French
DeutschBlack room
A black room is part of a communication center (e.g. a post office) used by state officials to conduct clandestine interception and surveillance of communications.[1][2] Typically, all letters or communications pass through the black room before being passed to the recipient. This practice had been in vogue since the establishment of postal and telegraph services, and was frequently used in France by the ministers of Louis XVIII and his followers as the cabinet noir (French for "black room").[3]
In modern American network operations centers, optical splitters divert a percentage of the laser light from all incoming and outgoing fiber-optic cables to the secret room.[4] An example is Room 641A in the SBC Communications building in San Francisco.[4]
The term black room or black chamber has also been used to refer to any place or organisation dedicated to code-breaking.[5]
See also[edit]
- Bulgarian medieval cryptography
- Black Chamber
- Black site
- ECHELON
- Postal censorship
- Secrecy of correspondence
References[edit]
- ^ "Black Chamber at espionageinfo". Archived from the original on 8 January 2010. Retrieved 4 December 2006.
- ^ Kahn, David (13 January 2006). "Back When Spies Played by the Rules". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 May 2010.
London's was in Abchurch Lane, near St. Paul's. Black chambers resembled laboratories.
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 920.
- ^ a b Mark Klein (31 December 2005). "AT&T's Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens" (PDF). Wired. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 June 2006.
- ^ "National Security Agency Central Security Service > About Us > Cryptologic Heritage > Center for Cryptologic History > Pearl Harbor Review > The Black Chamber". www.nsa.gov. Retrieved 31 October 2020.