The Daily Omnivore

The Nuclear Football (also called ‘The Button’) is a black briefcase, the contents of which are to be used by the President of the United States of America to authorize a nuclear attack while away from fixed command centers, such as the White House Situation Room. It functions as a mobile hub in the strategic defense system. Russia and the United Kingdom have similar briefcases. Reputedly, there are four things in the Football: the ‘Black Book’ containing the retaliatory options, a book listing classified site locations, a manila folder with eight or ten pages stapled together giving a description of procedures for the Emergency Broadcast System, and a three-by-five inch card with authentication codes.

The ‘Black Book’ is 9 by 12 inches and has 75 loose-leaf pages printed in black and red. On the ‘vital’ page listing possible responses to a nuclear attack, retaliatory options appear in red and were labeled: ‘Rare, Medium or Well Done.’ The book with classified site locations was about the same size as the Black Book, and was black. It contained information on sites around the country where the president could be taken in an emergency.

A secure telephone is a telephone that provides voice security in the form of end-to-end encryption for the telephone call, and in some cases also the mutual authentication of the call parties, protecting them against a man-in-the-middle attack. Concerns about massive growth of telephone tapping incidents lead to growing demand for secure telephones. Additionally, as the popularity of VoIP grows, secure telephony is becoming more of commonplace and less the lonely domain of spies and civil libertarians.

Cabinet noir (French for ‘black room’) was the name given in France to the office where the letters of suspected persons were opened and read by public officials before being forwarded to their destination. This practice had been in use since the establishment of posts, and was frequently used by the ministers of Louis XIII and Louis XIV; but it was not until the reign of Louis XV that a separate office for this purpose was created. Although declaimed against at the time of the French Revolution, it was used both by the revolutionary leaders and by Napoleon.

read more »

Room 641A is an intercept facility operated by AT&T for the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), beginning in 2003. It is fed by fiber optic lines from beam splitters installed in fiber optic trunks carrying Internet backbone traffic and, therefore, presumably has access to all Internet traffic that passes through the building.The existence of the room was revealed by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, and was the subject of a 2006 class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against AT&T. Klein claims he was told that similar black rooms are operated at other facilities around the country.

The EFF suit accused the telecommunication company of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the NSA in a massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications. Room 641A is located in the SBC Communications building at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, three floors of which were occupied by AT&T before SBC purchased AT&T. The room was referred to in internal AT&T documents as the SG3 (Study Group 3) Secure Room. The room measures about 24 by 48 feet (7.3 by 15 m) and contains several racks of equipment, including a Narus STA 6400, a device designed to intercept and analyze Internet communications at very high speeds.