I dislike this article whenever it comes up in that it conflates the NSA activity at the site (TITANPOINTE) with the building in a very confusing way. The building is not an NSA building, it is an AT&T building. The NSA is a tenant, along with many other organizations who use the building for meet-me and internet exchange purposes. It's absolutely true that the NSA has a concerning relationship with AT&T that has evidently allowed them to conduct widespread surveillance at telephone switches, but this article seems to be making a case that the building itself is an edifice of the NSA... which is no more true than an Amazon data center.
It is interesting that the building is nuclear-hardened, but it was started in 1969, which was about five years after it became standing policy for AT&T to nuclear-harden all major long-lines facilities. It's not at all unique to this building and is unrelated to the NSA, nuclear-hardened AT&T exchanges can be found from major cities to small towns across the United States (Farmington, New Mexico, for example), and a large portion of surviving microwave relay sites are hardened. The general standard was roughly for a 100KT detonation at five miles, but some facilities were built for more. The motivation was survivable telecommunications after a nuclear attack, which was primarily a requirement of the US Government which relied on AT&T to build out AUTOVON as a survivable C2 and continuity of government system (and AT&T was generously paid for this work). Alongside AUTOVON, AT&T designed and operated systems like ECHO FOX which provided telephone connections to Air Force One and other national emergency command post aircraft. The end-user client here was mainly the POTUS and Strategic Air Command (later Army and Navy components of the triad), not intelligence.
The choice of architect was a fairly simple one, he was, at the time, a notable architect who was friendly with the federal government (who was in part the client due to AUTOVON and other C2 programs, not intelligence) and had prior experience working on hardened facilities like embassies.
It feels like the author chose this rather confusing way of presenting the issue, conflating the physical building with NSA activity that occurs in it, mostly just to weave in the architecture criticism. The building itself is very interesting, but really does nothing to advance the NSA story and rather seems to suggest that the scale of NSA activity is far larger (the whole building!) than it really is (generally thought to be a single suite on one floor, and far from the only suite occupied by staff of AT&T tenants). What the NSA has seems to basically be an office space, cage, and cross-connect agreement, which tons of other tenants also have... the NSA is just unusual in that the cross-connects go to interfaces configured for lawful intercept (which is more a telecom term of art and not a judgment of the legality).
It’s an intercept piece, so there’s always the drama and eye roll associated with them.
That said, how many cages or suites are leased by an intelligence agency isn’t really germane… the fact that they are or were there at all is the news. The square footage is particularly irrelevant as the building and “condo” owners are known to perform various tasks for intelligence services.
Where that building is located and who is served by it make it very strategic, and it’s imo naive to assume that the security, intelligence and counterintelligence services weren’t stakeholders in the building and network designs in the 60s and 70s. (A heyday for illegal behaviors for these entities)
Here is perhaps a better wording of my ultimate concern about the article: The NSA's relationship to AT&T, even in the context of the article, is not dissimilar to the FBI's. A variety of federal agencies have extremely close relationships with AT&T (and generally all other major telecoms) including colocated staff and equipment---equipment being somewhat required by the lawful intercept protocol design. The American public should be made aware that this is now a broad, nationwide concern that's rooted in the everyday policy of telcos and the federal government... tangling it up so much in _this specific building_ with borderline conspiratorial implications mystifies the issue and makes it actually seem smaller than it is.
What the NSA does at 33 Thomas is not special, it is mundane. And that is much more frightening. If anything I suspect the NSA's intercept infrastructure is inferior to that of the FBI, because it's more likely to be legacy and because the NSA likely insists on transitioning the data to one of their own networks (which AT&T almost certainly has a hand in operating). There's talk in the documents of an NSA engineer having to work on an intercept project... rather surprising as law enforcement agencies just fill out the form and get the data! I suspect the NSA wanted to set up its own crypto equipment in an AT&T facility.
The possibility that the NSA was somehow involved in the design of the building is a theory with little evidence, and seems unlikely: AT&T had fairly detailed design standards for telephone offices, drawn from a variety of papers in e.g. BSTJ exploring the different practical factors. Even more elaborate design requirements were imposed by Cold War research on nuclear survivability by the military and AEC, and military concerns of sabotage (which had been a design consideration in telecom networks since WWII when it was feared the Japanese would come ashore sneakily and destroy West Coast telephone infrastructure, although this never occurred). It's difficult to imagine an NSA desire that the building would not have met: they could obtain space for equipment/technicians, cross-connections, and access to their own secure networks in any major exchange. The facilities were highly secure by virtue of being major exchanges. The NSA does apparently have a SCIF there but "SCIFing" existing spaces, i.e. in leased buildings, is a well understood process that doesn't require any special involvement (and couldn't have anyway as the modern SCIF concept is newer than the building).
Indeed, if the NSA has been so deeply involved in 33 Thomas, perhaps because of it being a critical exchange in the international network, one would wonder if they are similarly involved in other such exchanges like Mojave, or SCPs such as those of the competitive long distance carriers? I'm sure they are, no speculation about the architect's loyalties required.
There is some value in presenting information in a way that regular people would take the time to read and understand.
The key here is you are being spied on by your government in the heart of NYC and AT&T is helping.
The video with this article takes the motif further with a sort-of X-Files like presentation and set of mysterious sounding voiceovers.
From the start, I thought this building reminds me of the one Will Smith’s character reported to in “Men in Black.”
To some extent all information in news is editorialized for an angle that draws the reader in.
Could it be the truths of this story are so well known to you that it is hard to enjoy the way this is presented? Perhaps, in the same way the TV show “Silicon Valley” is unattractive to some startup founders as too close to home?
I'll shamefully admit that I sometimes end up writing about a topic because I had recently commented on it on HN, but this time it was the other way around.
So... Like, yeah. What's really kind of stupid, to me, is that The Intercept think this facility is unique in any way, shape, or form for the Cold War. Like, it's totally on average.
Anyone here think the USSR Ministry of Communications, KGB and FSB were lacking any of this? Anyone believe Putin has just simply put away all the evesdropping gear?
Anyone believe the Chinese were not then and are not doing this right now?
Or that any of the other major powers down to the lowest level tinpot dictators on the planet were not or are not now operating monitoring gear at their own access points to major trunk phone and networking lines?
While yes, in the US we take our civil liberties incredibly to heart, I worry far more about the people in far more sketch countries in the world, where the wrong call to the wrong person gets you disappeared the same day.
Find me the building where this is going on in Syria. Find me where in China this sort of operation is going on. Or the UAE. Or KSA. Because guaranteed, if this freaks you out in midtown Manhattan, what's going on in those countries will turn your stomach.
Basically every telecom office building I've seen looks run down, in my opinion.
I remember walking by the AT&T building (one with windows) in my city and noticing how it looked basically abandoned at street level despite being in active use.
I think telecoms just don't spend money on stuff like that because it has no return on investment for them. They're like your neighborhood dive bar that owns the land with no plans to sell/leave/lease out space (since the building is physically attached to their product), therefore has no financial incentive to improve the building.
Plus, their customers have no choice but to use them even if walking by the building makes them think negatively of the company. Nothing a half-funny commercial with an overused spokesperson can't fix!
That intercom buzzer still works so there's no reason to replace it. There's no money in the budget for a nice sign, so the employee printed something out and taped it there, because that's what's in the supply cabinet.
33 Thomas Street (formerly the AT&T Long Lines Building) is a 550-foot-tall (170 m) windowless skyscraper in Tribeca, Lower Manhattan, New York City. It stands on the east side of Church Street, between Thomas Street and Worth Street. The building is an example of the Brutalist architectural style. It is a telephone exchange or wire center building which contained three major 4ESS switches used for interexchange (long distance) telephony, as well as a number of other switches used for competitive local exchange carrier services. However, it is not used for incumbent local exchange carrier services, and is not a central office. The CLLI code for this facility is NYCMNYBW. The building has also been described as the likely location of a National Security Agency (NSA) mass surveillance hub codenamed TITANPOINTE.
This has been educational for me as well - I happen to have a clear view of the building from the coffee area of our office and have been wondering for quite some time now what that neo-brutalist looking thing actually is.
Ha, looking at the pictures, I thought "that looks just like the records building in the middle of season 3 of Mr. Robot", and it's the same building.
BTW this is unrelated to the thread, but Mr. Robot is an incredible show, and the middle of season 3 (where this building is featured) in particular is probably the greatest television I've ever seen. Episodes 5 and 6 are like a full two-episode climax to a story arc that had been building since season 2. I generally avoid any "hacker" type shows/movies for the cheesiness/cringiness of the hacker portrayals (and Mr. Robot does start off a bit cheesy), but I'm glad I made an exception here.
How is it attractive? It looks extremely oppressive.
I remember coming by that building while walking through Manhattan by chance and thinking this must be some government surveillance center or something.
I can totally understand why one would dislike it, but personally I'm a huge huge fan. My favorite features:
- the lack of glass gives the granite façade lots of space to shine.
- the off-center elevator shafts on the building's two long sides prevents the entire building from being disorienting at street-level: https://i.imgur.com/DQdWQ36.jpg
- the round-rect vent windows contrast with the sharp lines of the granite they're cut from, echoing an overall theme of natural skin versus high-tech innards just like the granite itself versus all the telecom gear inside: https://i.imgur.com/BQmYnuw.jpg
- the re-use of the roundrect windows to hide the former Long Lines microwave horn antennas on the roof of the building, coupled with a Disneyland-style perspective trick where the microwave windows are double the height of the vent windows so they look identically-square when you're on the street looking up: https://i.imgur.com/6TYn6Ug.jpg
Absolutely gorgeous building, probably my favorite in the entire city <3
The roundrects give the design a deep kind of uncanny valley effect for me. They suggest some kind of human characteristic, either a hooded face or an orifice of some type, depending on the angle that you look at the building. From street level (e.g., your first photograph), it's like a series of six hooded figures, with another six hooded figures towering over those figures or standing on their backs.
>How is it attractive? It looks extremely oppressive.
not really mutually exclusive. More positive description would be that it looks imposing. Also it's in a sense aesthetically honest because it reflects what it does openly, which is rare for surveillance infrastructure and even kind of ironic
I find the opposite to be unattractive, which is this sort of Silicon Valley HQ childish design where surveillance and power is hidden behind rainbow colored ping pong tables and so on
Although I know that some people prefer brutalist architecture, there's definitely a case to be made about the design of a building meant to house communications in a free nation that prides itself with the first amendment, you would think they would make it transparent or all-glass and even go out of their way to make the corners of the building see through. Maybe something like Mies Van der Rohe's Westmount Square in Montreal could have been explored with an added deep underground level to satisfy the nuclear-hardening requirements.
Sometimes buildings and architecture are testaments to the culture of the time that it was built, some might say it was the beginning of the cold war and the rise of secrecy etc.
The real gem of the Federal Plaza is actually the post office building. When you walk inside you have the feeling of a floating ceiling with no columns (there are well-hidden columns).
It's an equipment shed. Most telephone exchanges are pretty bland boxes. In this case the brutalism is functional rather than a soul crushing architectural circle jerk.
The architecture in that game is really beautiful, though I admit the brutalist look isn't for everyone. Neither was the gunplay or story, in my opinion, but I did have a load of fun exploring the moody, minimalist interiors of the game. It reminded me of the stark, arena-styled level design of old-school shooters like Half Life and Quake with much more modern lighting and linear storytelling.
Quite a bit of fun! Getting it to run on my aged GTX 1050Ti, on the other hand...
This discussion is bizzare. It’s not a NSA building it’s a telecom building. So the NSA goes there to tap into telecom.
That doesn’t make it an NSA building though it’s still primarily a telecom hub. It’s not the only giant windowless building of its kind in Manhattan either. There’s the Verizon one next to the Brooklyn Bridge on Pearl (which added some windows decades after being built) among others not to mention the Western Union building in Tribeca and so on.
I always found it very awkward working in 111 8th Ave and seeing "National Security Agency" on the building directory. It's like we weren't even pretending what was going on there.
(My greatest enjoyment, however, was that Level 3 was on the 3rd floor.)
A bit off-topic, but why would one build a nuclear-hardened skyscraper? I can't think of any structure more vulnerable towards extreme winds. Wouldn't a house or bunker be far more practical? Especially when you skip the windows anyway.
Describing it as “hidden” is a bit sensational. I don’t think I can walk past it in a group without someone throwing out this factoid. It’s also unapologetic about what it is—no fake windows or any of that garbage.
I was hiking in a trail along the Pacific coast in the Bay Area and came upon an abandon missile launch site. There were a barrack, observation post, communication poles, and clearly underground missile silos. Not sure whether there're still missiles buried underground. It's pretty close to residential area, too. Very interesting. It's probably from the Cold War. Nowadays missiles are mobile.
Nike Hercules, it was an urban-scale air defense system widely deployed on the coasts against potential Soviet bombers. While there had been plans to upgrade Nike to Nike Zeus and later Nike X, which were nuclear and anti-ballistic missile systems, these were cancelled for various reasons and the Nike system went out of service in the '80s. The launch complex vaults, in which the missiles were stored, have mostly since been filled in for safety reasons (those that haven't are almost always flooded). Fortunately there's one in Marin County preserved as a museum by a historic society.
Fortunately, being an air-defense system, Nike never had a combat engagement. Nike X, while it never came close to achieving its goals, did serve as the birthplace of modern phased-array radar and several advancements in real-time, networked data processing. Overall the Nike system is one of the America's most visible military artifacts of the Cold War. At the apex there were nearly 300, mostly coastal but also inland around certain priority targets like SAC bases and ICBM fields.
If I ran an NSA secret spy hub, it wouldn't be called Titanpointe. It would be called something less ridiculous and more mundane like "John's Computer Services". I'd be embarrassed when a name like that kept appearing on documents or for brought up in meetings.
My wife was working for the NRO's agency-private data center for applications that couldn't be hosted atop Amazon's cloud service in C2S, and it somehow ended up with the initials "RC" which nobody really knew what it meant, so they either called it "Rodeo Clown" or "Rogue Central," depending on who you asked. When they had a renaming contest put to a vote, I can't remember what actually won, but #2 was "Totally Not a Government Death Ray Facility."
Believe it or not, the hackers working for spy agencies are exactly the same nerds as the hackers working for wherever the rest of you work. They have senses of humor. My personal favorite piece of NSA software was "Bilbo Badger." A sibling comment mentioned the NROL39 Octopus mission patch. The latest next great vehicle they launched late last year had a motto written in Elvish. I remember when they first showed it to us before the launch, I thought it might have been the Black Tongue of Mordor, but it took maybe 20 minutes to find someone on the program who recognized it and could translate it.
The program I was on at the time, which ran the ground processing for that vehicle, was code named "Lateralus," which is a Tool album, and my wife's old program after the RC one, was code named "Rush," the old Canadian prog rock band. It was the program that ran the Sentient software, the thing people get all freaked out about as some government AI autonomous control system like Eagle Eye or Enemy of the State or some shit. When they renewed the contract in January, the new code name became "Cyberdyne," in honor of all the public paranoia over what they're doing.
If you think it's embarrassing to have nerd names for stuff, you should see what the people look like. My first boss there had purple hair, never wore shoes, and wore a different wolf shirt every day of the week. I'm not sure who you think goes to work at places like this. There's a reason 80% of the NRO mission patches are wizards and dragons.
> There's a reason 80% of the NRO mission patches are wizards and dragons.
Probably because they are established intelligence iconography. It goes further than that though, lightning bolts and crows are also common and all have specific meaning. Now the original imagery may have been chosen because it was chosen by geeks but its used nowadays because it has meaning.
Ever read Focault? Perhaps they want you to feel that their powers of surveillance are nearly infinite so that you believe you could be observed at any time. You comply because you never know when you’re being watched. A self-inflicted oppression.
So what if the name leaks and some hapless computer-unsavvy person happens to call John's Computer Services to help him get rid of the 32 rows of IE toolbars on his Pentium IV-based PC running Windows Vista?
At least Titanpointe sounds like a government codename and something vaguely menacing that you shouldn't really mess with.
My theory is that the keywords used make it easier for the authority to search for when the keyword has been used/disclosed. There is counterintelligence value that is lost if the name of the secret blends in too much.
It is interesting that the building is nuclear-hardened, but it was started in 1969, which was about five years after it became standing policy for AT&T to nuclear-harden all major long-lines facilities. It's not at all unique to this building and is unrelated to the NSA, nuclear-hardened AT&T exchanges can be found from major cities to small towns across the United States (Farmington, New Mexico, for example), and a large portion of surviving microwave relay sites are hardened. The general standard was roughly for a 100KT detonation at five miles, but some facilities were built for more. The motivation was survivable telecommunications after a nuclear attack, which was primarily a requirement of the US Government which relied on AT&T to build out AUTOVON as a survivable C2 and continuity of government system (and AT&T was generously paid for this work). Alongside AUTOVON, AT&T designed and operated systems like ECHO FOX which provided telephone connections to Air Force One and other national emergency command post aircraft. The end-user client here was mainly the POTUS and Strategic Air Command (later Army and Navy components of the triad), not intelligence.
The choice of architect was a fairly simple one, he was, at the time, a notable architect who was friendly with the federal government (who was in part the client due to AUTOVON and other C2 programs, not intelligence) and had prior experience working on hardened facilities like embassies.
It feels like the author chose this rather confusing way of presenting the issue, conflating the physical building with NSA activity that occurs in it, mostly just to weave in the architecture criticism. The building itself is very interesting, but really does nothing to advance the NSA story and rather seems to suggest that the scale of NSA activity is far larger (the whole building!) than it really is (generally thought to be a single suite on one floor, and far from the only suite occupied by staff of AT&T tenants). What the NSA has seems to basically be an office space, cage, and cross-connect agreement, which tons of other tenants also have... the NSA is just unusual in that the cross-connects go to interfaces configured for lawful intercept (which is more a telecom term of art and not a judgment of the legality).