US Government Internet Surveillance
Surely, this doesn’t happen, I mean people monitoring ordinary peoples web browsing in the USA. Well if you don’t believe me I’d like to tell you briefly about a room, and not just an ordinary room – this room has sparked a scandal.
I’ll tell you briefly about it just in case you’ve never heard of this infamous room.. It has quite an unremarkable name, it’s simply called room 641A and is probably the most famous room in San Francisco for many people. The room sits in a building owned by AT&T, which was primarily an internet switching centre. This centre is an important part of the internet backbone and a huge amount of internet traffic flows through the network infrastructure housed here.
Here we should now introduce a Mr Mark Klein who had been a technician for AT&T for some time.. As the room 641A was set up and Mark slowly realised what he had seen, he also obtained documents detailing this facility. Mark Klein passed this documentation to both the press and the Electronic Frontier Foundation..
So what did he witness, why was room 641A so secret.? Well I’ll tell you it was set up by the NSA (National Security Agency) and the entire internet feed that passed through this facility was split and a copy sent to this room. We are talking huge amounts of data, your web traffic and mine, from all over the world. In this room there existed the equipment to analyse and intercept.
This was all our traffic, from internet users across the planet.. That is all our traffic, not just suspects but ordinary internet citizens of the world. How did they filter, what did they do with this traffic – who knows?
What is likely that all across the US and in fact the world there are many, many room 641As. If you think you have some anonymity on the internet, I’d think again.
If you’d like more information on the who, how or why of anonymity online, take a look here – Surfing Anonymous Online
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