Inside the Fortified, Nuke-Proof Bunker that's Now Hosting Wikileaks
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
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
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.
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.
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).
I wonder what AT&T uses all that extra floor space for now.
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.
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
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.
Most datacenters which are in excess of that were either originally built for telcos (crazy battery banks for the DC plant), or were industrial (e.g. the TANK FACTORY in SF which became 360 Spear/365 Main).
Behold, racks of crossbar switches (from one such AT&T facility). I'm glad these things are pretty much a relic of the past. I suspect the weight of those racks was one reason for the floor load ratings. http://long-lines.net/places-routes/MoundsOK/DSC00536A.html
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://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
http://www.dtmag.com/dive-usa/locations/TexasMissileSiloTX.h...
... to comply with the Patriot Act.
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.
I imagine the day somebody figures out how to make a HTTP-compatible P2P network that allows you to browse web pages hosted on bittorrent will be the day WikiLeaks moves to P2P.
There's no reason they can't do both.
They may want to verify the authenticity of the documents to avoid fake leaks. They may also want to edit some documents to remove data that would put individual persons at risk, like they did with Cablegate.
Doing this takes time, and may not be short-circuited easily.
They can't simply encrypt the files, release them using P2P, and then edit them / check them for authenticity. I guess it would be useful as an insurance, though.
And if something happened to them...well it's going to be discovered anyways.
Well, no. Competently done crypto is uncrackable for all practical purposes without side-channel attacks. Or, maybe, quantum computers (RSA; but why would you use RSA for this?)
Note that I'm talking crypto: the OpenSSL people seem quite able to make all sorts of mistakes, but it's almost never the crypto itself that is at fault. (Today's news: a workaround for Netscape's stupidities apparently allows attackers to downgrade to a worse protocol suite in certain cases. Stupid bug, but not crypto per se.)
So yes, there are errors, but publishing something AES-encrypted and giving away, say, half the key doesn't tell us anything about those.
e.g. Some asymmetric so that I could encrypt something easily but then require someone who wants to decrypt the message to perform 100 Trillion operations to decrypt it?
It may be possible to reduce variance in cracking times by requiring multiple cracks (use a secret sharing scheme to break up the "real" key in chunks; encrypt each chunk in a crackable way.)
Maybe send them a email?
As for the visibility of Wikileaks, I think that what matters is that journalists get the files. That's how most people hear of them. So it wouldn't really matter if they were released in a distributed P2P fashion, as long as the files are easy to find and recognize (f.ex. Wikileaks-01-01-2010-003.PGP or whatever).
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5728614/Wikileaks__insurance...
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...
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.
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.
Just finished Stephenson's masterpiece last week.
I bet that's Randy in that last pic. ;)