have Chocolate pudding !!!
Most att buildings around the country have no windows.
Oh well
Those criminals at the NSA up to no good again? A lot of the information they are collecting is being used to harass certain members of the public. Look up organized stalking or gang stalking, the NSA not only know about it but are involved in it too.
If they really wanted to keep it secret they should have made fake windows so people wouldn’t be so curious about it.
Interesting article. This building is probably a lot like the bunker at the greenbriar – long past it’s prime once it was revealed. The whole thing is probably distraction. I also find it funny I have to give my name and email to comment on this page. Makes me wonder who you are collecting for. I’d assume anyone interested in privacy would allow for anonymous commenting. Irony would dictate that snowden and the intercept were all one giant fabrication to bring dissidents into light.
There is that number 33 again.
And revealing this information is a good thing?
I think it is fascinating that the NSA can collect all data, but then how is it mined for whatever they are looking for. They must have some heavy MEGA (MAGA) DataCenter hot site CPU power to sift the data.
I know there isn’t enough human resources to analyze the data, so they must be using outstanding AI programs. They probably need to drastically increase their IT staffing, like most IT organizations.
MAGA!
Not surprised by this at all. I remember years ago coming across an article in a Florida newspaper (pretty sure it was not on the internet) about the government tapping into what was formerly SNET in New Haven. I recognized the person mentioned in the article who was the supervisor at that location as she used to work for my husband when he was with the telephone company This article had to have come out some time after 2003. Of course, it didn’t go into this level of espionage, but it was about direct tapping of the government into the phone company and published in a regular paper.
Yet can all be undone with simple passing of old fashioned printed documents.
We’ve got one of those in Philly too, sans the satellite dishes: http://www.ocfrealty.com/naked-philly/rittenhouse/we-give-up-whats-up-with-the-att-building
A lot of cities have similar buildings, preferably along routes of cables and older microwave routes. They were generally built in the 60’s or 70’s and designed to handle a nuclear war. (There are similar buildings to house local exchanges, only some of them have Windows.) A good indicator of a “long lines” building (used for long distance connections) would be the big microwave antennas on top. (There may also be places where you just have a microwave tower and a reinforced bunker-like building outside major cities.)
One reason that the NSA sets up shop in places like this is the direct connection to the lines. Plus, with the shift from copper wire to fiber optic cable, that results in more connections, with less space and less need for cooling the phone equipment, which could free up space for a data center, be it NSA or otherwise. (Of course, that could overwhelm the cooling systems, resulting in a need for extra fans.)
My hometown has a similar building, which is blurred in parts on google maps. I did walk around a bit outside, noticing the manholes (including older AT&T, Bell System, and Southern Bell ones), and the loading dock. I even went inside- to the lobby of sorts. (There were three doors- one on one side for the maintenance supervisor, one on the other side for storage and two steel doors to the building itself. Those doors were locked, and you had to get buzzed in- and possibly call AT&T to get in. They also had warnings about static discharge and hearing protection being required.) it was cool, though scary.
Is grandma’s secret apple pie recipe still a secret?
Isn’t that the Men In Black building? Sure looks like it. We can only wonder…wouldn’t take much imagination! Oh, the secrets that Obama has done in the last 8 years…
The fact our rights (4th Amendment) is being violated on a daily basis. And we just sit back like who’s ready for Monday Night Football!
What does the government for with information it collects? It projects media stories that control our mind and lives. The government or people with a lot of money can pay for information and market ideas to you that will influence hmm mm let’s say an Election.
Now all of us who wondered why the CIA and NSA sponsored avant-garde architects and artists in the 60s-70s have our answer. They covered the reasons for making such an ugly building under the cover of “brutalist architecture” movement that time. You can be sure that is not the only building they had built and needed to cover its unique look.
Great article, but I’m not so sure what the big deal is.
At least since 9/11 it has been public knowledge (as in government stated) that foreign communications are a free-for-all. Same thing happens at customs when one enters the country, where all your electronic devices can be scanned at the whim of the customs officer.
In this case, NYC happens to be the entry point for quite a few of the foreign communication links, which makes it the logical location to site the related taps.
As a matter of fact, siting the international taps at the entry point is _more_ in line with privacy expectations of citizens, given that data flows inside the country are not as likely to flow through that site. And if the tapping happens before AT&T even sees the data feed, _only_ international content gets collected.
Great! We (ISIS) were wondering what to hit next. It seemed so dull to pop a few floats at the Thanksgiving day parade. All our efforts fell flat compared to Osama’s twin tower strike. This will be spectacular, now we have a target worth destroying.
Thanks Intercept, we owe you royalties or a finders fee or something……
Strange as there is an AT&T building in downtown Pittsburgh, across from 600 Grant Street (exact address unknown) which no one ever seems to come out of and the lights are always off but has the same upper floor extensions shown on this building. Just saying….
I have rolls of real original “Tin Foil” I stocked up before it went to aluminum.
( feeling very smug about now) :)
There’s another secret NSA base at 4100 Bryan Street in Dallas. Google it and see for yourself.
A bunch of old 4ESS switches? Oh the nightmares…
Old News.
So Trump wins and in response, the media begins to release the specific location of top secret US government intelligence operations…sounds like a good way for the MSM to begin undermining Trump before he gets in office. Sounds like a good way to stir up the crazies to violence. If I was Trump I would relocate everything without telling anyone.
Let the conspiracy theories begin!
YAWNNNNNN…old stuff
Only a criminal government need spy on the people.
An American citizen, not US subject.
I suppose you would complain also if our gov did not do everything to insure our safety. like a liberal dbs always do.
The US just agreed to pay an apartheid murderous regime, called Israel, $38 billion.
What’s for? Colonial Tax?
http://presstv.com/Detail/2016/11/17/493945/romania-black-cube-israeli-spy
and, no doubt, a US suspect
Folks this information is very old. For those of use who as kids received 2600 magazine and operate on and in the ‘dark areas’ of the internet, this is chicken sh*t information.
There is far more surveillance being done through turning your cell phones on, operating any cameras that have internet/wireless connection … welcome to 1984 in 2016. I can’t believe the average American doesn’t already know this but then again, government schools have educated 10’s of millions of fools so I am not surprised.
No where near as impressive as the impregnable hollowed out mountains warehouses in Utah where a copy of every financial record pertaining to the United States are stored.
This misses the big point. Every government has always monitored the activities of people it sees as rebels or threats. Monitoring is older than writing.
The important question is what the government DOES with the information. If the monitors are just reading and storing the info, it’s not a big problem. If the government uses the info to ruin or imprison or kill the perceived rebels, it’s a big problem. Tyrants are perfectly capable of ruining and killing threats WITHOUT any sort of technical monitoring, so the tech really isn’t the relevant variable
The 4th Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Couldn’t have put it any better! Some people are willing to give up their rights. “You don’t use em’ you lose them”.
4th Amendment? Is that a new movie? ..no seriously, they have probable cause just by the virtue of your existence, right? ..no totally seriously now, we REALLY need to contact your governor and state legislatures NOW and get them to call for the Convention of States under Article 5. Congressional TERM LIMITS, repeal of the 17th Amendment, and possibly the repeal of the 16th Amendment should be at the top of the list of changes.
theyre obviously collecting all of this info for a reason. Theyre not just collecting it willy nilly. Why spend millions of dollars collecting data & maintaining this surveillance network if you didnt plan on using the data you were collecting? You or I will have no idea of course, but we can imagine. We have Constitutional Rights that are designed to protect us from these ‘unknowns’ but the NSA seems to be above all of them & can do whatever they want.
btw, as for John Carl Warnecke & Associates.. I hope those sonsabitches read this article. From this day forward..their lives are fucking cursed. Moreover, their dedication to all that is evil has now been documented. FUCK John Carl Warnecke & Associates. ..and those pathetic “architectural critics” who applauded the design of this monument to the insidious Surveillance State. May they choke to death on their next meal.
A “somewhat dystopian appearance” ? Are you sure Albert Speer didn’t ‘provide’ the original schematics ? Looking at the entrance of Nuremberg’s Luitpoldhalle, this might be one of his unfinished projects.
“[t]hough it looks more like a mammoth piece of equipment than a conventional building, it, in fact, blends into its surroundings more gracefully than does any other skyscraper in this area”, Goldberger wrote in his 1982 piece for the NY Times. Unfortunately, he didn’t elaborate…
Warnecke’s style was identified as contextualism. Not knowing the neighborhood, I’d like someone to tell me how well the “mammoth” is integrated within its surroundings, how, for instance, its opacity can be reconciled with the neo-renaissance buildings in its vicinity (construction date : turn of the century ?), or with the glass-and-steel architecture of other neighboring skyscrapers (construction : ca. 1960 ?) :
https://www.google.be/maps/place/AT%26T+Long+Lines+Building/@40.716595,-74.006701,3a,75y,90t/data=!3m8!1e2!3m6!1s132034257!2e1!3e10!6s%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2Fproxy%2FtDJYtUa5myVIeaDlR8s4yDP40LK1b4-VPz3j5b_6rg81WdwQrXImjQgmLPjCV2jZZpqbyEeHMnYW45UuyfONuOlVsmdnN6k%3Dw203-h270!7i3216!8i4288!4m13!1m7!3m6!1s0x89c25a1f83b11a7b:0xbe78afa5dbef524d!2sThomas+St,+New+York,+NY,+%C3%89tats-Unis!3b1!8m2!3d40.7165341!4d-74.0066847!3m4!1s0x0:0xc3a7ddcb8a1c1559!8m2!3d40.7165286!4d-74.0059206!6m1!1e1
If you ask me, AT&T’s Long-Lines Building seems to have a lot more in common with Libria’s achitecture :
http://www.tboake.com/madness/chow/permanence/equilibrium-83.jpg
Your choice of pictures, none of which is taken in broad daylight and all of which accentuate the building’s dark, creepy character, tend to indicate you agree…
Ok ok ok. It’s hard to put into immediate words, my outrage at this disclosure. All I know is…I’ve been BETRAYED. Betrayed by the schools, betrayed by the government, betrayed by society at large, but most of all… betrayed by those treasonous employees of NSA/AT&T who KNEW. And I’m fucking pissed. Lord help anyone from AT&T who ever crosses my path…ever again. I only pray, that one day, those scumbags at the top of the AT&T towers, fall to their knees in horrid fear, while they hear the gunfire closing in, floor by floor, knowing, when their victims reach their floor, they will be tossed from 1000 feet above the streets below, while the victors of the revolution piss on their and their children’s existence. And that includes YOU TRUMP, you treacherous bastard.
You are one crazy bastard. Get meds
Why Trump? He ain’t done nothin yet. Maybe he will help limit the NSA.
Your to weird to be commenting here. Go to a roswell website, they welcome crazies like you.
Why the outrage? Why is there outrage from ANYONE about this? Many people, myself included, have been educating the public about this type of surveillance for a very long time. The American people have it within their power to do great damage to the perps here, as they always have. It’s called BOYCOTT. AT&wee-wee and others can be boycotted to the extent that they go out of business. Yes, the US government is powerful; yes it will always disobey the law, but the people are not powerless. What they lack is the WILL to band together in an effort to get anything done about their situations. I am often alone in my own actions to throw off the monster called US government, but I am successful in keeping myself from the tentacles of it’s masturbation. If Americans are serious beyond just complaining, they will band together and put some of these lawless companies out of business. If you think this article came out to blow the lid off the US government, think again. The monster escaped this facility long ago and is operating elsewhere at this very moment. To destroy the monster, you must keep up with where it is… and BOYCOTT in HUGE numbers. But will you? No. Enough said.
That wouldn’t work like you think it would… One word: infrastructure. AT&T has a huge business aside from selling to individuals, they are leasing towers to other companies, as is T-Mobile and Verizon, they also provide switching across the country, not to mention they are employed by the Gov… They would simply fall to the background of the whole operation (again: infrastructure) and continue as usual.
Thanks, excellent article! Identifying a better target than the twin towers on 9/11. Since it was built in the 60-70s, being nuke proof was part of the cold war.
Why are we learning of this “tower” now?
We have a very tall ATT building in my hometown. Makes me wonder?
quote”Makes me wonder?”unquote
Says one still wondering how to decipher page 1 of Tying Shoes for Dummies.
sheesusfuckingchrist. No wonder the US is the Dumbest Fucking Country on the Goddamn Planet.
Btw, when’s the last time you wondered why your mother pinched the umbilical cord.
When you regularly comment in the domain of so many Fragile Snowflakes, I find it best to simply lead them to the obvious conclusion.
There is something very wrong about you…likely down to the genetic level. Do you find the female form disgusting?
W0X0F
The local telephone companies were required to house every major city’s switch gear in nuclear blast hardened buildings during the cold war …
The city of Santa Rosa, Ca bought one of those buildings and found out the walls were 3 feet concrete with like a dozen layers of rebar
It cost a small fortune to cut windows, because tearing the 10 story building down was almost impossible!
Someone tell me …please ..why, a blatant,, concrete monolith of this size, in the heart of NYC, with no windows, has never been questioned in my 70 year lifespan to date. This tells me something.
However, despite that fact, I’m amazed that the government, notwithstanding AT&T employees, has never generated any whistleblowers in regards to this insidious monument to the destruction of the 4th Amendment, whatsoever. This also tells me something. But now that I know, I’m cancelling my account with AT&T immedietly. Far be it from me, as a simple consumer of their wretched attempt to insure the Surveillance State remains in existence. I’m done. And fuck the person who comes to collect the equipment. For me…he’s where the buck stops. And he ain’t gonna like what happens.
wow … you’re full of gloom and doom and apparently stressing out. Better pay your phone bill before you lose phone service and are removed from the grid.
Someone tell me …please ..why, a blatant,, concrete monolith of this size, in the heart of NYC, with no windows, has never been questioned in my 70 year lifespan to date? Because this is a free country and is anyone wants to build a building without windows they can do so! Me the guy down the street and even your 70yr old @$$ can thats what FREE Country means
@generalwarrant you anti-American assclown – you say your almost 70 that’s good means your almost dead. We will just stay hear for a few more hundred years defending this country from foreign and domestic terrorists…and by the way as a former marine if you ran across me with threat like that you would be on the ground faster than you can blink. Just saying…
Are you sure the Russians aren’t really behind this?
OK, just kidding . . .
Don’t worry, I’m sure Trump will put this all to good use.
I’d like to see The Intercept do some research into which tech companies have been funded by intelligence agencies of the U.S. government. Silicon Valley is pretty smug about their success, but if you look closely at the origins of the successful SV companies it seems like all of them were either partially or fully funded by the government. But maybe that’s just my biased view, so it’d be great if you guys could look into it to see if it’s true or not.
quote”But maybe that’s just my biased view, so it’d be great if you guys could look into it to see if it’s true or not.
Says a Johnny come lately who just now becomes aware of Orwell. Yes grasshopper..it’s true. For beginners.. search Google/In-Q-Tel. Once you understand..then ..look at the history of those maggot AT&T’s CEO’s who facilitate AT&T’s 100 year affair with the USG…notwithstanding stealing every secret they have from brilliant engineers who tried to fight them for decades. I won’t go there. You do the research. AT&T is the posterchild for every insidious scum sucking Corporate Capitalism cesspool on the planet.
General, seek help.
Love,
Your mom.
You got laid off from AT&T didn’t you.
From the person who nust said in another post they have an account with ATT
Amazing reporting, guys! So grateful for the Intercept to keep the American public informed of what the government does in its name.
Maybe this reporting will help the Jewel case. It certainly couldn’t hurt.
And thank you Edward Snowden.
Amazing. Get ready for WWIII.
The shitty that never sleeps.
So the NSA must have known the whole story about Trump and Russian email hacking but chose to withhold it from the voters.
LMAO you snowflakes do swallow propaganda. Go back to your Nazi DNC you loser
Again with “the Russians”; the left’s perpetual boogeyman. Oy.
The Russians had NOTHING to do with it. Julian Assange has said repeatedly that it came from 3 DNC workers that became disillusioned with the party and Hillary Clinton. Knowing this she still risked our safety by provoking a war with the Soviets. For God sake, they were running nuclear attack drills with the entire population and yet she still pushed the bs line. That is why they said that if she was elected the US and Russians will be at war within a year.
Excellent work.
Reminds me of that movie “Brazil.” Creepy.