Affascinante lettura su questo edificio, in Manhattan, senza finestre, concepito per essere abitato da macchine e cavi e resistere ad un attacco atomico. Sarebbe la sede, tra il resto, delle apparecchiature di sorveglianza di NSA del programma BLARNEY che mira anche all'Italia. <https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-p...> [] Inside 33 Thomas Street there is a major international “gateway switch,” according to a former AT&T engineer, which routes phone calls between the United States and countries across the world. A series of top-secret NSA memos suggest that the agency has tapped into these calls from a secure facility within the AT&T building. The Manhattan skyscraper appears to be a core location used for a controversial NSA surveillance program that has targeted the communications of the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and at least 38 countries, including close U.S. allies such as Germany, Japan, and France. It has long been known that AT&T has cooperated with the NSA on surveillance, but few details have emerged about the role of specific facilities in carrying out the top-secret programs. The Snowden documents provide new information about how NSA equipment has been integrated as part of AT&T’s network in New York City, revealing in unprecedented detail the methods and technology the agency uses to vacuum up communications from the company’s systems. “This is yet more proof that our communications service providers have become, whether willingly or unwillingly, an arm of the surveillance state,” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “The NSA is presumably operating under authorities that enable it to target foreigners, but the fact that it is so deeply embedded in our domestic communications infrastructure should tip people off that the effects of this kind of surveillance cannot be neatly limited to non-Americans.” [] Through this tumultuous time for American spies, the NSA established a new surveillance program under the code name BLARNEY, which was first exposed in a Snowden-leaked slide published in 2013. According to a previously unpublished document provided to The Intercept by Snowden, BLARNEY was established in the early 1970s and, in mid-2013, remained one of the agency’s most significant initiatives. BLARNEY leverages “commercial partnerships” in order to “gain access and exploit foreign intelligence obtained from global networks,” the document states <https://theintercept.com/document/2016/11/16/blarney-program-overview>. It carries out “full take” surveillance — a term that refers to the bulk collection of both content and metadata — under six different categories: counterproliferation, counterterrorism, diplomatic, economic, military, and political. As of July 2010, the NSA had obtained at least 40 court orders <https://theintercept.com/document/2016/11/16/special-source-operations-corpo...> for spying under the BLARNEY program, allowing the agency to monitor communications related to multiple countries, companies, and international organizations. Among the approved targets were the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of Japan, the European Union, the United Nations, and at least 38 different countries, including U.S. allies such as Italy, Japan, Brazil, France, Germany, Greece, Mexico, and Cyprus. [] Notably, TITANPOINTE has played a central role in BLARNEY’s operations. NSA documents dated between 2012 and 2013 list the TITANPOINTE surveillance facility among three of BLARNEY’s “core sites” and describe it as “BLARNEY’S site in NYC.” Equipment hosted at TITANPOINTE has been used to monitor international long-distance phone calls, faxes, voice calls routed over the internet (known as Voice-Over-IP), video conferencing, and other internet traffic. Questo commento aggiunge qualche collegamento e mette in evidenza l'operazione di ingegneria legale attraverso la quale verrebbero sorvegliati gli americani non residenti in US abbassando il loro livello di tutela. <https://www.emptywheel.net/2016/11/16/nsa-conducts-704705b-collection-using-...> ciao, Alberto