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The Cold War Bunker That Became Home to a Dark-Web Empire

Rejected submission by aristarchus at 2020-07-30 00:52:22 from the Tor, Tor, Gently down the DarkWeb dept.
Digital Liberty

In depth article on things of interest, in The New Yorker [newyorker.com] Magazine.

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the West German Army, the Bundeswehr, built a vast underground bunker near the town of Traben-Trarbach. It was five stories deep, had nearly sixty thousand square feet of floor space, and was designed to withstand a nuclear attack. Eighty days’ worth of survival provisions were stored inside, including an emergency power supply and more than a million litres of drinking water. You entered the facility through an air lock; the interior temperature was set to seventy degrees.

And then, it was put on the market.

In 2012, a foundation controlled by a fifty-three-year-old Dutchman named Herman-Johan Xennt proposed to buy the bunker complex. Xennt travelled to Traben-Trarbach to explain his plans to a closed session of the town council. He was a striking man, with a cascade of shoulder-length gray-blond hair, and wore a dark suit, which highlighted the pallor of his face. Xennt told the council that he intended to set up a Web-hosting business at the bunker complex, and promised to create as many as a hundred jobs for local people, but he was vague when pressed for details.

As you may have surmised already, it does not end well.

Xennt was formally indicted on April 6th. German authorities stated that he had “made all the business decisions” for CyberBunker, and described him as the head of a “criminal organization.” This depiction was a bit difficult to square with the stranger, more complex reality of Xennt. A patina of idealism, however misguided, seemed to be essential to him. A police officer who monitored him for several years said that Xennt’s seedier qualities were accompanied by a utopian outlook—“free Internet, freedom of speech, nobody controls what’s out there, stuff like that.” The officer conceded, “This is no bank heist. It’s not like he’s a billionaire.”

Interesting look at the common carrier status of abetting criminal activity on the internets. Involves libertarians.


Original Submission