Post #1894809

«Mark told us that the fiber-optic cables carrying traffic to and from AT&T’s portion of the backbone converged on the seventh floor of the Folsom Street building. This was reasonable. But he showed us that those cables also connected down to the sixth floor of the building. The sixth floor was where the weirdness happened. Sometime in 2002, a “secret room” (designated 641A) had been built on that level of the building, accessible only to workers with NSA clearances. Mark didn’t have clearance himself, but he knew and worked with the person who did and had access to that room. »Next to the secret room was a “splitter cabinet.” On one side, the internet-connecting fiber-optic cables that came down from the seventh floor fed into it. On the other side, two sets of fiber-optic cables came out. One set snaked back up to the seventh floor to carry traffic onto the wider internet. But a second set of cables went into the secret room.» The Whistleblower Who Uncovered the NSA’s ‘Big Brother Machine’ | The MIT Press Reader https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-whistleblower-who-uncovered-the-nsas-big-brother-machine/