Room 641A | Hacker News Reader

Room 641A

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207 pointsmimsee75 comments

I work across the street from this building. One thing I noticed is that in early 2015 they boarded up the balcony on the 6th floor. Presumably it was to stop someone from gaining access to this room by climbing up the side of the building and breaking in through the balcony door.

http://imgur.com/SA4DRjo

That's interesting. Why would they do that? I mean if somebody is willing to break through a balcony, traversing between floors shouldn't be a big problem. And the second balcony is quite far away, there could be the same secure entrance between it and the room, as the floor entrance (If you can't just get there through the elevator). Maybe it's more about being able to see people who work there?

That could be, although in the time I've been here I've seen people out on those balconies maybe twice, and one of those was when they were installing a microwave antenna. I get the impression they are there mostly as a place to shelter in an emergency.

Edit: Typically the stairs and elevators in buildings like that are pretty well locked down to prevent unauthorized access from inside. The elevator probably opens into a small lobby with heavy locked doors blocking access to the rest of the floor. The balcony doors may not have been so well secured.

Maybe it's just to protect the antennas from weather.

Wow, I've been commuting past there for nearly a year and had no idea!

There are a lot of places like that, just Google something like:

(secret OR sensitive) (facility OR building) INSERT-LOCATION-NAME

I had a pretty good chuckle when I did that. First result was "Nut-free and scent-sensitive facility - elementary school". Second up was "Culturally-sensitive treatment facility".

I do know of a few pretty sensitive places nearby, and I'm kind of glad they didn't come up on Google searches.

There's definitely locations listed online that should not be, though as areas become less populated, best way to find secret location is visual analysis of satellite maps, or call a local social hotspot, claim to be from a major newspaper and asked if they know any; point being, it's possible to find them unless they're very careful.

Where's the sidewalk? I thought San Francisco was supposed to be mad pedestrian friendly, but that neighborhood looks like shit

The entire strip between the trees and the base of the building.

>On August 15, 2007, the case was heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and was dismissed on December 29, 2011 based on a retroactive grant of immunity by Congress for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the government.

I'm not from US and don't fully understand everything that goes on over there, but does this part mean that you can't sue any telecommunications company, just because they have cooperated with the government? How is that sane? Sure, I get it that the company was just following order, but shouldn't you be able to sue the one who made the order in that case? Thinking about it, you should be able to sue people who were blindly following orders, if the following the order means breaking the law.

I guess it means you would have to sue the government.

Which is circular logic. To sue an entity which you fund is to indrectly sue yourself.

What? No. You can sue your employee after all.

When suing in a case like this, punitive damages would be paid out of the governments budget, rather than the personal assets of those personally responsible, correct?

Yes Alan Watts, everything is connected, but organizations and people can still remain distinct and have different motivations. :)

You can't sue the US government for this without its permission.

Correct! Sovereign immunity.

You can read about the ongoing suits that followed Hepting v. AT&T, on EFF's case page: https://eff.org/nsa/ . The timeline is also worth a look: https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline

(Disclosure: I work at EFF)

Yes, the applicable statutory immunity grant (FISA Amendments Act Section 802) is very broadly-worded. There was a follow-up case, Jewel v. NSA, that sued the NSA directly for issuing those orders. That case is ongoing: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/06/jewel-v-nsa-moves-forw....

Yes, but remember, people like Klein and Snowden are traitors working on the payroll of the Russians against US interests, and...

Man, I can't even make this stuff up.

I want to know how many more of these rooms exist, and where exactly they are. I'm surprised we haven't had many more leaks about them given what I would consider the ease of identifying them. (ie, how many doors out there don't have door handles and sit next to a huge fiber optic networking infrastructure.)

... and belong to AT&T with many cables going there :D

I live in a town of about 5,000 that is 15 minutes from a city of 200,000 and we have an AT&T building in our small downtown. It's about the same size as the frozen yogurt place next door, but it has two 1000+ gallon gas tanks sitting outside. I've lived here for years and never seen anyone go in or out, and the sign on the door says that packages should be delivered to the tavern next door. The door itself has blacked out windows.

It's super weird. I'm not saying it's a spy room, I guess it could be a tiny datacenter or switching building, but it's still super weird.

I live in a village of similar population in the UK and our telephone exchange looks just like a bungalow, situated on the end of a road dotted with similar houses. It's set back further from the road with tall hedging but I managed to cycle past it for eight years without even realising what it was. Weird, but in an opposing way :-)

In the days of Strowger switches, their clacking racket would have blasted you from the bike ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strowger_switch

I doubt it. I walked past a large strowger exchange building as a school kid every day in the UK heard nothing from outside.

Wild stuff, never knew about these old mechanisms. Doesn't seem too loud however. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cNNKLuM8yY8

A room full of those, piled up in columns/towers seven or eight feet tall, gets pretty loud.

But yeah, as mentioned, a building with decent insulation can contain the noise. A flimsy cottage, probably not.

Try https://archive.org/details/EastLangtonUax13TelephoneExchang... That's a standard UK rural exchange. Capacity 100 lines! The last few decomissioned went, in full working condition, to museums.

Background noise is the motors for the tone generator, probably the cable compressor too. The louder noises are the call routing and reset. Background noise would normally be a fair bit louder - I'm guessing he had mic right up against the rack for this.

Or a town exchange: https://youtu.be/xUOh9fCSgqw

Towns had much larger exchanges, and they were loud. Probably enough to have hearing loss if you worked there. Only visited one once, decades ago.

Also had a distinctive smell - machine oil, burnt electrics (50v), solvents. Lovely.

What an irony that this was invented to prevent fiddling about with things, considering how fouled up it all got.

Another example: here is a water pumping station disguised as a home in Raleigh, NC: http://wunc.org/post/video-whats-inside-house-wade-avenue

People used to enter those and document what was inside. That was stopping at the end of the 1990s, but 9/11 really made it trickier to do.

I think somewhere on textfiles.com there's a file by possibly kelticphr0st about those buildings.

If you've got time, I would be really interested in this ;-)

Having worked in the telco world for a bit, I wouldn't say that your description is unusual for a remote site. Generator backup is typical, and a switching office usually isn't manned, so it makes sense that they would arrange for packages to be delivered next door. Window tinting sounds nefarious, but truly could be done just to reduce HVAC load from solar heat. It's also nice to not advertise the pair of $100k+ Cisco or Juniper big iron routers that could be in there.

The amount of equipment that makes up most telco networks is actually pretty incredible. There are tons of small, unmanned sites that house switches, routers, and fiber amplifiers.

That said, I don't doubt that there are tons of sites that look just like this and actually do have something to hide.

That's what I figure, I just thought I'd bring it up in context of the description of the room in the linked article. It sounds just the same, so it's really difficult to determine what is a bad place and what is a normal place. Again, that's likely by design.

> That said, I don't doubt that there are tons of sites that look just like this and actually do have something to hide.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Quick question for you: I've noticed that in most cities there's at least one nondescript, windowless brick building with 70's era architecture and some connection to a telephone company. Examples: [1] [2] [3] Now, those were probably made back in the days when everything was built from mechanical switches, or at best, transistors. What do they do with all that space when modern, miniaturized tech comes to town? Are they just filled with cobwebs and bits of ancient mainframe computers nowadays?

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6767102,-122.2095201,3a,75y,...

[2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Museum+of+Communications/@...

[3] https://www.google.com/maps/place/AT%26T+Long+Lines+Building...

I truly have no clue. My direct experience is in network operations in the satellite communications industry, which tangentially exposed me to more traditional telcos. I couldn't speak with authority on what those buildings do nowadays.

Often, replaced with fiber patch bays, DSLAMs, etc. Then you have the same gear duplicated for CLECs that have colocation. At one point AT&T was claiming that COs were full/that there was no more space for CLEC colocation.

In larger cities some were repurposed as MSCs for cell service.

- Some of that space is now filled with networking gear, since phone companies are ISPs via DSL, FiOS, etc. Since this implies a lot of internet bandwidth coming into the building, they might also lease some of the space and network capacity to other companies who co-locate their own servers and networking gear there.

- The backhaul equipment that connects cellular networks to the landline phone/internet networks may also be in those buildings. (Some big carriers, e.g., Verizon, provide both landline and cellular services.)

- Some of that space is taken up by backup power supplies (batteries and/or generators) to keep the system going during power outages.

- Some of the space may be used for storage of supplies used for maintaining the local phone network.

What you're describing is the ILEC CO.

Sounds like a telephone company central office where all the local copper wires land.

Agreed. Here's what one looks like where I used to live: https://www.google.com/maps/@35.685061,-105.9393468,3a,75y,5... .

Centrally located, no public entrances, and no windows. I imagine the lack of windows also helps make it more secure, and less vulnerable to vandalism.

Here's what the local CO looks like in my hometown (~6K people). It was still a SxS switch when I was in high school (early 90s) but has since been upgraded; I presume most of the building is empty at this point and it's just used as staging for repair parts (see the pic of the back fenced-in area).

http://imgur.com/a/MMSK4

And it's not surprising you'd never see anyone come or go. These offices typically don't have permanent staff; technicians stop by for maintenance as needed.

> I'm not saying it's a spy room

Oh it is totally a data collection point.

> how many more of these rooms exist, and where exactly they are

Dozens, if not hundreds, in every major US city at the very least. Have we really not learned anything in the recent years, that we're still unsure about such basic questions? Imagine the KGB at its peak activity, bump it up by a few orders of magnitude, and you have the NSA. Man, despite everything, the US is still really good at brainwashing even its most tech savvy citizens.

> I'm surprised we haven't had many more leaks about them given what I would consider the ease of identifying them

I think you're greatly overestimating "the easy of identifying them", and how much the average AT&T employee knows/cares. Things are also probably much better hidden now compared to 2006.

> Dozens, if not hundreds, in every major US city at the very least.

That's the most paranoid thing I've read in ages.

NSA's job isn't domestic surveillance.

So weird then, because thats exactly what they do....

The terms "foreign" and "domestic" are meaningless in the context of the world wide web.

> NSA's job isn't domestic surveillance

We've known since 2013 that is certainly is.

GP hasn't gotten the memo. Instead of "paranoid fantasy" now they're supposed to say "nothing new here; intelligent people have known about this for decades".

It's really not: https://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/sigint-faqs.shtml

Well, I guess that settles it, then! There's no way their job is broader in scope than what they publicly say. I'm convinced.

Where have you been the last few years?

I'm usually not this snarky... but seriously... it's fact NSA operates an enormous surveillance infrastructure within the US borders targeting US citizens.

That is not debatable.

What may be debatable by some, is whether or not it's legal/constitutional/moral... but you are not making that point.

You're right that it is not debatable. It's simply false. There is no evidence that supports your claim of the NSA operating enormous surveillance infrastructure targeting US citizens. The one program that Snowden leaked that included US citizen data (phone metadata) has since ended, and the way that metadata was queried according to Snowden's leaks does not constitute surveillance.

You'll never win with facts, unfortunately: the only things that sway this crowd are half-truths, falsehood and innuendo.

Just to throw in my anecdote: when touring a local datacenter some years ago one of the principals pointed out equipment cages they claimed were rented by the NSA. The facility wasn't the local carrier hotel, but did have a large number fiber loops into it, enough that peering with virtually everyone was trivial. It would be a reasonable place to duplicate and sift through traffic that goes out over a number of pacific undersea cables. It's also entirely possible the principal was telling a tall tale.

In any case I think given all that's been disclosed over the last 10 years it's more reasonable to assume over-collection than under-collection.

Undersea cables go to other nations, and thus aren't domestic.

The idea that NSA has 'dozens, if not hundreds' of devices 'in every major US city,' regardless of utility for foreign intelligence, is just rampant paranoia, not much behind claiming that the lizard people are eating our brains while we sleep.

I would love to downvote you; sadly, I can't yet.

Why? Snowdon's leaks and the law show that he is correct.

Interestingly, Android autocorrect replaces Snowden with Snowdon. No idea why Android has Snowdon in its English dictionary.

Snowdon is the highest peak in the UK.

I have worked in telco and had to fix an issue with a circuit once, so ended up auditing the in/out circuits to which I found a few that were somewhat undocumented and further enquiry was basicly, you do not touch those. reason for auditing was issue with video link and was looking for a spare circuit to negate a older bit of kit that I suspected of inducing the odd bit error. Which for networking is not going to be noticed but for video, visually impacting. This was about 20 years ago.

Let us not forget that many a spare fiber was laid in the internet boom, unused and classed as dark fiber. But in government and telco's of the time and to this day you will find no single person working on the entire network to the stage they deal with there part and somebody else deals with there part. you can easily end up with unnoticed and ignored links for security.

What I'd be interested in is what about Russia, China and other countries, so much about the NSA and yet more is known how they operate in contrast to other countries security collectives.

But kinda gets down to presuming they see everything and with that, more right than not.

There was a big T-splitter in NYC back in the 90s that would route copies of eastern seaboard and transatlantic telecom (voice) traffic. I don't know which TLA was attached. And then there was the DNS/Internet stuff in Crystal city about the same time. There was all the KDC back-door administrivia out of Maryland too, but that was less interception of traffic and more making sure they had the keys to decrypt it all...

There was a room at work that ATnT "owned" that we weren't allowed in...hmmm...

> I'm surprised we haven't had many more leaks about them given what I would consider the ease of identifying them.

the last guy who blew whistle on the beam splitters attached to Google's and the others' fibers is happy, given the alternative, to live in Putin's country...

Previous discussion from 1195 days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5847166

There's no door handle on the exterior to the entrance to the room.

I'm glad someone else noticed how unusual the door is.

But I believe I have an explanation. That is a emergency exit door only, you can see the rivets for a door-bar across its middle, and you can also see the alternative entrance door to 641A with lock in this PDF[0] page 14 from the lawsuit.

I believe it is using this style of door-bar[1] (note the rivets). But obviously that is speculative.

[0] http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/att_klein_wire... [1] http://i.imgur.com/NlpaqmH.jpg

You're probably right, I wonder if there's a door entry that doesn't require some handy-work to enter. Pretty interesting that that could be a defense mechanism

I remember this, from before Obama's presidency, and after.

A family member worked in that building back in the late 80s/early 90s. The shenanigans laid out were already known about and occurring back then.

I'm not surprised.

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