Room 641A

By Captain KRB (Sierra)

Hey Everybody

It’s the last episode of the season! As such, I don’t think a segue is fully needed. Instead, I’ll simply ask: did you know that the United States is currently under a state of emergency? Okay, I’m being slightly dishonest. We’re actually under around 40, at the present moment.[1] The oldest was signed into effect by Jimmy Carter with the issuance of Executive Order 12170 all the way back in 1979[2] and over the subsequent decades states of emergency have simply been put into effect faster than they’ve been formally called off. Each currently in effect represents a (theoretically temporary) expansion of federal capability, and each manifests this expansion in its own unique way, but of particular value to our story tonight is one Proclamation 7463, issued by then-president George W. Bush on September the 14th, 2001[3]. Although not widely known at the time, this declaration was the first of several steps which ground into frightening motion a soon-unstoppable series of legislative shifts that were, in a sense, the first real federal actions to harness and leverage the wild, untamed power of the information age. Over the following years a shadowed leviathan emboldened by nearly unbounded executive power would rouse far beneath the waking eyes of the American populace and would in time come to work its writhing tendrils into nearly all sectors of public life, unseen in its grotesque enormity. And beneath notice it would remain until, one day in early 2003, it was discovered, unassuming and unobtrusive, on the 6th floor of the AT&T building at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco, behind a door labeled 641A.

Mark L. Klein was born into a Brooklyn, NY family on May 2nd, 1945, just 6 days before silence fell on the European front of the Second World War. Klein pursued a bachelor’s in history at Cornell University and graduated 1966 before attending technical school and finding employment in computer manufacturing throughout the 1960s and 70s.[4] He participated in protest marches against the War in Vietnam and witnessed the revelation of a widespread domestic espionage campaign under the Nixon administration in the late 1970s.[5] Klein had lived through close to 40 years of American political turmoil before discovering what would be his lifetime career in November of 1981, when he secured a position as a Communications Technician working for the AT&T Corporation on the cusp of the Bell System divestiture. The pace of these revelations would not slow at any point during his 22-year tenure with the company, as he was transferred from NYC to White Plains in 1990, to Pleasanton, CA in 1991, Point Reyes in 1993 and finally to AT&T’s Geary Street facility in San Francisco in January of 1998.[6] It was during his time at this particular location that an event would occur which, to Klein at least, eclipsed all that preceded it in the scale of its impact.

It’s impossible to overstate the degree to which the attacks of September 11th 2001 fundamentally altered the United States. There was really nothing in living memory at the time which could compare. In a sense, the events leading up to that day and the immediate, cataclysmic backlash are a Rosetta Stone to understanding much of the next 25 years of American politics. I could go on for this entire video and ten more on this topic alone, but of import to the matter at hand is the federal government’s sweeping legislative response. Spearheaded by the Bush Administration, which for that brief period saw its approval rating skyrocket from a middling +12 net to a historic +84,[7] the American political apparatus issued a broadside of legislation which utterly obliterated any extant limitations on its own power, in the name, of course, of fighting terrorism both abroad and at home. The following days, months and years saw the declaration of two states of emergency,[3][8] the initiation of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program,[9] the formation of the Department of Homeland Security,[10] and of course, the crown jewel of post-9/11 legislation, (this name is so fucking stupid) the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001.[11] As a collective these various acts essentially gave the federal government free reign to act and acquire information with impunity on all matters pertaining to counter-terrorism and national security, a set of definitions which would prove remarkably flexible in the coming years.

Mark Klein, at this point in his late 50s, was working as a Computer Network Associate in a San Francisco AT&T office when these changes took effect.[6] Klein was aware of the upheavals in Washington but remained physically disconnected from them until, one summer day in 2002, he received an email. A manager at the San Francisco office had issued a notice that a representative from the National Security Agency would be stopping by to conduct some unspecified business. This struck Klein as strange; he would recall, in recounting the event, the passing of the FISA Act of 1978, enacted in the aftermath of the Nixon-era domestic surveillance scandal, which mandated federal law enforcement to obtain explicit authorization before conducting intelligence gathering on domestic soil.[12] Nevertheless, Klein directed the apparently highly subdued representative, when he did arrive, to the appropriate figures and, as the days wore on, thought increasingly little of it.[5]

However, in the fall of that year, rumors began to circulate. Whispers began to slip through the brickwork of Klein’s Geary Street workplace that the man in black had not vanished after his brief exchange with Klein’s supervisor, and that he was in fact keeping in close contact with a project being undertaken at the nearby Folsom Street location, an AT&T phone line and Internet hub facility. A low level of anxiety concerning this nondescript project simmered around the office, and for good reason; the news at this precise point in ‘02 was awash with stories of DARPA’s Total Information Awareness program, an initiative led by one Admiral John M. Poindexter to collate vast swaths of government data into a massive standardized database, documenting, in neat, query-ready form, the lives of each and every individual currently living on US soil.[13] To Klein and his colleagues, a line between the program, or another like it, and the happenings at the Folsom Street office seemed all too easy to draw. And it was around this time that Klein first heard word of a strange room being built on the 6th floor of the compound.[5]

Things escalated in January 2003 when Klein and 3 technician colleagues were invited to Folsom Street to take a tour of the location in preparation for being transferred. And it was on this tour that Klein caught his first glimpse of the mysterious room the NSA agent had frequented. The 24 by 48[14] room was nothing noteworthy from the outside, and any contents of note were hidden behind a nondescript, single-wide orange door labeled plainly with the room’s number, 641A. This visit only piqued Kleins curiosity; Room 641A, he would soon find out, was off-limits to all technicians employed in the building, in direct violation of union rules, accessible only to a single management field specialist with security clearance. The room was also, strangely, built adjacent to Folsom Street’s primary phone switch room, through which thousands of calls were routed daily. But it wouldn’t be until October of 2003, when Klein was officially relocated to the new office, that the nature of Room 641A would become apparent.[5]

Klein was subject to oversight from a long-time employee of Folsom Street, whom he would soon be replacing, for his first two months as a technician in the 7th floor Internet relay room, which handled large chunks of traffic over AT&T’s WorldNet service.[6] Out of curiosity, during one of their long collaborative shifts, Klein broached the topic of the bizarre room on the floor beneath them; “Well, it seems to me,” Klein remarked, “that the secret room is right next to the phone switch room, so I assume they’re listening to phone calls.” Instantly, the senior technician had a response: “No,” he said, “Internet. [Here,] I’ll show you.” Klein was lead past row upon row of humming networking equipment until he arrived at a seemingly innocuous cabinet, wired into the room’s fiber optic lines and containing a piece of technology very strange indeed: an optical splitter, designed to duplicate incoming optical data and send the copy elsewhere without damaging the original signal. And the copies, in this case, were taking a on way superhighway trip directly down into the inscrutable depths of 641A.[5]

This was, in technical terms, really scary, when considered in conjunction with the services Folsom Street provided. WorldNet was the primary service offered by AT&T at that point in time in its capacity as an ISP,[15] and Folsom Street just so happened to be a link along WorldNet’s Common Backbone, through which essentially all the service’s traffic flowed at one point or another. Not only this, but the facility also contained peering links which allowed intercommunication between AT&T’s network and the networks of other Tier 1 ISPs, passing through massive load-bearing Internet exchange points like MAE-West and permitting traffic from period networks like Qwest to flow through Folsom Street as well if needed.[6] In other words, whatever was down there in 641A, it was getting everything.

By this point, Klein had begun searching for hard evidence to substantiate his suspicions. He dug up internal documents dating to the end of 2002 and the beginning of 2003 which described procedures for technicians to install the splitter cabinets, protocols for cutting into 16 of Folsom Street’s peering links and routing their traffic through the splitters to 641A, which the documents plainly referred to as the ‘Study Group 3 Secure Room.’ To Klein, the smoking gun, if one was to exist, came in the form of an equipment registry for the SG3 Secure Room dated back to December of 2002. The document, which itemized the networking machinery contained within 641A, featured the strange inclusion, on its 16th line, of a device called a Narus STA 6400. Klein, by that point a 2-decade networking veteran, had never come across the device or its manufacturer, raising a red flag which was immediately set alight when he discovered the device to be an Internet traffic analysis engine developed by a big data analytics firm which specialized in intelligence gathering.[6] To sum up, inside Room 641A was a spy machine overseen by an NSA agent with direct, unfiltered access to the lion’s share of American internet traffic circa late 2003. Based upon references to other sites present in the internal documents as well as conversations with involved technicians, Klein additionally came to suspect that rooms similar to 641A were present across the continental US.[5] Astute viewers amongst you may have identified this as a bit of a problem, as did Klein. Taking photocopies of the relevant papers, Klein retired from his position at AT&T in May 2004[4] and, following the publication of a New York Times piece in December 2005 on recently-discovered domestic wiretapping and the Bush admins aggressive response,[16] he felt the time had come and brought his story to the Electronic Frontier Foundation in the hopes of bringing unprecedented litigation to bear against the federal government. In January of 2006, the EFF officially filed what would become Hepting v. AT&T.[17]

From here, things moved very quickly. Hepting was introduced January 31st and, it should be noted, was at this point filed only against the AT&T Corporation, not the NSA. In the suit the EFF alleged that AT&T’s conduct was in direct violation of FISA, the gospel for domestic surveillance legislation, and sought an injunction against the telecom giant requiring them to compensate each and every customer that may have been harmed by the Study Group 3 operations.[6] On April 28th AT&T moved to dismiss the case and, perhaps unsurprisingly, on May 13th the United States Government moved to intervene as a defendant, essentially entering the case aligned with AT&T, similarly moving to dismiss the case entirely.[18] The Justice Department attempted to invoke state secrets privilege, a precedent dating back to 1876 that allows the federal government to outright block the presentation of evidence if said evidence would lead to the revelation of government secrets,[19] which in this particular case would obstruct the viewing of Klein’s documents and testimony. On July 20th, however, California District Court Judge Vaughn Walker denied both AT&T and the United States their motions to dismiss, ruling that a company could not assert immunity, and the case continued.[18] Escalating, the defendants appealed the case to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals by 2007 and were approved. By this point media outlets including the Seattle Times[20] and the Wall Street Journal[21] had begun to report on the case, and the jury first began to hear argument in August.[22] Then, in July of 2008, it all stopped. In August the Ninth Circuit Court remanded the case back to the California District Court, the United States moved to dismiss in September, and, on June 3rd of 2009, the District Court granted this motion, judging in favor of AT&T Corporation and the United States of America.[23] What the fuck happened?

Well, as it would turn out, while Hepting v. AT&T was making its way through the court system, a resolution numbered 6304 was introduced on the House floor by Texas Representative Silvestre Reyes, which soared through the House and Senate and onto the desk of the president, being signed promptly into law on July 10th of 2008 as the FISA Amendments Act of 2008. The Act granted, alongside other broad privileges, sweeping retroactive immunity for commercial entities like AT&T from investigation and prosecution.[24] The original FISA Act of 1978, which Klein had seen introduced in direct response to the premiere wiretapping scandal of the 20th century, in an instant saw any teeth it might have had blunted beyond use in service to the perpetuation of a new century’s surveillance monolith. It was in recognition of this development that the case, along with all hopes which may have been riding on it, was dropped without ceremony. The involvement of foul play was painfully, blindingly obvious; a 10,000-ton elephant wedged into a tiny AT&T server room. But how can you litigate something that’s been retroactively made legal?

Now, of course, the fight did not end here. The EFF remained a staunch supporter of cases which followed in Hepting’s footsteps as did Klein until his death just this year at the age of 79.[4] And there have, to be fair, been sporadic breaks in the greater case, like the Snowden leaks in 2013,[25] but by and large the trend has been one of steady growth for the programs and operations born in the sultry, primordial dawning hours of the digital millennium. Total Information Awareness and the Terrorist Surveillance Program became PRISM and everything else made legal under Section 702 of the 2008 FISA Act, and these programs undoubtedly continue not just to operate but to flourish to this very day. And the thing about it is, stuff like this isn’t perpetuated through negligence. This type of legislation is required to be regularly extended and renewed and expanded over the years and, with very few exceptions, it is. That Bush-era state of emergency from September 14th ’01 was ordered to continue by Bush,[26] Obama,[27] Trump,[28] Biden,[29] Trump again;[30] the RISAA Act of 2024 not only renewed the 2008 FISA Act but expanded its scope even further.[31] In the time since Mark Klein broke the 641A story, there have been brief, incendiary moments where the curtain was ripped aside for a fleeting instant, but there exists no doubt in my mind that the apparatus of surveillance has only grown more encompassing, the leviathan sunk deeper and yet ever more pervasive. Will there arrive with the oncoming future a day when this is no longer the case? I sure as hell hope so, but until such a day arrives, stay safe out there.

And, for the last time in this season we started back in 2023, thanks for watching.