Room 641A: full declaration transcription

In San Francisco the secret room is Room 641A at 611 Folsom Street, the site of a large SBC phone building, three floors of which are occupied by AT&T. High speed fiber optic circuits come in on the 8th floor and run down to the 7th floor where they connect to routers for AT&T’s WorldNet service, part of the latter’s vital Common Backbone. In order to snoop on these circuits, a special cabinet was installed and cabled to the secret room on the 6th floor to monitor the information going through the circuits.

The secret room itself is roughly 24-by-48 feet, containing perhaps a dozen cabinets including such equipment as Sun servers and two Juniper routers, plus an assortment of other equipment.

These splitters didn’t filter international from domestic traffic. Everything, from local ISP customers to global backbone users, was being copied. The data flowed into hardware capable of deep packet inspection and real-time monitoring.

The NSA is getting everything. These are major pipes that carry not just AT&T’s customer traffic but everybody’s.

Klein used several internal AT&T documents to support his account, including a December 10, 2002 document titled Study Group 3, LGX/Splitter Wiring, San Francisco, which led him to conclude that signals from optical fibers carrying internet traffic were being split and sent into Room 641A. The location code of the monitoring cabinet is recorded as 070177.04, denoting the 7th floor, aisle 177, bay 04.