Speaker 1: Okay, so imagine this for a second. You're strolling through
Lower Manhattan, right, busy streets, glass, steel, brownstones, you know,
classic New York. But then you see it something well,
something totally different. It doesn't just stand out, It almost
feels like it's pulling back from everything around. It's huge tower,
like a monolith, and the kicker, no windows at all,
just sheer concrete and granite going straight up. And at
night it's just this massive black shape absorbs all the light. Honestly,
it feels a bit spooky. Maybe you've walked past it,
gland stop, I know, I have. You just get this
feeling like what is that thing? It feels like it's
keeping secrets.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, You're definitely not alone in feeling that way.
It's often been called a twentieth century fortress. And get this,
it was originally designed to would stand a nuclear blast.
Think about that for a moment. A skyscraper built for
machines really not people function over form to the extreme.
And yeah, for decades, what really went on inside was
kept under wraps, you know, like the building itself very
sealed off until well until whistleblowers started to kind of
peel back the layers. Yeah, and the story it's fascinating, complex,
and yeah, honestly.
Speaker 1: A bit chilling, And that's exactly what we're going to
do today. We are diving deep, really deep into the
story of this building, thirty three Thomas Street. We're going
to explore its architecture, which is frankly kind of amazing
in its own weird way, and its absolutely critical role
in connecting the country back when telecommunications were just exploding.
But then, yeah, we have to get into the really
shocking claims, the allegations at this place right here in
Manhattan secretly became one of the NSA's biggest spy hubs,
supposedly monitoring communications from well pretty much everywhere.
Speaker 2: Right, And it's so much more than just a building,
isn't It's really a story about how communication itself evolved,
about the incredible, often invisible infrastructure that makes it all possible.
And you know, it forces us to ask some pretty
deep questions about privacy and power and control in this
digital world we all live in now. So, yeah, we're
going to unpack a lot today, surprising facts, incredible technology,
and some really serious implications. Get ready, because once you
know the story of thirty three Thomas Street. You might
start looking at a lot of other buildings differently.
Speaker 1: Okay, let's really picture this. You're in Trindeca, cobblestone streets,
cool offs, art galleries, you know the vibe, and then bam,
there it is thirty three Thomas Street, just this colossal
gray block. What is it like, one hundred and seventy
meters tall?
Speaker 2: About that? Yeah, twenty nine floors above ground and three
floors deep.
Speaker 1: Underground right, three floors below. But the first thing, the
thing that just hits you. No windows, I mean literally
zero windows. It's just so weird, almost intimidating, and like
I said, at night, definitely spooky. It just looms there.
Speaker 2: It really does loom and that visual impact, that darkness,
it's entirely deliberate. It's a classic example of brutalism.
Speaker 1: Brutalism. Okay, tell us about that.
Speaker 2: Well. The architect was John Carl Warnick. He was known
for bold designs. Brutalism came about after World War Two.
Orn out of this NEBU for practical affordable buildings, fast construction.
It emphasizes raw materials baton brute French for raw concrete
is where the name comes from. Stark shapes function over
everything else. It was almost a statement against fussy ornamentation.
Speaker 1: So function first got it exactly.
Speaker 2: And Warnick, even though he sometimes talked about fitting buildings
into their surroundings contextualism, this one it does the opposite.
It doesn't blend in. It dominates. It demands you look
at it. It practically screams I'm here to do a job.
It challenges what you even think a skyscraper should be.
Speaker 1: Okay, So it's not just strange looking. It's also built
like a well, a fortress. Right you mentioned with standing
a nuclear blast. I mean seriously, a building in down
on Manhattan needing that kind of protection back then? What
was going on?
Speaker 2: Oh that's the million dollar question, isn't it? And the
answer lies in its original function, which we'll get to.
But the resilience astounding the facade isn't just concrete. It's
sealed with flame treated Swedish granite, super durable stuff chosen
specifically for resistance to extreme heat, pressure, even radiation.
Speaker 1: And treated granite.
Speaker 2: Okay, And if the power grid goes down disaster scenario,
it's designed to operate completely independently off grid for two
full weeks. Ooh, backup, generators, massive ones. Yeah, and they
have almost a million liters of fuel stored underground to
power them.
Speaker 1: A million leaders. That's insane.
Speaker 2: Seriously, seriously think about that capacity, enough fuel to keep
everything running for potentially weeks. It's like a self contained world. Wow,
and goes beyond just power. They thought about people too,
even if it was built for machines. There are food
and water reserves enough for fifteen hundred people.
Speaker 1: Fifteen hundred people inside a windowless building.
Speaker 2: Right, plus its own waste water systems, sanitation, even decontamination showers,
all designed to keep occupants safe and functional, shielded from.
Speaker 1: Fallout, decontamination showers.
Speaker 2: The whole design screams impenetrable, self sufficient hub, pure cold
war thinking, you know, building infrastructure that could survive the
absolute worst case scenario. It's a physical manifestation of that
era's anxieties, building for survival, even in the heart of
the city.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: When you hear those details, food for fifteen hundred, decontamination showers,
and million liters of fuel, you realize, Okay, this is
not your average building, not even close. It's like it
has its own personality, silent, powerful, maybe a bit paranoid.
It really makes you think about what they were trying
to protect. So the big question, if it's built like
a nuclear bunker, what was it actually for? What needed
that level of protection. Back in the late sixties, we have.
Speaker 2: To remember what was happening then. The world was connecting
like crazy. Phones were becoming essential, not luxuries, and demand
for long distance calls was just skyrocketing. But the existing systems,
the analog ones, they were creaking under.
Speaker 1: The strain, right, like old switchboards and tangled wires.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pretty much you needed physical connections for everything. It
was becoming a bottleneck. There was this huge urgent need
for something faster, more efficient, something digital. Enter at and
T exactly AT and T was the giant back then,
pretty much the phone company. They had this division called
the Long Lines Department. Their job was basically to hook
up all the local phone companies into one big national
network coast to coast. As this network grew, they desperately
needed new switching centers, new data hubs to handle the
millions and millions of calls pouring through every day. And
that's where thirty three Thomas Street comes in. It was
conceived under the code name Project X.
Speaker 1: Project X sounds suitably mysterious.
Speaker 2: Doesn't it. It was meant to be this monument to
the new era, a totally modern facility designed crucially for
the machines doing the switching, not for people. Hence no windows.
Speaker 1: Okay, that makes sense now if it's for machines, who
needs a view? But machines generate tons of heat, right.
Speaker 2: A massive amount, which is why instead of windows you
have those huge ventilation lovers you can see on the
outside on floors ten and twenty nine. Powerful cooling was essential.
Speaker 1: So what kind of machines? What was the tech inside
that needed a nuclear proof Well, the few.
Speaker 2: Photos that exist show you'd expect kind of racks and
racks of electronics, rooms overflowing with telephone gear, rows of
backup batteries. But the real heart of the operation, the
revolutionary part, was three enormous switches. They were called four
ESS switches for ESS when they were installed in the
early seventies. These things were unprecedented, the biggest digital switches
ever built, and critically, they were the very first system
designed to route phone calls ye completely digitally.
Speaker 1: The first digital routing. That sounds like a big deal.
Speaker 2: It was monumental, a total game changer for telecommunications. It
was the beginning of the digital communication age we take
for granted.
Speaker 1: Now, Okay, so break it down for us. How did
it work. Let's say I'm in New York in like
nineteen seventy five calling my aunt in California. What happens, right, So.
Speaker 2: You pick up your phone, dial the number your local
exchange sends the call information out. Your voice gets digitized,
turned into computer code essentially, and routed to a hub
like thirty three Thomas Street. Inside your digitized call hits
one of those massive four ESS switches. And these weren't
just dumb switches. They were intelligent. They'd instantly analyze the
network traffic across the country and figure out the absolute best,
fastest path to send your call data to California. No
more crackly analog lines tied up.
Speaker 1: Okay, so it finds the best route digitally than.
Speaker 2: What Then your call data, that stream of ones and
zeros would likely jump across the country via microwave relay towers.
Speaker 1: Ah. Those towers are used to see everywhere.
Speaker 2: Exactly, spaced about thirty miles apart, forming this invisible highway
in the sky. Your call would hop from tower to
tower hundreds or thousands of miles until it reached another
hub in California, probably with another four ess switch. That
switch would convert the signal back, so your ant's phone would.
Speaker 1: Ring and it would sound much clearer.
Speaker 2: Presumably significantly clearer and faster to connect. Now, eventually fiber
optic cables take over from many of the microwave towers,
offering way more capacity, but those central switching hubs still
absolutely essential, and the vultvolume just kept growing. By the nineties,
thirty three Thomas Street was handling something like one hundred
and seventy five million calls a day.
Speaker 1: One hundred and seventy five million a day. Wow, it
really was. The nerve center absolutely.
Speaker 2: A critical piece of national infrastructure.
Speaker 1: Which means it had to be secure, reliable, no room
for error, right with millions depending on it, and I
guess its importance was really driven home on September seventeenth,
nineteen ninety one.
Speaker 2: That sounds ominous, Yeah, that day was a real wake
up call. It really showed what happens when that nerve
center fails. What happened in the middle of the night
there was a major power failure inside thirty three Thomas Street.
And despite all that planning. All the redundancy, a mix
of technical issues and frankly human era, meant the backup
generators didn't start up properly.
Speaker 1: Oh no, So the whole place went dark pretty much.
Speaker 2: And the immediate result, half the phone traffic in and
out of New York City just stopped dead.
Speaker 1: Half the city's calls. Yeiit yeis.
Speaker 2: And it wasn't just people chatting. Air traffic control systems
at JFK, Laguardi and Newark Airports went down simultaneously.
Speaker 1: Wait, the airport control towers lost communication.
Speaker 2: They did. It caused absolute chaos. Flights were delayed for hours,
up to four hours in some cases, right across the Northeast.
Emergency services were impacted. Businesses couldn't function. Over five million
calls were blocked that day. Communication to almost four hundred
airports nationwide was disrupted. It was a massive failure.
Speaker 1: Wow, so even the Fortress wasn't fear approof exactly.
Speaker 2: It proved just how vital that single building was and
maybe how fragile our reliance on that technology had become.
It underscored its critical role in a really dramatic, painful way.
Speaker 1: Okay, so fast forward about a decade nine to eleven happens,
and everything changes, right, the whole focus shifts to counter
terrorism national security.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it was a watershed moment. In response, the US
government really doubled down on preventing future attacks, and almost
immediately within days, Congress passed the Patriot Act. This gave
intelligence agencies, especially the NSA, really broad new powers powers
to expand surveillance, collect more data, all in the name
of security.
Speaker 1: And this is where the story of thirty three Thomas
Street takes that darker turn, right, from connecting calls to
potentially listening in.
Speaker 2: That's the allegation. Yes, and if you think about it,
the NSA's main job is foreign intelligence. But to do
that effectively, especially after nine to eleven, they needed cooperation.
They needed access to the infrastructure where communications flowed, and
that line between foreign targets and domestic communication it started
getting really really blurry. The Patriot Act kind of enabled
that blurriness.
Speaker 1: So how did this connection, this alleged shift, first start
coming to light.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the first key moments involves a guy
named Mark Klein. Back in two thousand and three, he
was an AT and T technician working in their San
Francisco office and insider right, and he noticed something weird.
A door, just a plane door, no handles, only a
label six forty one.
Speaker 1: A, room six forty one AA.
Speaker 2: It was located right below a big server room handling
tons of Internet for millions of people. Klein got curious,
maybe a little suspicious now with two so he did
some digging, looked at building plans, saw unusual equipment being installed,
and he slowly figured it out.
Speaker 1: What did he figure out?
Speaker 2: He found out that room six forty one A contained
something called a splitter, basically devites that makes an exact
copy of all the Internet data flowing past it.
Speaker 1: So emails, websites, calls over the Internet.
Speaker 2: Everything, everything all duplicated silently and piped into this secret room.
He realized this was massive, but you know, he was scared.
He kept quiet for a couple.
Speaker 1: Of years, understandable.
Speaker 2: But then in two thousand and five, the story broke
about President Bush authorizing warrantless wiretapping by the NSA. That's
when Klein decided he had to speak up. He went public,
followed a lawsuit against AT and T. Now, ultimately Congress
stepped in, changed the law retroactively and gave AT and
T immunity.
Speaker 1: So the lawsuit didn't go far legally, no.
Speaker 2: But Klein's actions were huge. He exposed Room six forty
one A and crucially at and t's co operation with
government surveillance. It really set the stage.
Speaker 1: Wow, so one technician's curiosity cracks open this secret. But
that was just the beginning, wasn't it. Klein was like
the first tremor before the earthquake.
Speaker 2: A really good way to put it. The earth cope,
of course, was Edward Snowden in twenty thirty.
Speaker 1: Noden right, the NSA analysts who leaked thousands and thousands
of classified documents.
Speaker 2: An unprecedented leak. He flew to Hong Kong, met with
journalists and started revealing the sheer scale of NSA surveillance.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't just about US citizens anymore, was it.
Speaker 2: Not even close. That was the truly shocking part revealed
by the Snowden files. The NSA was spying on well
pretty much everyone, Allied governments, politicians, world leaders. Remember the
outcry when Germany found out Angela Merkel's phone was monitor.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, that was huge, diplomatic fallout.
Speaker 2: Huge, It sparked a global scandal, and it kicked out
this massive effort by journalists around the world to sift
through all those leaked documents, understand the programs, the code names,
piece it all together.
Speaker 1: Which leads us back to thirty three Thomas Street. Right.
How did the Snowden files connected that specific building.
Speaker 2: It took a few years until twenty sixteen reporters at
the Intercept, who are meticulously analyzing the Snowden cash, started
noticing recurring code names. There was Blarney, a program intercepting
foreign communications Fairview, which documents described as a partnership with
a major US telecom company. Okay, but then there was
Titan Point. The documents specifically identified Titan Point as a
secret NSA surveillance site located right in New York City.
Speaker 3: Titan Point in New York getting warmer exactly, So, the
Intercept dug deeper into the files related to Titan Point
and they found mentions of specialized equipment there, specifically foreign
gateway switches with Rimrock access.
Speaker 1: Rimrock access that was the key.
Speaker 2: Through more digging, they discovered Rimrock was the internal NSA
code name for those very same four YSS switches, the
big digital foam switches at the heart of thirty three
Thomas Street.
Speaker 1: No way, the same switches.
Speaker 2: The very same, and there was more. The files named
the part company supervising Titan Point as Lithium and who
was Lysium. Earlier reporting based on the snowed and docks
had already identified lithium as the code name for AT
and T.
Speaker 1: AT and T of course the company that built and
ran the building precisely.
Speaker 2: So you connect the dots location New York City Technology
Rimrock for ESS switches partner Lithium, AT and T. The
intercept concluded Titan Point was thirty three Thomas Strait It
was the code name for the NSA surveillance operation inside
that building.
Speaker 1: That's incredible investigative work connecting all those code names, and
it gets even wilder, right. There was like a travel
guide for NSA agents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that was another detail that came out of the leaks,
a kind of handbook for agents visiting sites like Titan Point.
They told them things like, prepare cover stories for your visit,
even for your colleagues, use specific unmarked cover vehicles.
Speaker 1: Don't draw attention standard spy stuff, I guess pretty much.
Speaker 2: And it even mentioned almost casually that security for the
site was handled by the FBI, whose New York Field
office is conveniently located right next door to thirty three
Thomas Street.
Speaker 1: Right next door. You can't make this stuff up. You
just ring the buzzer.
Speaker 2: Apparently it seems like it. But okay, the big question,
what were they supposedly doing inside Titan Point? What kind
of spying? Yeah?
Speaker 1: What was the tech?
Speaker 2: Well, according to the intercepts analysis of the files, there's
likely another hidden room inside thirty three Thomas Street, much
like Klein's Room six forty one, a SCIF sensitive compartmented
information facility CURE room, highly secure where the NSA could
basically tap into the communications flowing through the building. And
it wasn't just the phone calls going through the for ess,
which is remember the roof those big satellite dishes.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you mentioned eighteen and t has a license for
satellite stuff there.
Speaker 2: Right, the only place in NYC they do. Those dishes
are believed to be part of another NSA program code
named Skidrow. Skidrow is designed to intercept communications like Internet
data video calls VoIP as it travels between satellites having
signals out of the sky.
Speaker 1: So they're getting phone calls through the switches and satellite
data through the dishes covering all bases.
Speaker 2: That seems to be the idea, intercepting vast amounts of data,
both domestic and international, passing through that crucial.
Speaker 1: Hub, and all that data they collect, where does it go?
What do they do with it?
Speaker 2: It's allegedly channeled through an EIGHTE and T controlled interface
within the building and then sent directly to NSA headquarters
at Fort Meade and Maryland. And once it's there, NSA
analysts can access it using a really powerful search tool
called x keyscore.
Speaker 1: X key score sounds ominous too.
Speaker 2: It's been described as the NSA's version of Google, but
for surveillance data, a Google for spies.
Speaker 1: What can it do?
Speaker 2: Apparently it allows analysts to search through enormous databases of
collected communications metadata and content. They could potentially put in
an email address, a phone number, even just keywords, and
search across everything collected from sites like Titan Point and
other sensors worldwide.
Speaker 1: So they could potentially pull up someone's entire digital history, emails, chats, browsing.
Speaker 2: That's the capability described in the documents. Yes, accessing emails, chats, browsing, history,
social media activity potentially a huge amount of personal data.
It's a pretty staggering vision of surveillance power.
Speaker 1: And AT and T was okay with this helping them.
Speaker 2: The leaked documents suggest more than just okay. Some internal
NSA memos actually praised AT and T for its extreme
willingness to assist the agency's operations.
Speaker 1: Extreme willingness. Wow.
Speaker 2: There was even a specific instance revealed where back in
two thousand and three, a secret court order reportedly allowed
AT and T to help the NSA tap all Internet
communications coming from the United Nations Headquarters, which is also
in New York.
Speaker 1: A UN headquarters.
Speaker 2: Seriously, that's what the reporting, based on the documents indicated,
And to this day, AT and T hasn't confirmed or
denied any of us publicly. They've maintained complete silence about
Titan Point and their alleged role.
Speaker 1: Just silence. And is thirty three Thomas Street the only
place like this?
Speaker 2: Probably not? That same twenty eighteen intercept report suggested there
could be at least eight other AT and T facilities
across the US Chicago, La, San Francisco, DC, Seattle that
might be operating as similar surveillance sights for the NSA.
Speaker 1: Eight other buildings do they look similar often.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's one of the striking things. Many of them
share that same kind of windowless fortress like brutalist architecture,
buildings designed for machines, not people, machines processing and potentially
collecting the data of millions. It suggests a whole hidden
network embedded within our national communication infrastructure hashtag tag tag nowtrack.
Speaker 1: So, wrapping this up, we've really gone down the rabbit
hole with thirty three Thomas Street. It started life as
this marvel of engineering, right the long lines building connecting
the world.
Speaker 2: A symbol of progress connection.
Speaker 1: But then the story shifts. It allegedly becomes Titan Point,
this silent, windowless giant in Manhattan secretly helping a global
surveillance system collect unimaginable amounts of data.
Speaker 2: This is just stark paradox, isn't it. A building designed
to facilitate communication potentially being used to intercept that very
same communication on a massive scale. It really highlights that
tension between technologies promise security demands and our fundamental right
to privacy. It's a difficult balance.
Speaker 1: It really is, And you know, it just makes you
wonder how many other buildings like this are out there,
standing right in front of us, hiding their true purpose
in plain sight.
Speaker 2: That's the lingering question, isn't it. As our world gets
more and more connected, as literally everything we do creates
data that flows through these hidden channels, who really controls
that flow, who gets to look at it? And what
does that mean for us? For our freedom, for our future?
What other secrets are built into the concrete and steel
of our cities. Maybe next time you walk past a
strange windowless building, you'll pause and wonder what's really going
on inside.
Speaker 1: Definitely something to think about. Thanks for joining us on
this step dive. Until next time, Keep digging, keep questioning,
and stay curious.