Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/26095/?ref=rss

by FSecurePal • 16 years ago

100 51 16 years ago

die_sekte• 16 years ago

Utterly insane. Neat. Holy shit. I don't know what to think.

Is this a black eye for Amazon, or do they get a pass due to the pressure that we assume was applied to them as a company domiciled in the USA?

ergo983• 16 years ago

They get an easy pass. The idea of this ever going to Amazon in the first place just seems extraordinarily ill-conceived: There was no way it was going to stay up.

Wikileaks is pursuing a remarkably old-school method of releasing these, with the whole centralized distribution point.

They should release the entire set via P2P with collections symmetrically encrypted. They could then -- via the most rudimentary methods -- release individual keys at chosen intervals to still obtain the same throttled response. And one day when the feds are kicking in the doors, just drop the entire key collection.

glhaynes• 16 years ago

I wonder why they're not doing that.

nochiel• 16 years ago

"Wikileaks is pursuing a remarkably old-school method of releasing these, with the whole centralized distribution point."

Please could you clarify what you mean. According to cablegate.wikileaks.org the distribution is being done via torrent (with an increasingly large number of seeds becoming available quickly).

http://file.wikileaks.org/torrent/cablegate/cablegate-201012...

rdl4• 16 years ago

I'm curious if wikileaks picked Amazon knowing they'd be kicked off (either for political or technical reasons), just to increase their own media profile.

tzs• 16 years ago

Arguably some of the material on Wikileaks violates Amazon's acceptable use policy. For example, you can't use Amazon services to host things that are violations of privacy.

It's also possible that some of the materials violate copyright, and so hosting it would violate Amazon's AUP. Works authored by government employees within the scope of their employment will be public domain so most of the material is probably OK, but is all of it?

Finally, under the law on the books, I believe it is illegal to make much of the material available, and hosting illegal content violates the AUP. (And could get Amazon in trouble). It is possible that under the Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers case that the First Amendment would override that.

I say "possible" because it doesn't seem at all certain to me. That case was largely, I seem to recall, about prior restraint, and it was kind of a fuzzy decision.

Amazon just wants to host stuff. If there is some serious question over whether it is legal or not, I don't think they want (or should be expected to want) to be the ones to deal with that fight--that's for whoever wants to actually publish the documents.

davidedicillo• 16 years ago

This is a 360 tour of the place http://www.bahnhof.se/panorama/

nkassis2• 16 years ago

I found the Tintin moon rocket in the conference room quite awesome ;p

gravaint• 16 years ago

Looks like a place that Jack Bauer would break into.

pigbucket• 16 years ago

"...one wonders why Swedish Bahnhof would take on the challenge of hosting a site that will probably be under permanent attack for the foreseeable future.

Unless it's for the PR value"

That's a good example of allowing one's imagination of possibilities to wander over very short distances. Is it that inconceivable that a company might be motivated by something other than the bottom line? Arvinjoar commented earlier on the principled character of the Bahnhof's founder: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1959961

potatolicious• 16 years ago

Indeed. It's a little depressing that we live in a world where someone driven by principles instead of profits is regarded as extraordinary.

Dove• 16 years ago

Such a sentiment says more about the speaker than the world.

grinich• 16 years ago

I think it has to do with the author/editors.

Most journalism today is driven by profits, not principles. Sites like this are practicing textbook yellow journalism, trying to grab eyeballs to save the sinking ship of newspapers. Principles and integrity are now so foreign an idea for them that it comes out in the writing.

Julian Assange and Wikileaks are muckrakers, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Directly, the exposed governments and corporations. But indirectly, also the titans of "journalism" and news.

Journalism is meant to push society, and right now Julian Assange is doing exactly that. WikiLeaks is like a new kid on the block, turning over rocks and standing up to bullies.

baconhammer• 16 years ago

In the reception area of that particular server hall, they have a small, wall-mounted box labeled "FRA collaboration point" (FRA being the Swedish equivalent of NSA, more or less). From that box, two cut cables are sticking out. :-)

bullseye• 16 years ago

As far as articles go, I'm not impressed with this one. Although I'd be willing to admit that my interest in all things Wikileaks is seriously waning.

That said, there was little to no information about the actual data center, other than a link to a Forbes article about the first time Wikileaks moved there. They even embedded the same video from that original article.

Throw in an offhand and speculative comment about Amazon bowing "to political pressure" and a few Flickr pictures and presto! I almost felt like I was reading another one of Shaun Gallagher's "I wrote this article with one mouse click" experiments.

tlack• 16 years ago

Can anyone with more technical knowledge comment on this facility's connectivity to the internet, and how damage-resistant that is? If someone were to forcibly take Wikileaks offline, I would think internet connectivity would be the easiest attack vector, especially if they're located in a remote bunker which probably limits their options.

joebananas• 16 years ago

Remote? It's located in (under) Stockholm.

JoachimSchipper5• 16 years ago

We're not quite at the level where anyone is going to risk war by throwing cruise missiles into a major metropolis just to shut down Wikileaks...

cosmicray3• 16 years ago

Back in the late 1960s, and early 1970s, AT&T built a series of nuke resistant bunkers. The typical specs were concrete walls 36" thick, self contained turbine generators, water and air purification, plus rations to last up to 6 months. Some of those facilities are still around and operating (including one not far from me). I would expect that the switching gear of todays vintage takes up much less space and power than it did in 1971. Back then the interconnections were via long-distance coxial cable and microwave. Today there are fiber huts adjacent to the bunker.

I wonder what AT&T uses all that extra floor space for now.

pak• 16 years ago

I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers. Here's one in Lower Manhattan that is 29 stories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street

They were likewise designed to withstand nuclear fallout. Because telephone switching equipment has shrunken over the years they now rent out some of the floor space as a hosted ultrasecure datacenter.

nkassis2• 16 years ago

That building looks like something right out of blade runner.

cosmicray3• 16 years ago

> I don't think you were referring to these, but there are actually a few windowless, fortified concrete skyscrapers in New York that were built as telephone switching centers.

Actually no. The ones I'm referring to were (usually) built way out in rural areas, where they were away from the expected blast area of a hit on a major city. The one I'm aware of is built mostly underground, then backfilled so that it looks like a natural hill (a hill with a concrete top, and a big microwave tower).

Some of these facilities were rumored to have ground entry points for a system called Combat Ciders ... http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/usa/c3i/combat_ciders.htm

Pfiffer• 16 years ago

> The floors are also unusually strong, designed to carry 200 to 300 pound per square foot (10 - 15 kPa) live loads.

This is pretty much the coolest thing I've seen all day. I'm not sure what kind of standards buildings are held up to in terms of load-per-foot-squared, but that seems like an awful lot to me. That building is incredible.

daten• 16 years ago

It looks like 2000 of those bunkers were sold back in 2002 for $25,000 each.

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/11/230203

Here's a map with links to pictures of 5 of the nuclear hardened sites.

http://coldwar-c4i.net/ATT_Project/index.html

rdl4• 16 years ago

You can also just buy old (ICBM) missile silos; unfortunately, they are often in pretty bad repair, flooded, and may contain PCBs or asbestos.

http://www.silohome.com/atlas_f_missile_silo_for_sale_ultima... is a particularly nice example of a residential conversion, though.

Moses Lake, WA has a site which got used for ToorCamp, a hacker conference, a couple years ago. http://joachimp.fotki.com/events/toorcamp/page4.html

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

> I wonder what AT&T uses all that extra floor space for now.

... to comply with the Patriot Act.

Retric• 16 years ago

I don't know about now, but my father spent Y2K in an AT&T bunker as "essential personnel." So my guess is they are probably still in use. Not necessarily because of the nuke resistant part so much as self contained with generators and on-site security measures.

mkramlich2• 16 years ago

Crypt anyone?

Just finished Stephenson's masterpiece last week.

I bet that's Randy in that last pic. ;)

rdl4• 16 years ago

Bahnhof is pretty amazing. They have great interior design too, almost like a movie set (although I haven't visited in person yet).

While for reasons of principle, hosting controversial content is great, and if it's legal in your jurisdiction, it is up to you if you want to do it, as a practical matter, a site getting >10Gbps DDoS while paying presumably close to nothing is going to potentially impair the usability of other sites in the datacenter. Even if you don't put profits above principle, you have a responsibility to your other customers to not fuck them over.

A pure colocation (vs. managed or hosting) facility in a legal to host jurisdiction, near or at a carrier hotel where you can cheaply buy bandwidth from a bunch of different providers (on their core networks), and with great filtering agreements in place with the upstreams, is probably the only way to go. The colocation facility is just renting you space and power, and it's a much more arms length relationship; you can rapidly turn up network connections from other providers within the facility, vs. your own building somewhere (where running fiber often requires digging up the streets).

Back in 2000 I did this with ~2Gbps of aggregate transit/peering to people inside London Telehouse, and 4xE1 + WiFi to the hosting location, with VPN over VSAT as a backup.

You want to be able to put "problem" customers on their own subnets, potentially on their own routers and even transit connections, to isolate them from the rest of your customers. Combined with the regulatory constraints, Stockholm and Amsterdam are probably the best places to do this right now (or SFBA if it's a customer who will not be a legal problem in the US).

woadwarrior01• 16 years ago

More pictures of the Bahnhof datacenter, from the pingdom blog. http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-de...

chrislloyd• 16 years ago

I think now is an appropriate time to mention "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth": http://baens-universe.com/articles/when_sysadmins_ruled_the_...

arethuza2• 16 years ago

No bunker is really completely nuke-proof - even Cheyenne mountain had multiple SS-18s with single 25 megaton warheads targeted at it - it would not have survived.

You might survive a near miss or fallout in a bunker - but in the age of precision delivered and/or high yield bombs nowhere is 100% safe.

ANH• 16 years ago

Yes, the author of the article must not have watched the video he linked to. The CEO of Bahnhof himself jocularly admits it wouldn't survive a direct hit.

Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks

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