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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.""
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.
Given the context of the situation and what happened, I think the OP meant Dynadot (the US DNS outfit), not Wikileaks, as the injunction was effectively against Dynadot, not Wikileaks.
Dynadot did issue a statement: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20080220005582/en
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."
True, but like someone else already pointed out, you can still censor them by removing their access to the Internet. Either by cutting the cable physically or blocking them at the first outside router, or in the case that already occurred, remove their DNS A records.
The way I see it, where they host is largely irrelevant as long as they're somewhere that's neutral and will protect their rights to free speech and won't succumb to political pressure to censor them. I'm not sure that such a place exists but Switzerland might be the first place I would look.
How would they afford such a premises?
They're not that expansive.
From http://www.missilebases.com/ :
Polo, MO, Hardened Underground Communications vault on 10 acres (more or less), built in the 1960's as a nuclear war-proof communications center, 8,800 sq. ft. usable floor space, 24" thick walls & ceiling, 2' to 4' of earth over, metal shield enveloping entire structure, two 1000 pound blast doors, 6 air vents with filtration and blast valve closure mechanisms, well on site, 10,000 gallon stainless steel water storage tank, escape hatch emergency exit, 177 ft. tower (a rental possibility). Lighting, pumps, fans, heating, cooling, dehumidification present in structure. Electric hoist operational. Commercial zoning, low property taxes. Video $24. Excellent for underground home or secure document storage facility.
Price: $299,000.00
So, 300 grand- about the price of a good house.
Atlas-F Sites
Wilber, NE. 21.9 acres (m/l). 30 minutes southwest of Lincoln, 10 minutes to Crete (has Super Wal-Mart). LCC and stairway dry with roughed-in lighting. Underground electrical & phone to structures. 176 ft deep silo stripped to bare walls( 90 ft of water). 2 original wells on site. New 14' X 24' log cabin kit under construction on private entry road.
A pretty home-site. Video available soon (not yet available) $24
Price: $229,000.00
of course, you can go crazy, too:
Titan I Site
Denver, CO. 210 total acres. Very rare piece of history - only 18 built. Massive 45,000 + sq. ft. of underground floor-space; high chain-link fence around central complex; 2 high capacity deep wells (into aquifer) in power dome; 3 missile silos all interconnected by mile of tunnels. Launch control dome is the best we've seen. Distant mountain views, just 20 minutes from metropolitan area and international airport. Large capacity elevator intact; needs reconditioned. Under new ownership; clean-up and refurbishment underway. Many unique possibilities for commercial or private usage. Serious and capable buyers only.
Video $24
PRICE : Firm at $1,800,000.00
(No owner financing, full cash at closing required.)
Other advantages of a bunker are
Missile silos would also offer some unique experiences in bungee jumping. Or, you could plan on not having to take out the garbage for several decades.
The Guardian didn't say the data was there - they commented on the background of someone they were talking to. The information about The Bunker, is, as far as I can tell, entirely correct. The assumption that Wikileaks uses it was made by the /. poster rather than being part of the article.
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!
Any shelter you make is going to have a hard time withstanding a direct hit. That's just not the point. You have blast shelters and you have fallout shelters. Blast shelters are designed to withstand some blast damage. The further you are from ground zero the less blast damage you will take. That's where the blast shelter shines. You might be in an area close enough to the ground zero where you would otherwise be killed by the pressure and heat and flying debris, but if you're in a blast shelter you have a much better chance of surviving.
The blast damage alone isn't the only killer. Fallout shelters are designed to protect the blast survivors from the subsequent radiation and provide them with enough food and water until they have to leave.
These things will increase survivability even with a large h-bomb attack. While the chances of this happening have gone down since the Soviet collapse, the shelters themselves are far from obsolete. The wide spread notion that we're all dead in the event of a large scale nuclear exchange is simply not true.
And despite the frequent criticism of the old duck and cover movies, this is still the best thing to do if you see bright flash on the horizon. It's far better than standing there mouth agape looking stupid when the blast wave hits.