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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."
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.
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!
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!
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.
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That is enough.
No sig today...
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.
Down the rabbit hole and back again.
I doubt think this is to protect the servers against military/police action by legitimate authorities. This is probably the DR site they forgot to build.
They need to bolster security, because Wikileaks might have information that bad actors would love to get their hands on in uncensored form.
If the military wanted to blow up servers, they could simply secure cooperation from the operators of the datacenter, and force their way in, less collataral damage that way.
If it was really war... a nuke would deny access to the servers from the surface, and might be combined with bunker busters
... 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
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
What is the point of it being underground like this?
To survive some kind of explosive attack?
Anybody that is at all determined to disable access to this server would just need to snip the internet cable running into this bunker (and yes, jam/intercept any wireless connection it may have) and then prevent WikiLeaks from fixing it.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Nah, 98 ft is just right for a GBU-28. No need for a nuke.
"It proved capable of penetrating over 30 metres (100 ft) of earth or 6 metres (20 ft) of solid concrete."
This is 30 meters of granite, not earth. Still, I wouldn't want to be underneath it.
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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.
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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.
It's there:
1. To make the servers physically safer
2. Because it impresses investors
It's not in a bunker to ensure uptime, but to ensure istime.
I'm not part of the "political right" nor am I part of the "political left"... But I am able to make a joke about someone in the political world without the joke being politically slanted. Honest. Read it again and substitute anyone else's name in there. :p
Remember to maintain your supply of
If the Swedish Police, or US government, for some reason decides that Wikileaks must be shut down an underground bunker won't help at all. It seems pointless, but then Wikileaks is all about the drama.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
For bunker busters, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_bunker_buster
Altering the shape of the projectile to incorporate an ogive shape has yielded substantial results. Rocket sled testing at Eglin Air Force Base has demonstrated penetrations of 100 to 150 feet (46 m) in concrete[citation needed] when traveling at 4,000 ft/s (1,200 m/s). The reason for this is liquefaction of the concrete in the target, which tends to flow over the projectile. Variation in the speed of the penetrator can either cause it to be vaporized on impact (in the case of traveling too fast), or to not penetrate far enough (in the case of traveling too slow). An approximation for the penetration depth is obtained with an impact depth formula derived by Sir Isaac Newton.
So, it still depends. What material is between the surface and this bunker? I'd imagine a hard rock would have a lot more stopping power than concrete (due to how they penetrated the concrete). Either way, it sounds like if you would line the bunker with a pretty thick layer of steel in addition, you'd probably turn out OK.
Someone in the know correct me on this.
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
There are probably some European countries where they could be prosecuted but they have not violated any USA law.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Because they are underground it is much easier to control the climate. They are not as affected by poor weather going on upstairs. And let's not forget the batcave factor. That would be a very cool place to hang out.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Somehow I can see the US being more interested on taking out Wikileaks that Osama or the-like.
Why? Security theatre must be protected so that draconian laws can stay on the books.
The irony is:
-if they get Osama, Joe-six-pack will think that 9/11 is finally over and things can go back to normal.
-If they take out Wikileaks, the world stays in the dark (OMG, new dark ages?) and the truth is what the USA says it is.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
I would guess some sort of metamorphic rock, having been in Sweden a lot. There's a lot of metamorphic rock smoothed by glaciers there. When roads were built, they drilled into the rock and put in explosives to blast away the rock, which is how you get a rock face like the one in that picture of what looks to be the main entrance. Or at least that's what it looks like to me, that picture is small. Anyway, such rocks tend to be quite large and extend quite a ways under the earth. So it's definitely possible that it's solid rock all the way down to the level of the bunker.
Unrelated to the rest of the post, this whole bunker business may be unnecessary, but you can't deny they've got style.
The natural enemy of fiber... a backhoe?
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
They're buying space in an existing colo facility with probably hundreds of other paying customers. Probably just a couple of cabinets. They're not building the thing.
It will also be much easier to control access.
;-)
Someone should tag it pionenforthefjords, though.