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This video is about bricks.
Bricks come in all shapes and sizes and each of these has its own name.
In the field of commercial architecture, a common choice is the Norman.
The long, slender shape of this incorporates elegantly into modern architecture, while
still maintaining its cost-effectiveness for large-scale projects.
The brick with the best name of all, though, is a variant of the Norman—it’s called
the Slim Jumbo Norman.
With its unique long yet shallow sha… ok, that should be enough brick talk to get the
feds of of my trail.
There’s no way they’d sit through all of that.
You see, the topic of this video, the real reason this skyscraper in Manhattan doesn’t
have any windows, is a highly classified government secret—a secret we only know because of
leaked NSA documents and investigative reporting.
The skyscraper in question is known by two names: some call it The Long Lines Building,
which is also what I call Newark airport, while others call it simply 33 Thomas Street.
Now, I’m not going to reveal its exact address so no, “Florida Man Raids NSA Building After
Watching Confusing, Unfunny YouTube Video,” headline ends up in the paper soon, but the
building is in the Tribeca area of New York.
It stands 550 feet or 170 meters tall, has 29 stories and, just like Apple’s headquarters
or a coffee shop in Brooklyn, has no windows at all.
Until recently, not much was known about the building.
The only real publicly available information was that it was built between 1969 and 1974
by AT&T, designed by an architect named John Carl Warnecke, and that it served as a telephone
switchboard hub, mainly routing AT&T’s long-distance phone calls.
It’s easy to forget now that everyone has a cell phone that they protect as if it’s
their own child, but phones used to all be connected by physical cables—and landlines
still are.
For the whole system to work, the cables all have to connect to each other, and 33 Thomas
Street is one of the places where that connection happens.
33 Thomas Street’s job is to change which cable is connected to which based on who is
trying to call who.
There used to be actual people who did this called telephone operators who would actually
answer your call, ask who you wanted to talk to, and then switch the cable by hand, but
after a while, we figured out that not only did everybody hate talking to strangers on
the phone, but also that that system was incredibly inefficient, and so the telephone operators
were replaced with machines, just like we all will be in 50 years.
I mean, once bots learn to read Wikipedia pages quickly, use outdated memes, and write
bad puns, it’s over for me.
These phone switching machines require intense security and they have to run no matter what—after
all, if the machines stop working, the phones stop working.
Even in a disaster scenario, the machines need to stay operational—the only thing
worse than an hurricane is a sharkicane, but the only other thing worse than a hurricane
is an hurricane that knocks out the phone lines, so people can’t communicate and get
help.
That everything-proofness was the public justification for the lack of windows at 33 Thomas Street—the
architect claimed he was told that he needed to design a building that could survive a
nuclear blast and still keep the phones working.
The only way to do that was to build it without windows, so that’s what they did.
But recent reporting suggests that’s convenient for another reason.
According to reporting from The Intercept, 33 Thomas Street is much more than just an
AT&T phone switching hub.
With more efficient modern equipment, AT&T had some empty floors so they were kind enough
to lease these out… to the NSA.
It’s here where there’s an NSA surveillance site, used to tap into and monitor phone calls,
faxes, satellite transmissions, and internet data.
In 2013, an NSA subcontractor named Edward Snowden released a massive trove of classified
documents revealing that the US had secretly been running several global surveillance programs.
Believe it or not, back in 2013, the fact that the government was doing a bunch of sketchy,
illegal surveillance was considered surprising news.
Among the leaked documents there was frequent mention of a mysterious surveillance site
called TITANPOINTE, but its location was so classified that even Snowden didn’t have
access to it.
In 2016, though, journalists were able to piece together a series of different clues
in Snowden’s documents, combine it with their own reporting, and prove that 33 Thomas
Street is, in fact, the mysterious TITANPOINTE.
Here’s how: One document disclosed that TITANPOINTE was in New York City.
Another said that the site was supervised by LITHIUM—which we know is the NSA’s
codename for AT&T.
Yet another said part of TITANPOINTE’s surveillance work was intercepting satellite communications
and there’s only one place in New York City, run by AT&T, that has satellite ground stations—33
Thomas Street.
You can even see its satellite dishes in the satellite imagery of its roof.
There was other evidence too—for example, one document said that to get to TITANPOINTE,
you should first head to the FBI’s New York office, which is only a block away from 33
Thomas Street.
Plus, another document said that TITANPOINTE had several pieces of equipment that AT&T
employees have confirmed are used at 33 Thomas Street, and of course, the final piece of
evidence was that 33 Thomas Street is a freaking skyscraper that doesn’t have any windows,
which is about as suspicious as a sign that says, “NORMAL BUILDING, NOT A SPY CENTER
AT ALL JUST A TOTALLY NORMAL BUILDING, NOTHING TO SEE HERE.”
Of course, if you want to build a massive, global surveillance network, you’re going
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Computer Science is, of course, a daunting field and a lot of places will teach you individual
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Brilliant’s interactive computers science courses are just some of their many fantastic
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