Mail Online The vast cave, drilled into granite under the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm, houses dozens of computer servers used as storage by many companies.
Complete with a ‘floating’ conference room, suspended glass corridors, lunar landscape flooring, designer furniture, and even, intriguingly, German U-boat engines as back-up generators, all that is missing is the bleached-blond Assange himself, stroking a white cat.
WikiLeaks was hosted by internet retailer Amazon but it was kicked off its website following intense pressure from American politicians. Assange then used a French firm before being expelled from there as well. As a result, WikiLeaks has set up numerous ‘domain names’ in dozens of countries, each linked to one that keeps copies of the original files.
Assange has turned to Sweden because the country’s laws are some of the best in the world for protecting the work of freedom of speech campaigners. Under Swedish law, WikiLeaks cannot be prosecuted and neither can the people who pass it information.
Wikileaks is funded by a mixture of public donations, help from Assange’s wealthy patrons and, so far as anyone can tell, a fair bit by Assange himself. But the cost of this storage will be very little, because although Assange’s team have released several million documents, in data terms this is not a large amount. Everything WikiLeaks has in its possession could probably be stored on a high-capacity memory stick.
However, putting it into the trust of this set-up – which any self-respecting Bond villain would be proud of – must surely pander to Julian Assange’s huge ego.
With his eccentric personal life and air of mystery, the flamboyant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange seems to be doing his best to impersonate a James Bond villain. How appropriate, then, that he has chosen what looks like an 007 film set as the back-up store for the thousands of confidential emails and documents that have shaken the world. These pictures show the Pionen data centre, 100ft below ground in a former Cold War nuclear bunker, where all the WikiLeaks files are being kept
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The New New Internet Think whistle-blower, and you’ll more than likely conjure up an image of a government worker who wants to shed light on an internal problem or a moral dilemma. These days, however, the whistle-blower has morphed from a one-man band to an orchestra of many, sounding the horn about everything from classified information to embarrassing communications concerning world leaders.
In 1863, Congress passed the first whistle-blower law, the False Claims Act. In those days of the Civil War, fraud ran rampant, both in the north and the south: Nefarious contractors sold the Union Army sick horses and mules, defective weapons and food that had gone bad. To prevent this from happening, Congress decided to pass a law that would aid people in recovering what they had lost through fraudulent transactions, by suing on behalf of the government and getting paid a percentage of the recovery.
In 1912, the Lloyd-La Follette Act was passed, which made it the first protective legislation for whistle-blowers. The act additionally protected the right of federal employees to join unions. However, before the 1960s, businesses had broad autonomy in employee policies and could fire an employee without reason, according to Lilanthi Ravishankar.
Fast-forward to the 21st century: According to Dr. Roberta Ann Johnson’s A Piercing Look at Whistleblowing, after 9/11, patriotic whistle-blowers reported concerns about breaches of security. After California’s 2000 and 2001 electricity crisis, energy-sector whistle-blowers sought to expose system manipulation, and in Congress, auditors of private corporations testified on tax cheats. In the United States, more people blow the whistle than anywhere else in the world, according to Johnson.
