A massive, heavily fortified skyscraper that has puzzled New Yorkers for years — sitting windowless and unlit in Lower Manhattan since 1974 — is reportedly hiding a very dark secret.
On the surface, the ominous structure — known as the “Long Lines Building” — serves as a giant telecommunications hub for the New York Telephone Company, which is an AT&T subsidiary.
But a recent investigation conducted by The Intercept indicates that it might actually house a covert surveillance mega-center, where millions upon millions of phone calls, faxes and emails are intercepted daily by the National Security Agency.
“This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
According to the Intercept, the NSA has been using a secure room known as a “Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility” — which they integrated inside the Long Lines Building — to record conversations and internet data from across the globe.
While mystery has long surrounded the 550-foot tower of concrete and granite, located at 33 Thomas Street, new documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, which were published by The Intercept on Wednesday, are said to serve as evidence of the agency’s electronic spying efforts.
When combined with architectural plans, public records and interviews with former AT&T employees, the documents reportedly prove that the AT&T building is actually one of the NSA’s most important surveillance sites — code-named TITANPOINTE.
A series of top-secret NSA memos obtained by the Intercept also suggest that the agency has been using equipment to tap into millions of international phone calls.
The outlet reports that 33 Thomas Street is ultimately a “core location” that’s been used for a number of controversial surveillance programs — targeting the communications of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and at least 38 countries, including US allies such as Germany, Japan and France.
While the NSA documents that Snowden leaked feature dozens of references to TITANPOINTE, its connection to 33 Thomas Street was initially unclear. It wasn’t until after the Intercept obtained a set of secret travel guides — dated April 2011 and February 2013 — that they were able to link the two.
In the document from 2011, the NSA lists various facilities for NSA employees and reveals that TITANPOINTE is, in fact, in New York City. The other guide states that a “partner” called LITHIUM — which according to the Intercept, is the agency’s code name for AT&T — oversees building visits at the facility.
Inside the building are at least three “4ESS switches,” which are used to route calls across different phone networks.
“Of the first two, one handled domestic long-distance traffic and the other was an international gateway,” Thomas Saunders, a former AT&T engineer who retired in 2004, told The Intercept.
The Snowden documents also describe TITANPOINTE as having access to “foreign gateway switches,” as well.
In addition to monitoring phone calls, The Intercept reports that the facility also intercepts satellite communications as part of a surveillance program dubbed SKIDROWE.
Many New Yorkers have probably spotted the numerous satellite dishes on the roof of the Long Lines Building, which are believed to be used by the NSA.
‘This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become … an arm of the surveillance state’
- Elizabeth Goitein
After a series of surveillance operations targeting anti-Vietnam War activists, “domestic terrorists” and “foreign radical” suspects — including Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali — led to tighter controls on intelligence gathering, the NSA implemented a new program called BLARNEY, which was first exposed by Snowden in 2013.
According to the Intercept, NSA documents dated between 2012 and 2013 indicate that TITANPOINTE served as one of BLARNEY’s “core sites” — and that equipment was being used at the 33 Thomas Street address to keep tabs on long-distance phone calls, faxes, internet voice calls, video conferencing and other forms of internet communication.
In one instance, an April 2012 memo showed that NSA engineers working under the BLARNEY program were tapping in on a line at the UN mission in New York. This directly led to the “collection against the email address of the U.N. General leading the monitoring mission in Syria,” the memo said.
“Such spying activities are totally unacceptable breaches of trust in international cooperation,” Mogens Lykketoft, former president of the U.N.’s general assembly, told The Intercept.
According to the NSA documents, most of the cyber espionage going on at 33 Thomas Street involves tracking calls and other forms of communication as they come through AT&T’s international phone and data cables.
The SKIDROWE program ultimately focuses on gathering “digital network intelligence” as it is sent between foreign satellites, The Intercept reports.
This data is then handed over to XKEYSCORE — a mass surveillance system that is used by the NSA to track emails, online chats, passwords and even internet browsing histories.
While the relationship between the NSA and AT&T has been widely known for quite some time, what’s been going on inside the Long Lines Building has never been officially revealed.
During the day, the telecommunications center seems foreboding, yet harmless. There are no windows and no lights — making for an eerie scene once the sun goes down.
The structure was constructed by John Carl Warnecke, a prominent architect who had been ultimately tasked with designing a telephone exchange building for AT&T.
Dubbed “Project X,” architectural drawings and plans described it as “a skyscraper to be inhabited by machines,” which was designed to “house long lines telephone equipment and to protect it and its operating personnel in the event of atomic attack.”
The Cold War had been going on at the time — and since many feared an imminent nuclear strike on the US — the 29-floor building was fortified to withstand an atomic blast, according to the Intercept.
It was also outfitted with enough food to last 1,500 people at least two weeks, should their be a disaster — and 250,000 gallons of gasoline to fuel power generators. In the event of a power failure, the building is supposed to be able to act as a “self-contained city” for at least two weeks, the plans said.
After its construction, questions and rumors swirled for years about the enigmatic structure.
According to a New York Times article from 1994, the Long Lines Building served as AT&T’s “giant Worldwide Intelligent Network” and directed an average of 175 million phone calls each day.
The company went on the defensive when asked about the belief that they were hiding an NSA surveillance hub right under the noses of New Yorkers.
“[AT&T does not] allow any government agency to connect directly to or otherwise control our network to obtain our customers’ information,” explained Fletcher Cook, a company spokesperson.
“Rather, we simply respond to government requests for information pursuant to court orders or other mandatory process and, in rare cases, on a legal and voluntary basis when a person’s life is in danger and time is of the essence, like in a kidnapping situation.”
Mark Klein — a former AT&T technician who claimed in 2006 that the NSA had been spying on the public from a “secure room” at one of the company’s San Francisco buildings — told The Intercept that he worked at 33 Thomas Street for 9 years and “wasn’t aware of any NSA presence.”
But he said he always “had a creepy feeling about the building.”
“I knew about AT&T’s close collaboration with the Pentagon, going way back,” Klein explained, adding that he was “not surprised” by the evidence linking the building to the NSA.
“It’s obviously a major installation,” he said. “If you’re interested in doing surveillance, it’s a good place to do it.”
The Intercept investigation was ultimately a joint reporting project between the outlet and their filmmaker-driven documentary unit, Field of Vision — which is set to debut a short film this week about the Long Lines Building at the IFC Center, titled “Project X.”