I feel like evil institutions don't even bother trying to hide their evil any more.
If you look at a photo of the building, it's pretty much exactly what you would expect a dystopian secret police to operate out of. [0]
If you look at a photo of the building, it's pretty much exactly what you would expect a dystopian secret police to operate out of. [0]
There are former Long Lines sites around the country, from urban high-rises to lonely fenced-in microwave horn antennas atop bunkers, miles from the nearest towns and sometimes accessible only by helicopter. A good few are next to highways and train tracks, which is how I came to start reading about them.
They provided rural telephony for civilians, but were also part of the Cold War-era continuity-of-government system connecting SAC bases and missile silos.
There's a fairly dedicated hobbyist community cataloguing the sites [0]. A remote Long Lines site also played a role in the Death Valley Germans story, which got some pretty good discussion on HN a while ago [1].
[0] http://long-lines.net/places-routes/
[1] http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/search-and-rescue/the-hun...
Here's a photo that more better captures its size:
https://www.emporis.com/images/show/446315-Large-fullheightv...
Every agency has to operate from someplace. It makes sense that spy agencies operate from non-descript locations. Unless your argument is that NSA should not exist altogether, or that it should not operate on American soil, I honestly don't understand what the fuss is about.
And I say this as a _staunch_ opponent of domestic surveillance.
> It makes sense that spy agencies operate from non-descript locations.
The building is the opposite of nondescript. A 30-story building in Manhattan with no windows stands out a lot more than if they dressed it up with windows.
I also happen to think the NSA should be completely disbanded and replaced with an agency which solely focuses on international espionage.
One American burst out "its a f&^king prison" when he visited martelsham.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building#/medi...
It looks ugly and menacing in the pictures, it is even more so walking next to it.
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/18/politics/steve-bannon-donald-t...
That's a pretty sweeping generalization, wouldn't you say? Just considering how fractured religion is, if nothing else.