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The Nuclear Bunker Where Wikileaks Will Be Located
An anonymous reader writes "Engadget has photos of 'Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.' It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman's lair."
What a disappointment. I clicked through expecting a robotic T-Rex and a giant penny.
-Peter
I'm reasonably sure Slashdot did a story on this underground data center about a year ago, maybe a bit more. I know I've seen these photos before.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Now taking bets on whether the American Gov't will seriously consider nuking Sweden or not.
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
What benefit is there to using these bunkers? If Wikileaks is shut down it will be by court order, not by nuclear missile. I don't see the purpose of paying for their fancy fountain/lighting set up with your server maintenance fees.
We ain't got no steenkin' servers. We spent all our money with Gary, our Designer.
anyone with enough tin foil and a couple million $ can have their very own underground fortress!
Who's got the breakdown on the cooling strategy for the batcave?
Reply to That ||
... they finish building the ion cannon out front.
Here's another one just as bad: Let's hope they stop having leaks when they start breeding Rachni. Snap!
-goes to corner and puts on dunce cap-
This is just grandstanding really. A nuclear bunker data center is no more secure from law enforcement than any other data center. Sure, you get better protection from natural disasters and whatnot, but if the cops come in with a court order to shut it down, the nuclear bunker people are no safer than anyone else unless they plan on hiring an army and defending the place to the death. Even then, the government just needs to get a court order to force all of their upstream network providers to cut them off and they'll be just as screwed as any other data center. After all, "leaking" documents to a collection of servers underground is not particularly effective if those servers can't connect to the Internet.
The survivability of Wikileaks in Sweden is entirely dependent on the Swedish government's willingness to let them be there, and nothing else. The servers could exist in a cave underground or a data center with a big sign that says "Wikileaks is here" in downtown Stockholm. Either way, if the Swedish governments decides they want it gone, it's going to be gone.
no a bunker makes it easy to cut the data / power cable!
Seems like a wise use of money. I mean, sure, they could have bought a normal data center for far cheaper, but does the normal data center protect against nuclear missiles? You see, these are the questions you have to ask Meg.
Here's why:
It's pretty cool at those depths so simply pumping air around can save in air conditioning utility bills. On the other hand, dealing with human waste often needs additional equipment though not expensive.
Engadget has photos of 'Pionen White Mountains, the nuclear bunker in which Wikileaks will locate some of its servers. It was excavated 98 feet underground, in a rock hill in the center of Stockholm, Sweden, during the Cold War.' It looks like they hired the same interior designer who decorated Batman's lair
Even though the summary mentions Engadget as the source, the TFA links to Gizmodo and as far as I know Engadget has nothing about this on their homepage.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Unexplained disappearance of Stockholm blamed on Julian Assuange having sex with an underage warhead.
Either the photos are fake, or that place keeps changing hands.
Seriously that's like the third if not fourth time I've seen this exact photo used over the last two or three years of Slashdot news.
That is enough.
No sig today...
If you look online missile silos that can also act as bunkers run in the area of a few $100K and the big ones are in the millions, so there is that. Then there is the cost of fixing the place up, I'm guessing they are going to put in a back-up generator and there is the cost of maintiance on that. The initial cost is probably going to be over a million easy and then the regular up keep as well. So who is flipping the bill on all of this?
so they ARE super evil genius quadruple spies!
Wikileaks is making no friends in the international community. A bunker in Sweden is not going to stop the Americans, Chinese or Russians from doing something about them. They may hide from other nations laws by residing in Sweden, but they will not hide from there espionage or guns.
The data's got to come out of a hole somewhere.
Wikileaks can be defeated with a pair of dykes.
when i worked at www.iol.unh.edu, networkworld or someone like that did an article about us. since we were just a bunch of server racks, they brought in all these stupid colored lights, killed the main lights.. all the kids working there got hollywood concealer jobs. they ended up looking like mimes, covering the nerd complexion. and of course, the place is 120 kids, 8 females... after 16 kids had photos taken, it looked like a 50% ratio. go figure. photography is a quick and easy way to stretch the truth.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
he's going OSAMA!
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
I'm looking at this photo of one of the rooms. Is having a glass room suspended from the ceiling really such a good idea for a bunker designed to withstand blasts? It seems like a very bad idea to make a structurally sound bunker with that kind of room. Unless you want your manager to be the first one to die in his office
You have to connect to the network somehow.
... to work there. Just imagine growing up programming in your parents basement, and when you finally get a real job, it's in a cave.
I assume one dyke to distract the employees with a tirade on modern gender roles in the gay community while the other sneaks in with a sledgehammer.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
... with, or without, the obvious self-destruct button?
Inquiring minds want to know!
Let's assume, just assume, that Wikileaks has some more juicy tidbits it hasn't been sharing.
Now if they have a location that cannot be broken into physically, and if they have a satellite upload rig, HAM radio, or a similar guaranteed-broadcast failsafe, then there is no way short of abject violence (bombs or similar) to stop them from spreading the dirtiest secrets they have should any determined foe show up at their door and demand that they turn over servers.
Now, given time or the right equipment, an agency can get through even a nuclear bunker, but if they need time, the broadcast capability becomes a serious threat, and if they need equipment, there's most likely going to be... well, leaks that it's getting ready to be mobilized, and then we come to the time issue again. Setting things up to get into a hardened facility without tripping a safeguard like that is tricky.
Or maybe not, but it's food for thought.
bunkers or caves usually ARE cool and don't swing radically up or down in temperature...
until you put a bunch of servers in them
then they heat up, and STAY hot, and are harder to cool than on the surface because there is nowhere to dissipate the heat
also: they are hard to get supplies to and build in, they have air quality issues, etc
yeah: they look really cool and they sound really cool, but in actual practicality, the idea of servers in caves or bunkers sucks
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I've been down there on a tour once. It's quite a cool place as you can see from the pictures, with its humidifiers, plants, lighting and floating island landscape. Although as others have pointed out, none of this protects against any real threat.
"Stop failing the Turing test!" -- Dilbert
Looks like a great place for Assange to stash the women. Be a lot harder for them to run to the police.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Has shown that they are willing to do the xxAA's bidding. Ask DVD-Jon.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Looks to me like it's being done more for show, and perhaps ego, than for any practical reason. I certainly don't see it being any cheaper than just having the servers in some office building somewhere.
I fear for the safety of those at WikiLeaks as well as their gear and data. The best security might be to have quite a bit of their data and personnel in a highly mobile, very covert, posture. Various governments can not be trusted and murder is not an unknown event.
... as seen in the first photo in the link, does it imply, there is cellphone reception at that depth ? hmm ...
The natural enemy of fiber... a backhoe?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
This makes good sense for Wikileaks. It gives them protection against any "accidents". The US government can ask the Swedish government to shut down Wikileaks, but that will be public, highly visible, controversial, argued in the press, and decided by Swedish courts.
I doubt Wikileaks "central control" is in that bunker any more than Federation Central Control "was"
Is there a self-repairing energy grid protecting the complex? If so, look somewhere else.
Funky bunker, Funky bunker, Funky Bunker! (say that three times fast). Anyway, love the primary colors and the stone everywhere. If only they could build a coffee shop in front of the entrance, with a secret doorway in the back to get in. That would be sooo kewel! I wonder actually if ....there is a second secret entrance somewhere, and may be a wall that you can push on (in 3 places in a particular sequence) that opens up another level... Or it may be it was just me playing too much "Spear of Destiny" years ago.
Gleaming white pyramid, need we see (23) more? ;-)
And that's just days after having been implicated in the destruction of Alderaan...
and I have to agree. It was only a Canadian Dieffenbunker (http://www.diefenbunker.ca/ ) in Alberta, but it was underground, under concrete and steel and it got a bit depressing. After a 12 hour shift it was really quite shocking to exit the bank-vault doors and return to the real world :P
It was also kinda cool in a way :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
the CIA has been known for doing things that they shouldn't just higher a terrorist ring to do what ever it takes to destroy the servers those cheeky terrorist will find a way or just issue death warrants for all those in the company after all they are a major threat to national and international security.
Impressive pics, would love to have a look around. The last data center I went to had lots of screens up to mask whose kit was behind the screen!
A $15/hr jackass with a backhoe is capable of severing large parts of the world from the rest of the Internet. I don't see how a bunker is going to stop that.
Yell loudly to all and sundry that the servers are in location X which is super-protected blah blah. Then really put them someplace innocuous and random.
It worked for Servalan.
I piss off bigots.
no a bunker makes it easy to cut the data / power cable!
No it doesn't. I visited similar (maybe even this one) bunkers when I did my Swedish military service in the 80's. The power supply lines (many redundant and independent), is really well protected and even if the external power sources was cut of, they have independent internal power generators (and fuel storages) that would make them go for at least months. These bunkers was created to host military command centers, consisting of several hundred soldiers and officers, for 8 months(*) or more, even in case of a full targeted nuclear attack. The original data lines was also very well protected with high redundancy, but I guess they are replaced with newer ones, so if they screwed up the construction of those, that could create a weakness.
That said, there are still weaknesses and if the power gets cut of, most of these bunkers get (at least partly) flooded with water.
I remember when I visited one of these bunkers, that it had a thinly veiled NATO spy base just outside the military area (the military area had been kept really small to make it less obvious). The NATO spy base was in the form of an ice cream parlor in the middle of nowhere. Its only customers came from the Swedish military command base. Everybody (including me) bought their ice cream, candy and soda. Everybody knew it was NATO operated, but the urge for sugar was to high. It would have been really simple to poison the entire base with something else than sugar.
(*) In the 70's it was concluded that if Sweden could keep the costs high enough for an attacker in invading and occupying Sweden for 8 months, nobody would think Sweden was valuable enough to spend military resources on. It would also likely be time enough for other countries to reach political decisions to give military and diplomatic aid against the attacker (whether the attacker would be USA, NATO (very unlikely as Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Germany would oppose such an attack) or the Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance, the three entities that Sweden wouldn't have been able to fully defend itself against during that era).
"Nuke it, its the only way to be.....er wait."
Are they planning to keep their Leakmobile there as well?
If my mom ever wins the lottery, I'm asking her for a basement done by THAT guy.
for the outing of Afghani civilians who have provided intelligence to the US Army. I think we can all agree that he ought to have censored out the names of these civilian informants, though that's assuming you believe America is in the right in this conflict. But in general we Americans believe America is in the right. Be fair to Assange, however. The idea is to publish leaks while they are relevant. He had some ridiculous number of documents to scan through. When it came down to it, I'm sure he made the decision to publish the documents without much review. Perhaps wikileaks could employ a team, a small crowd if you will, to crowdsource review duties to.