AT&T Room 641A

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Pigeon
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AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Wed Oct 10, 2012 6:37 pm

Room 641A is a telecommunication interception facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency, beginning in 2003, and exposed in 2006.

Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 [Study Group 3] Secure Room. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, as analyzed by J. Scott Marcus, a former CTO for GTE and a former adviser to the FCC, has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building, and therefore "the capability to enable surveillance and analysis of internet content on a massive scale, including both overseas and purely domestic traffic."

Former director of the NSA’s World Geopolitical and Military Analysis Reporting Group, William Binney, has estimated that 10 to 20 such facilities have been installed throughout the nation.

The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 15 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.

The existence of the room was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T. Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country.

Link

According to a security consultant who worked on the program, "What the companies are doing is worse than turning over records ... they’re providing total access to all the data", and a former senior intelligence official said, "This is not about getting a cardboard box of monthly phone bills in alphabetical order ... the N.S.A. is getting real-time actionable intelligence."

And people worry about minor issues of privacy on the internet.

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Royal
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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Royal » Wed Oct 10, 2012 8:32 pm

"Study Group 3" lol

Read about this Room in a "Computers and Society" class. I suspect that government snooping was a common practice long before it was legal by the Patriot Act. My impression is that Room 641A is the technical expression of a well watched and manipulated society. Just as "loss prevention" is designated in department stores to watch employees (not necessarily the customers), the government have been watching it's people in the same manner. Before, it was less technical and had a more anthropological emphasis. Whether it was done directly through government or indirectly by factions of society.

The problem with "monitoring" is the well known observer effect.
The observer-expectancy effect (also called the experimenter-expectancy effect, expectancy bias, observer effect, or experimenter effect) is a form of reactivity in which a researcher's cognitive bias causes them to unconsciously influence the participants of an experiment. It is a significant threat to a study's internal validity, and is therefore typically controlled using a double-blind experimental design.
Which means, people looking for trouble makers would be inclined to see most as trouble makers.


For real time processes:
In information technology, the observer effect is the potential impact of the act of observing a process output while the process is running. For example: if a process uses a log file to record its progress, the process could slow. Furthermore, the act of viewing the file while the process is running could cause an I/O error in the process, which could, in turn, cause it to stop.

In physics:
In physics, the term observer effect refers to changes that the act of observation will make on the phenomenon being observed. This is often the result of instruments that, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some manner. A commonplace example is checking the pressure in an automobile tire; this is difficult to do without letting out some of the air, thus changing the pressure. This effect can be observed in many domains of physics.

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Pigeon
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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Thu Oct 11, 2012 1:01 am

Which bring us to here

In quantum mechanics, the uncertainty principle is any of a variety of mathematical inequalities asserting a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously. The more precisely the position of some particle is determined, the less precisely its momentum can be known, and vice versa.

The original heuristic argument that such a limit should exist was given by Werner Heisenberg in 1927, after whom it is sometimes named, as the Heisenberg principle.

Werner Heisenberg formulated the Uncertainty Principle at Niels Bohr's institute in Copenhagen, while working on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics

Historically, the uncertainty principle has been confused with a somewhat similar effect in physics, called the observer effect, which notes that measurements of certain systems cannot be made without affecting the systems. Heisenberg offered such an observer effect at the quantum level as a physical "explanation" of quantum uncertainty.

It has since become clear, however, that the uncertainty principle is inherent in the properties of all wave-like systems, and that it arises in quantum mechanics simply due to the matter wave nature of all quantum objects. Thus, the uncertainty principle actually states a fundamental property of quantum systems, and is not a statement about the observational success of current technology. It must be emphasized that measurement does not mean only a process in which a physicist-observer takes part, but rather any interaction between classical and quantum objects regardless of any observer.

Since the uncertainty principle is such a basic result in quantum mechanics, typical experiments in quantum mechanics routinely observe aspects of it. Certain experiments, however, may deliberately test a particular form of the uncertainty principle as part of their main research program

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Royal
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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Royal » Thu Oct 11, 2012 10:17 am

So is 641A an "Odious number" or an "Evil number" as referenced in Mersenne twister thread?

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Pigeon
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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Thu Oct 11, 2012 3:28 pm

If 641A is seen as a hex number

110 0100 0001 1010 = 6 ones even = evil

IF it is a character string

00110110 00110100 00110001 01000001 = 12 ones even = evil

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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Sat Oct 27, 2012 12:22 am

Flashback

NSA line eater

The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers used to think it was mythical but believed in acting as though existed just in case. Since the mid-1990s it has gradually become known that the NSA actually does this, quite illegally, through its Echelon program.

The standard countermeasure is to put loaded phrases like ‘KGB’, ‘Uzi’, ‘nuclear materials’, ‘Palestine’, ‘cocaine’, and ‘assassination’ in their sig blocks in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse and overload the creature. The GNU version of EMACS actually has a command that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited text.

As far back as the 1970s there was a mainstream variant of this myth involving a ‘Trunk Line Monitor’, which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks. This is much harder than noticing keywords in email, and most of the people who originally propagated it had no idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them listen in.

Twenty years and several orders of technological magnitude later, however, there are clear indications that the NSA has actually deployed such filtering (again, very much against U.S. law). In 2000, the FBI wants to get into this act with its ‘Carnivore’ surveillance system.

The “NSA line eater” is a fictional creation of the USENET era. In the early days of the internet, newsgroup users collectively developed this urban legend that suggested the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was actively monitoring all posts, and that some type of surveillance tool was “eating up” random lines of various messages.

The idea of the NSA line eater emerged because USENET users would occasionally see some lines of posts vanish seemingly at random. They might see text from one post or another cut off in parts. The theory was that NSA monitoring and surveillance software was clipping these random pieces out of USENET postings.

In response to the idea that the NSA was monitoring everybody, users started to form their own defenses. One common practice involved trying to flood or choke the NSA line eater by putting useless anarchic jargon into every post through signature blocks. Users would put words like Palestine, cocaine, assassin or KGB into their signature blocks to add these words every single post.

[Usenet] A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bug was quickly personified as a mythical creature called the line eater, and postings often included a dummy line of line eater food


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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Sat Dec 15, 2012 4:22 am

ECHELON is a name used in global media and in popular culture to describe a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network operated on behalf of the five signatory states to the UKUSA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, referred to by a number of abbreviations, including AUSCANNZUKUS and Five Eyes). It has also been described as the only software system which controls the download and dissemination of the intercept of commercial satellite trunk communications.

ECHELON was reportedly created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War in the early 1960s.

The system has been reported in a number of public sources. Its capabilities and political implications were investigated by a committee of the European Parliament during 2000 and 2001 with a report published in 2001, and by author James Bamford in his books on the National Security Agency of the United States. The European Parliament stated in its report that the term ECHELON is used in a number of contexts, but that the evidence presented indicates that it was the name for a signals intelligence collection system.

The ability to intercept communications depends on the medium used, be it radio, satellite, microwave, cellular or fiber-optic.

The report concludes that, on the basis of information presented, ECHELON was capable of interception and content inspection of telephone calls, fax, e-mail and other data traffic globally through the interception of communication bearers including satellite transmission, public switched telephone networks (which once carried most Internet traffic) and microwave links.

Bamford describes the system as the software controlling the collection and distribution of civilian telecommunications traffic conveyed using communication satellites, with the collection being undertaken by ground stations located in the footprint of the downlink leg.


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Royal
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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Royal » Sun Dec 16, 2012 5:23 am

THANKS PIGEON.

I have to wait 10 more seconds to call AT&T numbers now.

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Pigeon
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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Tue Dec 18, 2012 12:55 am

The man who revealed room 641A


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Re: AT&T Room 641A

Post by Pigeon » Tue Dec 18, 2012 12:56 am

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