Black room

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While a black room or black chamber is often now used to refer to any place or organisation dedicated to code-breaking, its more exact meaning is a secret room in a post office, and, later and by extensive, a telecommunications center used by state officials to conduct clandestine interception and surveillance of communications.^[1] Typically all letters or communications would pass through the black room before being passed to the recipient.

In a modern American Network Operations Center, optical splitters divert a percentage of the laser light from all incoming and outgoing fiber-optic cables to the secret room. ^[2] An example is Room 641A in the SBC Communications building in San Francisco.^[2] Activities in a black room do not fall under the concept of lawful interception, as all data is intercepted and no court order will be obtained for its interception as it is at least arguably an extralegal procedure.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Cabinet noir

Cabinet noir 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. However, this had to be done with some sophistication, as it was considered undesirable that the subjects of the practice know about it, and "that the black chamber not interrupt the smooth running of the postal service."^[3] This practice had been in vogue 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. This was called the cabinet du secret des postes, or more popularly the cabinet noir. Although declaimed against at the time of the French Revolution, it was used both by the revolutionary leaders and by Napoleon. It was also employed by the Dutch Republic. ^[4]

In 1911 the Encyclopædia Britannica took the view that the cabinet noir had disappeared, but that the right to open letters in cases of emergency still appeared to be retained by the French government; and a similar right was occasionally exercised in England under the direction of a Secretary of State. In England this power was frequently employed during the 18th century^{[citation needed]} and was confirmed by the Post Office Act of 1837; its most notorious use being, perhaps, the opening of Mazzini's letters in 1844.

Such postal censorship became common during World War I. Governments claimed that the total war which was waged required such censorship to preserve the civilian population's morale from heart-breaking news up from the front. Whatever the justification, this meant that not a single letter sent from a soldier to his family escaped previous reading by a government official, destroying any notion of privacy or of secrecy of correspondence. Post censorship was retained during the interwar period and afterwards, but without being done on such a massive scale.

The opening of international mail outgoing and incoming from the United States by U.S. Customs ^[5] under a "2002 trade act," occurs under the border exception to the Fourth Amendment. ^[6] There has been some criticism of this practice (including allegations that it adds to the expense of conducting the Postal Service and can thus have an impact on postal rates)^[7], of which the USPS apparently informed Congress about the potential problems before passage of the legislation. ^[8] However, this criticism may be tempered by the fact that the act prohibits agents searching for contraband from reading mail incidentally included in the package or envelope including it, or allowing others to read it.^[5] The Intelligence Authorization Act of 2004 has also been characterised as unconstitutionally permitting the opening of domestic mail. ^[5]

[edit] See also

• Secrecy of correspondence
• Black site
• Postal censorship

[edit] References

1. ^ Black Chamber at espionageinfo
2. ^ ^{a b} AT&T’s Implementation of NSA Spying on American Citizens (PDF)
3. ^ Everything2: Black Chamber
4. ^ jstor.org
5. ^ ^{a b c} U.S. Customs Opening International Mail
6. ^ Feds Use Border Search Exception to Nab Pedophile
7. ^ mininggazette.com
8. ^ Minutes of the Mailers' Technical Advisory Committee .doc (Google cache)

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

[edit] External links

• Back when spies played by the rules by David Kahn, originally published in the New York Times - a history of black chambers
• AT&T Whistle-Blower's Evidence
• Discussion of cabinets noirs and Napoleon