Schöner Wohnen

While I was researching recently built exhibition spaces and thinking about what constitutes “creative space” I came across Wikileaks’ former server room in a mountain in Sweden. Apparently Wikileaks transferred their data there after being removed from the Amazon servers, but has since had to move from Sweden to France to Switzerland.

The former Swedish server room made the rounds in architecture magazines around 2010 for being absurdly fit for a James Bond movie. The Swedish internet company “Bahnhof” used to host Wikileaks: their offices are located within repurposed underground nuclear bunkers built during World War II, refurbished by the architect Albert France-Lanord. Konstantin Grcic’s iconic Chair One can be spotted in Wikileaks’s levitating situation room, as well as a kind of moon carpet, a version of a moon pillow that can be found on a wonderful website called “Oddity Mall” where—I promise—you will find all this year’s christmas presents.

I am not sure what the point of this is, except for the strange fact that apparently there is an aesthetics to data and that this aesthetics anticipates its own mythification by preemptively adopting a spy movie style reminiscent of the famously bad Batman movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Mr Freeze and Uma Thurman as Poison Ivy. Maybe living on the 12th floor has also made me more curious about what goes on underground.

Unfortunately another perfect christmas present has already been whipped up by bidder a***o for a mere US $33,000.00 on September 11 (no less) of this year: After Wikileaks moved their data elsewhere, Bahnhof decided to auction off the physical server, a Dell Poweredge R410 blade server, on Ebay.

This is their selling statement:

“In 2010 Wikileaks turned into a household name. The organization released almost 400,000 documents about the U.S. war in Iraq. Later the feat was repeated with 250,000 diplomatic cables. The releases took place via a server hosted by Bahnhof in Sweden. The notorious physical server that changed the world is now auctioned off by Bahnhof for the benefit of Reporters Without Borders.

– This is indeed the physical web server from which the leaked cablegate material was released, complete with hard drives, motherboard and everything! It can be plugged in and used immediately. We ourselves put it on a pedestal and displayed it as a museum item in our underground Thule Brunkow Ridge data center in central Stockholm, as a symbol for our values as a hoster and ISP. It constitutes a unique collector’s item. A couple of years ago foreign authorities would have bid a fortune to lay hands on this specific server, says Jon Karlung, CEO of Bahnhof.

Wikileaks chose “free speech ISP” Bahnhof for obvious reasons in 2010: As Sweden’s oldest independent ISP it had a tradition of never giving in to pressure from authorities to curtail free expression.

The contents of the server indirectly led to the rounding up of leaker Bradley Manning and to Julian Assange’s current condition: He took shelter in the Embassy of the Republic of Ecuador in London for fear of being extradited to the USA.

– We can of course prove to the buyer that the server was indeed Wikileaks’. We have the signature of Julian Assange on the hosting contract, where the ID of this particular server is noted. As CEO I talked to him myself a couple of times when he called to inquire about our services, says Jon Karlung.

The money from the auction goes to non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders and to 5july.org, the 5th of July Foundation that works for freedom of opinion and expression and for upholding the right to privacy on the Internet.

– We burn for those causes, so I invite high bidders, says Jon Karlung.

* For closer specification, see the page of the eBay auction. All hardware is original, including the hard disks. Those have however been erased according to the U.S. specification DoD 5220.22-M where every byte of the hard disk is overwritten several times. The original information cannot be recreated, not even by NSA.

Note: The physical server is owned by Bahnhof. Wikileaks rented the server as part of a hosting contract. It was never used for any other client than Wikileaks.”

What does this all mean? I don’t know. I can only say that according to his Ebay history, bidder a***o has since successfully bought three 7” vinyl LPs.