Slashdot Mirror
Are Wikileaks Servers In a Nuclear Bunker?
An anonymous reader writes "The Guardian has a two page spread on the background of some of the Wikileaks people, the Wikileaks scheme for "an open-source democratic intelligence agency" and the possible location of its secret servers — an abandoned US nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common and a radar station in Kent. "The Kent bunker is deep underground and supposed to survive 30 days after a nuclear strike.""
Whats the point of placing the server in a nuclear bunker when you can just snip the cable (both metaphorically and physically) to limit the access.
How would they afford such a premises?
Do sites like Wikileaks really have enough spare funding to pay for something like this?
It's interesting if true, would a nuclear bunker have internet access? Wouldn't it be quite a costly task getting internet access into such a bunker?
To be honest, even then it sounds like overkill, why would Wikileaks even need to survive a nuclear strike? Surely there are plenty of secure enough premises elsewhere that aren't nuclear-proofed that would be just as suitable for a whole lot less cost and hassle? I'm sure if they did get nuked we'd have a lot more to worry about than wikileaks future to be honest!
Well the Guardian isn't known for fact checking.
Currently wikileaks is at http://88.80.13.160, which belongs to "prq Inet - Access" based in Sweden. Greenham Common itself has been returned to civilian use, and most of it is being turned back into countryside and held in trust. The missile silos are being turning into a historical monument. There is a small business park, which does have a company providing secure hosting in one of the old bunkers (which I guess is sort of "an abandoned US nuclear weapons base at Greenham Common", but not quite, saying abandoned gives the idea of secret hackers stringing ethernet at night whilst no-one sees). The same company also hosts in an old radar station in Kent, at, Marshborough Road, Sandwich.
However the UK is not a good choice for hosting this sort of thing; our libel laws are open to all sorts of abuse these days, there's a tendency right now for individuals to sue in the UK high court for libel over publications which aren't even available in the UK, so called "libel holidays". Whilst secure hosting is all very nice marketing speak when the laws of the land will conspire against you then the security of your hosting is secondary; after all, really, what are they worried about? A company hiring a rogue agent to fire bomb the hosting? Most hosting facilities have large fences, gates and security, and a bunch are undergound. Being ex-military land doesn't improve security that much.
....lose touch with the way of living without all the advances such that should a disaster happen that destroys our advances, would we know enough about how to live without that we could survive it with minimal loses due to just plain ignorance of living without the advances?
Where would wikileaks be, even though they could perhaps transmit, who would have the receivers?
Say a nuclear event happen, but not one of man but rather nature, ie asteroid, record breaking sun flares, etc. that disabled/destroyed our computer technology and satellite system.
Imagine the mindset change that would be required to just survive without computers.
So the idea of wikileaks being in some nuclear bunker... its just a location that may no longer be secret.
I thought all the nuclear bunkers were built to survive a conventional a-bomb attack in an era where the CEP was so high that a miss was likely. Secrecy was a part of it too. The idea was to not get hit at all, survive a near miss from a small bomb in case they did find you. But, once the H-Bombs came of age, all of that was made obsolete. I mean, some of the USA test h-bomb shots in the pacific blew entire islands off of the map, and the Russians actually built much larger h-bombs that that.
The whole bunker thing is a joke.
This is my sig.
If you remove the word "nuclear" for a moment, a bunker would be a good place to prevent theft or sabotage of servers used for purposes like these.
In my opinion, i'd prefer to die from the nuclear blast than from starvation 30 days later because there would be no rescue coming after a nuclear explosion...
You'd die a much more painful death like that than if you'd be in the blast radius...
Thanks for telling us where the server is - I think I might take a daytrip there now! I'd better start preparing a picnic!
Those using pirated Tinysoft signatures(TM) are a real threat to society and should all be thrown in jail.
I bet I can survive a nuclear strike (sans hair, that is), if I'm not too close to ground zero :p
This is where I'd normally insert the "I can catch lightning in a bottle, but still don't know what the fuck you just said" picture made so popular from Internet message boards.
But since I can't insert the image...
What the hell did you just say? No, seriously. Reading that post was like watching retards try to screw a doorknob. Lay off the meth and try it again.
"A Phon-o-graph? What the f-eep-is that?" - Child ~13 on 'kid nation' reading the label on a picture of one.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Never happen. We'd just look up how to live without all the advances on the internet, and we'd be good to go....
That said, if you know how to make black powder and alcohol, you're probably well ahead of the post-apocalyptic game. And if your home-brewed alcohol is potable, so much the better.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Maybe the servers are well protected in a bunker.
But the cables run 4 ft. deep.
Makes me think what the advantage of the N/H bomb proof bunker is...
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Yep, it almost looks like Google is secretly involved, and they speak of the seven memes being released, I think there are clues in the video.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
Use P2P or similar mechanisms to distribute Wikileaks material, along with some clever way to access it via the web browser. This is unfortunately a necessary step for them to take, to prevent censorship. It's the mistake that Bluefrog Security made, assuming that nobody would take them out (and look what happened).
So... What happens on the 31st day?
The founders of wikileaks are afraid to use the system themselves and claim it's crackable. So if it's crackable, who exactly do they expect to use it?
"Laurie cautions that Wikileaks' vaunted encryption is not completely unbreakable. Codebreakers such as the US National Security Agency could probably crack it, he says. "If my life was on the line, I would not be submitting [documents] to Wikileaks.""
If the NSA can crack wikileaks, chances are China, Russia, and many other intelligence agencies can crack wikileaks. They have super computers and quantum computers too. So if governments can crack it, and if the founders wouldn't us it, who is it being built for? I suppose it would be strong enough to withstand the cracking ability of African governments, and governments in the third world. However, then in these situations theres risk if the encryption scheme is crackable.
Then that says a lot about the wikileaks system. Of course, it's crackable, thats not surprising. What is surprising is that the guy who helped design it, says he wouldn't use the system himself.
Wikileaks can be made a lot more secure than it currently is, but how can they hype it up throughout the article and then at the very end, tear it all down with a phrase like: Laurie cautions that Wikileaks' vaunted encryption is not completely unbreakable. Codebreakers such as the US National Security Agency could probably crack it, he says. "If my life was on the line, I would not be submitting [documents] to Wikileaks."
How can you stop them from accessing the internet through radio?
Nuclear bunker? That's really cute.
Fortifying your server inside physical security is painfully 1960's thinking. Your defenses will be defeated by the power of the subpoena and heavy handed back room diplomacy between governments.
We're going to watch the Pirate Bay issue play itself out accordingly. It doesn't matter if they mirror/move the tracker servers out of Sweden; the U.S. State department, acting on the behest of government officials beholden to enormously wealthy and influential lobbyists and IP (intellectual property) owning media companies - will suddenly start reminding X, Y and Z governments (in countries now hosting illicit material) that the huge agricultural trade deal they want with the U.S. may suddenly stall out because "we don't do business with countries that sponsor or turn a blind eye to the theft of American property." Oh, you wanted us to vote FOR your membership to the WTO? Well, about that pirate MP3 website hosted in your country, getting 500,000 hits a day..
THIS SPACE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK.
Especially if known about.
A better solution for information safety (preservation) is a combination of the following attributes:
-Widely Distributed
-Massively Redundant
-Strongly Encrypted
-Rewrappable by newer encryption
-Fragmented with self-seeking assembly
-Self-healing (checks that enough copies of self exist and makes more if not)
-Autonomously Mobile - Self-seeks newer and more reliable storage using a map of internet hosts with stats
That's orders of magnitude better than one bunker to which the electricity or datapipes can be cut.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I read that whole article before I visited slashdot this morning, and nowhere does it suggest that WikiLeaks' servers are in those bunkers. The Bunker was a past business venture of Ben Laurie, who designed the encryption methods used by the site. That information is presented to give insight into one of the minds behind the creation of Wikileaks, nothing more. Any connection between the Bunker and Wikileaks is made by the reader, not the author.
Part of PRQ's business is selling network tunneling services. For a small price, you can have your public tunnel end show up at PRQ in Sweden, while your real server(s) are elsewhere.
Their top advertised tunneling package, for 150 SEK/month (about €16.11), gives you unlimited bandwidth plus four static IP adresses and reverse DNS config.
Perhaps you should check some sources yourself, before your you blow the horn next time
... and it's a pretty amazing place if you're at all geeky. They don't let people into all of it these days, but I went down before it was fully operational, a few years ago.
The blast doors are a sight to be seen - they're about 4 feet thick of solid steel. There's blast doors on every entrance and at locations inside. Even the taxman would have a hard time getting through that [grin]. Then there's the air purifiers, which can filter out all known airborn toxins for the entire complex, and several diesel generators for backup power. The diesel tanks are large enough to keep the whole place running for weeks.
There's the room that was always guarded when the place was operational, and didn't appear on the blueprints... There's the fact that everything everywehere is tempest shielded, and there's the fact that it has sufficient fibre coming into it to carry most of the internet traffic worldwide - literally metre-thick bundles of the stuff. Oh, and it's H U G E inside; they'll not be running out of space any time soon...
Quite an amazing place.
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
The neat thing about the world we live in is that there are people with all kinds of crazy little obssessions. There are people who just love history, and people who obssess about arcane wilderness survival techniques. ;)
In the event of a catastrophe, so long as those few in possession of the knowledge you need are not entirely wiped out, odds are such information will be sufficiently highly valued to spread very quickly.
Just look at the bible. It's got info from thousands of years ago because lots of people are convinced it is a unique pearl of wisdom handed down directly from their all-mighty creator
Parent is right, plus its highly unlikely that wikileaks is running a 1 server / 1 location show. They probably have a few centers in a wikipeidia style and each center will have a few machines (a tor note, an i2p node, a squid proxy, an apache, a database server, a backup) so having a setup hosted is completly reasonable. Its also completly possible and incredible sensible that they have a backup server in the bunker, meaning that any attack wikileaks wouldn't affect the backups, unless at the same time both nuclear bunkers were breached.
p.s since when has the guardian been bad at fact checking ive only heard of tabloids be pis poor at fact checking, ive never heard of a broadsheets (guardian especially) running an easily falsifiable story.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
It could be that those Wikipedia folks just like underground data centers. Wikia Search, the search engine from the founders of Wikipedia, houses its servers in an ultra-secure underground hosting facility in Iowa. There are a growing number of these "data bunkers" that are getting business from folks who are paranoid about security, some of whom do indeed want "nuke-proof" hosting. I'm not sure if that's the issue for Wikia ... it's more likely that it's the proximity for Wikia's Jeremie Miller (perhaps best known to Slashdot readers as the developer of the Jabber instant messaging program) who is based in Iowa.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
This story seems more like advertising for WikiLeaks rather than hard research providing new information because there are more people involved in keeping WikiLeaks running than are cited in the article... And it is more interesting to note who is and isn't mentioned than just who is.
That wasn't a mistake at the Guardian. It was blatant censorship by the NSA. They really don't want readers of the Guardian to learn about their ability to brea
Hope they don't just setup a botnet.
... or does writing about such "conspiracy theories" tell of journalistic downfall. I mean, we have studies now that show that the youth of today can't/doesn't distinguish the difference between CNN, The BBC or there buddies facebook page. Perhaps its bled its way up the chain to an even more significant degree then previously thought.
"Imagine the mindset change that would be required to just survive without computers."
Imagine the scornworthy, overly delicate, hothouse-flower mindset than would come unglued without computers.
Glad I don't have it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
What's the benefit? If Wikileaks did have their servers in a decomissioned nuclear bunker, then the government would have a list of possible locations that it would be in the for of a list of decommisioned bunkers. If the founders were as smart as they claim to be, they would hide it in plain sight. I mean, what wold seem like a more probable place to hide a "hot-button" web site that strives to make life difficult for Big Brother?
Location A: Decommissioned nuclear bunker.
Location B: Decommissioned Atlas missile silo.
Location C: Underneath a chicken coop in rural Oklahoma?
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
[sarcasm] Yeah, joking... much... maybe...? [/sarcasm ]
(damn formatting)
We've been over this already people... Cheyenne Mountain is there to house the Stargate.
Ubiquitously - A Ubiquity Developer Community
So there is an issue of information distortion for personal gain of such information, is what you are saying?
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22jurisdiction%20shopping
http://www.google.com/search?q=libel%20%22jurisdiction%20shopping
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jurisdiction_shopping
Xenu loves you!
Tsar Bomba fit alright in the belly of the Russian bomber from whence it was dropped. They only say these weapons didn't have military value because the USA and the Soviet Union, left unchecked, could have pushed 100MT designs and more, and these become more genocidal weapons capable of destroying entire continents. Anything in the megaton range is unimaginably powerful. To give you a simple idea, the sort of device tested by the USA in the 1950s (and exceeded by Tsar Bomba), would at least damage or irradiate everything from New York City to Virginia if dropped on Philadelphia. That's good stuff.
This is my sig.
I'm saying that information believed to be useful dies hard.
There is a type of person that naturally loves to accumulate and spread knowledge.
There are people like that for every subject, no matter how obscure.
Those people (much like anyone) additionally love to be put in a position where they feel validated and useful (their knowledge-amassing habits suddenly turn out to save mankind).
It's likely that market dynamics would also kick in and reward that spreading of highly useful information in some way.
As an example, we have the bible (and other religious books). There have been people believing it to be an indispensable lifestyle guide for thousands of years. Those people have stood much to gain from spreading the faith. I'm not a christian, but I believe that evangelism, missionary activities, spreading the word is probably seen by christians as living a holy life, doing god's work etc.