Look Inside the WINDOWLESS New York Skyscraper Linked to NSA NAMED TITANPOINTE. NO WINDOWS. They don't want ANYONE looking in there. "They called it Project X. It was an unusually audacious, highly sensitive assignment: to build a massive skyscraper, capable of withstanding an atomic blast, in the MIDDLE of New York City. It would have NO WINDOWS, 29 floors with three basement levels, and ENOUGH FOOD to last 1,500 people TWO WEEKS in the event of a catastrophe For many New Yorkers, 33 Thomas Street — known as the “Long Lines Building” — has been a SOURCE OF MYSTERY for years. It has been labeled one of the city’s WEIRDEST and most iconic skyscrapers, but little information has ever been published about its purpose. It is not uncommon to keep the public in the dark about a site containing vital telecommunications equipment. But 33 Thomas Street is different: An investigation by The Intercept indicates that the skyscraper is more than a mere nerve center for long-distance phone calls. It also appears to be one of the most important NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY surveillance sites on U.S. soil — a covert monitoring hub that is used to tap into phone calls, faxes, and internet data. Documents obtained by The Intercept from the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden do not explicitly name 33 Thomas Street as a surveillance facility. However — taken together with architectural plans, public records, and interviews with former AT&T employees conducted for this article — they provide compelling evidence that 33 Thomas Street has served as an NSA surveillance site, code-named TITANPOINTE. 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." https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-york-hidden-in-plain-sight/ THIS ARTICLE HAS SOME PHOTOS Since publishing a story about an apparent National Security Agency surveillance site in New York, The Intercept has obtained several previously unseen photographs from within the building, offering a rare glimpse behind its thick concrete and granite walls. On Wednesday, we reported that top-secret documents indicate there is an NSA SPY HUB inside the massive, windowless skyscraper at 33 Thomas Street, used by AT&T to route communications across the world. The 550-foot tower contains equipment that covertly monitors phone calls, faxes, and internet data, according to the documents. But with the exception of employees who have worked at the building, few people have ever been allowed inside the iconic brutalist structure, which was built to withstand a nuclear attack amid the Cold War. Stanley Greenberg, a 60-year-old artist based in Brooklyn, shared a series of photographs he took in September 1992 while visiting 33 Thomas Street. Back then, before the 9/11 attacks, security was not as tight. At the time, Greenberg was carrying out research for a book, “Invisible New York,” and AT&T granted him access. The photographs never made it into the book, but Greenberg revisited his photo archive this week and sent the pictures to The Intercept after reading the revelations about the building’s apparent role as an NSA site, code-named TITANPOINTE. “They took me upstairs, and it was just racks and racks of electronics,” Greenberg recalled in a phone call Friday, adding that he toured the basement of the building and two or three other floors. “They told me, ‘We don’t use the whole building anymore so [we] serve private clients.’ I didn’t think at the time about whether anything secret was going on.” One of Greenberg’s photos (featured at the top of this article) clearly shows some of AT&T’s “4ESS switch” equipment used to send phone calls across networks. The NSA’s documents describe the TITANPOINTE facility as containing a “RIMROCK access,” which is what the agency calls the 4ESS switches that it taps into. By 2004, at least one of these was an “international gateway” used to route foreign calls to and from the U.S., a former AT&T engineer has said. Another photograph taken by Greenberg (below) shows a room full of large batteries, which were likely used as a back-up energy source for the building in the event of a power failure. Original planning documents for 33 Thomas Street state that it would have enough emergency power to last two weeks, enabling it to become a “self-contained city” in the event of a catastrophe. https://theintercept.com/2016/11/19/nsa-33-thomas-street-att-new-york-photos-inside/