Yes it's real. It's amazing to me how quickly this room, ECHELON, Carnivore and all the rest have been forgotten. There seemed to be a small but vocal technical uproar over this rooms existence when it was discovered but the public at large ignored it. Then Congress retroactively made it legal so there was nothing we could even do about it at that point.
I think it is basically a form of semantic satiation. Mention something controversial enough times and eventually the public stops understanding that it was real. I wager that if you took a poll of Americans, most would believe that ECHELON is a fictional plot device in spy movies that "conspiracy theorists" think is real because they are dumb.
