Nov 17, 2016 08:41 AM
It's a windowless 29 story skyscraper in lower Manhattan, built in the 1970's ostensibly for ATT, to house telephone switches. Today it still performs that function, with a large proportion of NY's digital communications passing through its routers and switches, especially communications headed to and from foreign countries. Officially the building is the 'ATT Long Lines Building'. The New York Times estimates that 175 million messages pass through here on an average day.
Well, as you might expect, that attracted the attention of the National Security Agency from the very beginning. According to documents stolen by Edward Snowden, the NSA calls the facility TITANPOINTE. (Sounds like the name of a James Bond film, but it does suggest the importance that the NSA attaches to the facility.) Tapping into its dataflow enable the NSA to intercept communications to and from the United Nations and all the UN delegations, the World Bank, the IMF and the big financial firms.
A flowchart on one of Snowden's documents (labeled 'top secret') has a box labeled 'TITANPOINTE' showing a 'partner' (ATT?) device labeled 'router' with an arrow to an NSA device labeled 'protocol processor'. This appears to route selected intercepts to the NSA at Fort Meade MD.
The FBI's New York field office is in a nearby skyscraper. NSA officers visiting TITANPOINTE are told to coordinate their visit through the FBI office which will arrange for clean cars for them to use that can't be traced back to the NSA by anyone watching or filming comings and goings from the building. (The Russians and Chinese can be expected to already know about it.)
The building is architecturally interesting. It has no windows and is apparently hardened against explosions ranging from truck-bombs to nuclear explosions a sufficient distance away. Its only features are big air vents, presumably for cooling the electronic equipment inside. It's unknown how many humans work in the building, but it is known to have food and water supplies and emergency generators and fuel stockpiled that can keep it up and running for weeks in power failures or disasters of whatever sort.
Lots of details here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-...ain-sight/
![[Image: medium_2016-11-17-6b4a21e5d9.jpg]](http://www.mogaznews.com/en//temp/resized/medium_2016-11-17-6b4a21e5d9.jpg)
Well, as you might expect, that attracted the attention of the National Security Agency from the very beginning. According to documents stolen by Edward Snowden, the NSA calls the facility TITANPOINTE. (Sounds like the name of a James Bond film, but it does suggest the importance that the NSA attaches to the facility.) Tapping into its dataflow enable the NSA to intercept communications to and from the United Nations and all the UN delegations, the World Bank, the IMF and the big financial firms.
A flowchart on one of Snowden's documents (labeled 'top secret') has a box labeled 'TITANPOINTE' showing a 'partner' (ATT?) device labeled 'router' with an arrow to an NSA device labeled 'protocol processor'. This appears to route selected intercepts to the NSA at Fort Meade MD.
The FBI's New York field office is in a nearby skyscraper. NSA officers visiting TITANPOINTE are told to coordinate their visit through the FBI office which will arrange for clean cars for them to use that can't be traced back to the NSA by anyone watching or filming comings and goings from the building. (The Russians and Chinese can be expected to already know about it.)
The building is architecturally interesting. It has no windows and is apparently hardened against explosions ranging from truck-bombs to nuclear explosions a sufficient distance away. Its only features are big air vents, presumably for cooling the electronic equipment inside. It's unknown how many humans work in the building, but it is known to have food and water supplies and emergency generators and fuel stockpiled that can keep it up and running for weeks in power failures or disasters of whatever sort.
Lots of details here:
https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-...ain-sight/