AT&T Building — 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco 94107
Long before “netizens” became Big Tech and took over the South of Market District, SOMA was already a key neighborhood for technological development.
Some of it took place in rooms like this one, and you were never supposed to find out about it. Stop for a moment on the northern corner of 2nd and Folsom Streets and look at the building diagonally across the street. Most of your personal digital communications probably have been routed here, through room 641A, or rooms like it, where the National Security Agency (NSA) has wiretapped and sifted our information for more than a decade.
The existence of room 641A came to light in 2006, when the San Francisco–based digital rights and privacy organization the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) sued telephone giant AT&T for collaborating with the NSA. AT&T has legitimate technical reasons for routing traffic through its building here. But the EFF was troubled by the unprecedented violation of privacy— and arguably the US Constitution—implied by allowing the NSA to secretly collect and analyze communication between citizens without a warrant. Eventually the lawsuit was dismissed, due to an act of Congress that retroactively immunized AT&T, through an amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. As of this writing, Congress has renewed the NSA’s clearance to monitor all information.
Despite public outcry, political promises, and feigned embarrassment on the part of corporations making billions off the Internet, the following decade brought a panoply of surveillance and manipulation by tech firms. From the perspective of regular people, it may seem to happen invisibly, but it unfolds in real places like this one. And the companies are not entirely hiding this activity. Google has admitted it reads your e-mail; Facebook admits it subjected users to abuse during the 2016 election season from at least one foreign entity; Twitter admits that bots (which are computer-generated “users”) were responsible for driving political activity also during the 2016 political campaigns; and YouTube continues its inflammatory “suggested next video” algorithm, which fans the flames of hatred, racism, and social injustice in the name of optimizing clicks. Even so, very few politicos dare challenge the Big Tech firms that have simultaneously cast themselves as indispensable engines of economic growth, and as willing partners in state-run surveillance from the US to China.
But this is more than a story of top-down power. As you stand on the corner looking at the rather featureless exterior of 611 Folsom, consider the fact that the largest private companies in the world and almost all Internet businesses everywhere rely on a necessarily open global network running on free, open-source software, big chunks of which were originally developed by people in the Bay Area. UC Berkeley, for example, pioneered an early iteration of this free software beginning in the 1970s with Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a free version of the Unix operating system. Not only is open-source software made by volunteer programmers and given away for free, the source code—which is the language you need to replicate it—is open, so anyone can change it to suit their needs. Big Tech has done this for profit, but open-source software (along with the more technically complicated consensus governance structure of the Internet), speaks to the many different paths forward for our increasingly digital world.
Like the secret NSA room that exists in a nondescript office building in San Francisco, so too do the material spaces where a free and open Internet is made. Many of these bright lights in the tech universe are unique to the Bay Area. In addition to the sometimes-controversial digital rights and privacy watchdogs at the EFF, Wikipedia— the ubiquitous, nonprofit, free dictionary fueled by volunteer editors—is located here, along with dozens of small nonprofits dedicated to digital access, such as Girls Who Code, which aims to eliminate gender inequity in tech. And in stark contrast to the NSA’s secrecy, the nonprofit Internet Archive preserves the historic Internet, creating open-access backups of the web itself and vast collections of audio, video, and books. They too are collecting information—the stuff people specifically choose to share via the web.
You can stop by the Internet Archive for lunch and a glimpse at the massive server bank that archives every page on the Internet in a sea of blinking blue lights (300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco; sign up by Wednesday for Friday lunch). (Bruce Rinehart)