No one should visit or even see room 641A.
San Francisco, California. Early morning. A disc of sun rolls slowly over the picturesque bay, illuminating the city hills and the Golden Gate Bridge. A tram rumbles through the silk Californian dawn, the streets are filled with vehicles and hurrying passers-by.
But our path lies further, to the northern part of the city, to an area called Rincon Hill.
A faceless 18-story building with no windows and no architectural delights at 611 Folsom Street, lost in the midst of similar high-rises. Cramped parking, lobby, elevator slides silently to the sixth floor. Winding corridors with dozens of similar doors. Staff scurrying about everywhere - very much like an ordinary working day in some office center …
But there is one door that always remains closed. Behind her is a ringing silence. No signs of life. Clerks and technicians with glasses of coffee run past in fright, afraid to glance towards office 641A.
Wait, someone is there! An electronic lock clicks, and several people come out of the strange room - impeccable suits, dark sunglasses, an impassive expression on their faces. Without exchanging greetings with anyone, they quickly leave the building through the service entrance - from the street you can hear the roar of an 8-cylinder Buick engine, carrying away the unknown inhabitants of Room 641A.
What's going on on the sixth floor of the Folsom Street building? Conspiracy theory? Or is the shooting of the next
blockbuster "The Matrix"?
Okay, while the inside is empty, I suggest you go in and inspect the strange room. Be careful! Don't touch anything with your hands!
Strange … It looks like there are no ghosts and portals to other worlds. A standard office, a few racks with computer equipment and a cable channel with a thick bundle of wires descending from the ceiling …
- Hands behind your head, facing the wall! On knees! You are under arrest for attempting to enter the property of the US State Department. You have the right to remain silent …
Big brother is watching you
The Gray Building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, is the largest telecommunications hub on the US West Coast, owned by AT&T, the leading telephony / internet / cable TV provider in the North American continent …
This fact alone lends the AT&T building an air of mysticism and superstitious respect - hundreds of telephone and internet cables from across the West Coast and the continental United States converge here; thick veins of transoceanic fiber-optic lines emerge from here - Japan, South Korea, China, Hong Kong … Thousands of splitters, routers, servers and computers pass through their bowels millions of phone calls and thousands of gigabytes of Internet data every second.
Internet communications in the United States
Unsurprisingly, the Folsom Street AT&T building has come under scrutiny from the National Security Agency (NSA). The global communication center allows you to get instant access to any information of interest to the special services: interception of cell and landline phone calls, absolute control over Internet traffic, access to information about banking transactions (cash flow, accounts and plastic cards), e-mail, social networks, etc. stock information - the entire economic, social, business and political life of a huge region of the Earth is "under the hood" of the NSA!
Project Room 641A began in 2002 when NSA officials made AT & T's management "an offer that AT&T could not refuse." On the sixth floor of a building on Folsom Street, NSA personnel were allocated a cozy 48 by 24 feet (14.5 x 7 meters) space. Slightly higher, on the seventh floor, where broadband Internet channels passed, several optical splitters (beam-splitters) were installed, dividing one data stream into two identical ones - duplicated streams were redirected to a room on the floor below, where NSA specialists analyzed the entire through the building of information.
A device officially called the Narus STA 6400 was installed in room 641A - a powerful Internet traffic analyzer that allows you to filter out the necessary information from a huge stream of Internet data and save the result on a server for further analysis and study in the interests of the American government and special services.
The "shop" functioned successfully until 2006 - until the former AT&T technician, and now a simple American pensioner, Mark Klein, attracted public attention to the problem of illegal wiretapping by the US special services.
M. Klein gave convincing evidence of the existence of the "black room", spoke in detail about the technical features of cyber espionage, made written statements to senators and representatives of news agencies - under intense pressure from the media, AT&T was forced to confess to voluntary and compulsory cooperation with the special services. A universal scandal broke out.
The interests of M. Klein and everyone who were outraged by the actions of the American special services were represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a non-profit human rights organization whose goal is to protect the rights and freedoms written in the US Constitution in the era of modern high technologies. AT&T was flooded with lawsuits, the reputation of the NSA itself was seriously "tarnished".
Mark Klein spent 22 years as a technician at AT&T. After leaving in 2004, Klein began a campaign to draw attention to the problem of illegal wiretapping in the United States.
At the same time, specialists from AT&T and the NSA, who had a direct relationship with the "room 641A", justify their actions by the fact that in the current era of high technologies and universal computerization of modern life, it would be too naive to believe that the state will not use these technology to their advantage.
Fight against global terrorism and drug trafficking, control over international business contracts, suppression of financial fraud, cyber attacks and other illegal actions by criminals. Ordinary people have nothing to worry about - no one is watching them on purpose; the system responds only to the key words: "bribe", "cocaine", "kickback", "weapon", etc.
Room 641A in the AT&T building on Folsom Street has been permanently shut down. However, Mr. Klein himself and his many associates are convinced that such "rooms" still function in the buildings of telecommunications companies in other US cities - in Seattle, Los Angeles, San Diego, as well as abroad, for example, in a large European communication center in Frankfurt am Main.
A few words about NSA
NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland.
NSA, the original abbreviation - NSA (National Security Agency), also joking transcripts "No Such Agency" (There is no such agency) or "Never Speak Anything" (Never say anything). A major American intelligence agency responsible for all types of electronic intelligence and technical information acquisition, interception of domestic and foreign telecommunications, cryptography (breaking secret ciphers) and data protection.
The number of employees (estimate) is about 20 … 38 thousand people work at the headquarters on "paper work", about 100 thousand more technical specialists work at military bases, communication centers and on the territory of US diplomatic missions around the world. In May 2013, the number of employees decreased by one - Edward Snowden left the slender ranks of NSA specialists.
The organization's budget is a state secret. According to some reports, the amount of funding for the NSA exceeds $ 10 billion, which makes the NSA the most secure intelligence agency in the world. It should be noted that the funds invested in the NSA are returned to the budget with double efficiency - the special service aggressively protects the interests of American business - the case is well known when the NSA thwarted the 6 billion contract between Airbus and Saudi Arabia by publishing calls and correspondence of the company's top managers with Arab customers, which discussed the amount of the bribe. Another time, the NSA disrupted the signing of a contract between Brazil and the French corporation Thompson - as a result, the American company Raytheon got a tender in the amount of 1.4 billion for the supply of radars.
How does the Internet work?
It is enough to type in the search bar, for example, any Japanese or American site - and the required information will appear on the computer screen in a second.
How does the Internet work? How does data exchange come in? The banal answer is by wire, from a local provider (as an option, by air, via 3G and Wi-Fi networks) … But the data (content) in question is stored on servers in Japan or the USA. How, then, do they almost instantly "fly" across the ocean?
Many are seriously convinced that information is transmitted via telecommunication satellites in geostationary orbit. Alas, this is absolutely not the case - the satellite has too "narrow" data transmission channel. The capabilities of one satellite were hardly enough to service a separate provincial town. Satellites have little to do with the Internet - all of the world's Internet traffic goes exclusively through fiber optic cables laid along the bottom of the oceans.
Such a situation provides exceptional opportunities for special services - it is enough to install several devices for intercepting data in key nodes of the scheme and you can be aware of all events on all continents of the Earth. In this situation, the United States has the most advantageous position - the lion's share of the world's Internet traffic passes through its territory.
