Looks like we now know that the white underbelly of the beast lives just down the street — as well as what it looks like:
In San Francisco the “secret room” is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High-speed fiber-optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T’s WorldNet service, part of the latter’s vital “Common Backbone.” In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the “secret room” on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits. (The location code of the cabinet is 070177.04, which denotes the 7th floor, aisle 177 and bay 04.) The “secret room” itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an industrial-size air conditioner.
And hey, the next time they hold a conference on “Intelligence Support Systems for Lawful Interception and Internet Surveillance”, let’s hold a BarCamp and riff on things like:
- …lawful intercept of voice over the Internet (VoIP) and real-time Internet surveillance and the need for lawful interception and Internet surveillance
- …what real-time Internet surveillance technology solutions are available, what tariffing mechanisms are available to pass costs off to the general public and how investments in Intelligence Support Systems (ISS) can generate a financial return without jeopardizing consumer privacy
- …and how there are no lawful intercept or real-time Internet surveillance barriers that can’t be solved with adequate research and development investment and service provider commitments
That’s the spirit! Anything can be accomplished if you put your mind to it. Whether it’s right or wrong! Whohoo! Moral absolution!
Fuckers.
Factory Joe 