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I recently found an article that included a simple theory on how to see whether or not your computer is being watched by the nsa. Ok so basically the background on this is that the nsa has been taking information out of AT&T's San Francisco's offices in a secret room. Now this sortof reminds me of the Zimmerman Telegram(if you dont know what that is you need to go re learn American History).

So here is what you do supposing your on a windows machine you simply load up your command prompt (by going to start, run, type in cmd and hit enter). Now type in this command

tracert nsa.gov

After that you should see something like this

C:\> tracert nsa.gov 

 1  2 ms  2 ms  2 ms 12.110.110.204 
  [...] 
 7  11 ms  14 ms  10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]  
 8  13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]  
 9  18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17  
10  88 ms 92 ms  91 ms [B]tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net[/B] [12.123.13.186]  
11  88 ms  90 ms  88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41] 
12  89 ms  97 ms  89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29] 
13  89 ms  88 ms  88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65] 
14  102 ms  93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214 
15  94 ms  94 ms  93 ms 12.110.110.13 
16  * * * 
17  * * * 
18  * *

if you see the entry in bold with the above or below a non att.net entry then your internet packets are being sent to room 641A and then illegaly taken by the nsa.

Originating Article

Now after this I would like to mention a great live cd for OpenBSD. This live cd is called anonym.OS and as you might of guessed it is meant to keep you anonymous on the internet. Basically it uses something called TOR (The Onion Router) to make your ip virtually untrackable now you can configure TOR on anything but anonym.OS comes preconfigured with it. Just so you dont run out and install this over your current OS this will not allow you to run at maximum bandwidth. Browsing will be fine but you wouldnt want to be playing online games (if even possible) or downloading big files on this. You can find out more about anonym.OS here http://kaos.to/cms/content/view/14/32/

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Short answer: the Room 641A story has real, documented allegations — but running a traceroute is not a reliable way to “catch” the NSA.

correctly recalls the 2006 allegations and the lawsuit that followed; Mark Klein’s declarations alleging a secured AT&T facility and optical “splitters” were central to the EFF’s Hepting v. AT&T complaint. The litigation and its outcome are complex (court fights, appeals and later statutory immunity), so the presence of an ISP hostname in a traceroute is not the same thing as independent proof of interception. (See EFF’s case summary.)
(https://www.eff.org/cases/hepting)

Traceroute shows the routers that respond to TTL‑expired probes, and the names you see are reverse‑DNS PTR entries maintained by the network operator — they are labels, not forensic evidence that traffic was copied. Traceroute relies on ICMP/TTL behavior; routers can deliberately suppress or rewrite responses, and load‑balanced paths or MPLS overlays can make results misleading. For how traceroute works and what those replies actually mean, see vendor documentation and protocol specs.
(https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/ip/ip-routed-protocols/22826-traceroute.html)
(https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1035.html)

If traffic was copied inside the provider network (as the Klein materials allege), detection from a desktop is difficult. Providers can use optical splitters or monitoring gear; detecting that reliably requires operator access or optical instrumentation (OTDR/OFDR) and baseline measurements — tools ordinary users don’t have. Technical reviews of fiber sensing and reflectometry explain what equipment can and cannot reveal.
(https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/4/1072)

Practical steps: assume the network path can be observed and use end‑to‑end protections — HTTPS/TLS (check certificates), SSH, modern end‑to‑end encrypted messaging, and good account hygiene (unique passwords + 2FA). For practical guides and tool recommendations, see EFF’s Surveillance Self‑Defense. A quick, non‑conclusive check you can run locally is to inspect reverse DNS or WHOIS for a hop (it only shows owner labels, not copying):

dig -x 8.8.8.8 +short
whois 8.8.8.8

Caution: these lookups help map ownership and routing but do not prove interception.

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Member Avatar for jwenting

Can you spell out CONSPIRACY THEORY?

Member Avatar for mikeandike22

C-o-n-s-p-i-r-a-c-y t-h-e-o-r-y

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