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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.
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.
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.
Nor were they invited to. They received notice of the hearing, by email, hours before it happened. This wasn't a matter of ignoring a summons; they were intentionally excluded. Baer and Dynadot stipulated to a bunch of stuff so Dynadot could get itself off the hook, Baer requested a few more things (including the nuking of the A records), and the judge agreed -- without Wikileaks input.
Bunkers are handy against EMP's too. You also generally get good overall physical security with a bunker, and data centers built in them tend to follow through with more practical aspects of security, like escorts instead of just letting you find your own way, as is common in most.
Bunkers also make for a relatively inexpensive readymade secure location, generally with good immortal power and HVAC. People don't put data centers in bunkers because of zomg sekure, they do it because it's often more practical than building your own from scratch.