![]() This would make sense considering that Offutt Air Force Base was once home to Strategic Air Command, the Cold War-era DoD outfit responsible for operating things like intercontinental ballistic missiles (the division was reorganized in 1992 as U.S. It was also home to a node of AUTOVON, the military telephony system and possibly a relay point in the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment network (SAGE), the computerized defense network that pioneered much of the research and development that later went into ARPANET. Among the site’s many artifacts are some reports indicating that the Fairview AT&T site was once (maybe still is, who knows) home to a cable connecting Offutt Air Force Base in nearby Omaha, Nebraska, to the AT&T network. is probably one of the best resources for finding out about old AT&T infrastructure. This is a history that, luckily for me, has a rich and very active online community documenting it. ![]() I remain pretty skeptical that this Fairview is related to the Fairview, but when I started to look for more information about the site months later, I learned that it has a pretty weird, interesting history tied to telecommunications and Cold War infrastructure. Could this random tower surrounded by farmland at the edge of Kansas possibly be the namesake of the surveillance program? Looking at the base of the tower through a fence, I burst out laughing at a beam on which someone had written “FAIRVIEW.” A few months before this trip, ProPublica and The New York Times had published their lengthy overview of the NSA’s Fairview program, in which AT&T had generously assisted the NSA with interception and surveillance. A Google Earth image shows a white van parked by the building, so presumably someone does work there sometimes. According to FCC records it looks like this tower still belongs to AT&T, but it didn’t look like anyone had been around the tower site in a while-and no one answered the door at the weird building with the AT&T mailbox out front. AT&T sold off most of the towers in the late 1990s. ![]() But by the time the Internet rose to prominence, the technology was pretty outdated and couldn't carry the kind of bandwidth that fiber-optic cable could carry. At the time, it was the first large-scale microwave-transmission network for telephony and broadcast, and it would be expanded a ton over the next few decades. Long Lines, AT&T’s division for long-distance communication networks, built out a massive microwave radio network starting in 1951.
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