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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.""
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.
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.
... 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!