Which windowless American buildings are secret AT&T/NSA listening posts?

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/25/minitrue.html

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All of them?

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The maps have an oddity - one view shows a mark on Seattle, but the ones that have the word “Seattle” have it parked in the neighborhood of Portland, Oregon. Is that just bad map-making?

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I knew which building would be identified as the Atlanta node. I regularly parked adjacent to 51 Peachtree Center Ave. about a decade ago. They may as well put an NSA sign on that building.

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To clarify, the buildings aren’t windowless because they’re NSA listening posts or because they contain them (I have no doubt that they do) but because that’s how the telcos build their switching offices and interchanges.

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I wondered the same thing; last I checked Memphis wasn’t in the center of TN.

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And I dunno about Seattle, but the windowless telco building in Portland is centuryjerk’s.

Not that they are unlikely to be doing the same…

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Ah, the downtown Dallas AT&T pop. No windows for the first 10 fors and the manhole covers at one of the corners is impressive
ATT, MCI, Sprint, Bell, there are a dozen or so manholes all at that corner. If you hang around the building at night, you often get approached by well fed “homeless” people who must really like to exercise.

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I’m thinking terrible map making. They also put Cleveland near Cincinnati in one map and have one map with no legend at all.

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To be fair, Centurylink is probably selling it on the dark web rather than (or in addition to) the NSA.

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Add my windowless place of employment dungeon to that list.

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They call it “Legal Intercept” in the special software they require companies provide them.

Only one of those words is the truth.

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Not if you construe “legal intercept” to mean that the law itself has been intercepted.

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I work down the street from 611 Folsom. It’s not windowless, unless you look at it from the alley in back or the parking lot. From the street, it’s a pretty normal looking office building. Look at google maps, street view.

The ominous windowless building shown in the thumbnail on the map is an Pacific Gas and Electric relay station… Which is mildly famous for a large outage that happened because someone walked in and threw a bunch of disconnects in the right order to create maximum chaos. Who, was never answered.

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That would have been named “Legalities Ignored” then.

The NSA owns and operates one of the world’s largest computers, not in Memphis but across the state in Oak Ridge.

Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN) had my work computer surveilled for a few days in 1996 because I had the temerity to write a letter suggesting medical marijuana processing facilities in TN might reduce the state’s embarrassing unemployment rates and incarceration rates for “greenshine”.

Left that fascist surveillance state for Jawja, no real improvement.

Lawful Intercept.

Trivia: “map 3” places “Seattle” where Portland Oregon would find it quite shocking to discover it.

Just gonna leave this right here:
http://map.norsecorp.com/
(at the time of this posting, it’s offline, but keep trying–it’s the realtime map of hacker attempts/attacks by origin, target, type, IP, and more… worldwide, and typically is only able to display ~3% of the total action; it’s fascinating in a perverse, forensic way)

Kaspersky has something akin:

These folks just track DDoS and it’s not as animatedly cool but…

A roundup:

Pew! Pew!

https://threatbutt.com/map

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