
Amazon Atlas: The “Highly Confidential” locations of Amazon's data centers - jolesf
https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/
======
morpheuskafka
How come WikiLeaks is distributing this? I don't see any meaningful connection
to government transparency or even corporate transparency... this has nothing
to do with abuse of power, it is completely normal and rightful for a company
to keep its infrastructure locations secret. Some of this could be found
through public records, etc. and that fine to post, but internal operating
procedures are not.

Sure, it's fun to look at. But the only people who will really benefit from
this being leaked are AWS competitors and malicious actors intending to
disrupt international communications.

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sschueller
Doesn't the CIA have a contract with Amazon to use AWS?

~~~
azinman2
So?

~~~
pageandrew
That is the connection to government transparency.

The CIA is storing massive amounts of our data somewhere, so shouldn't we have
the right to know where?

~~~
danvasquez29
I don't believe so, not if the risk to the general public is great enough.

~~~
staticautomatic
The public is far more at risk with the CIA around to begin with, so long as
it continues to carry out bullshit interventions around the world that so
often come back to bite us. The primary impediment to enumerating these risks
is the CIA's lack of transparency.

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TomK32
"Top 10 most boring building in the most boring part of town with no food
truck for miles."

[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-
web-services-data-center/423147/)

Seriously, besides the DoD contract angle, what's the point in publishing this
data?

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neurobashing
As a resident of Ashburn, VA the locations are hardly a secret. Just about
everyone in the area who cares to know, knows. I drive past the place in the
header image of
[https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-
web-services-data-center/423147/) on the way home from the Sterling Wal-Mart.
My next door neighbor is an HVAC tech for Amazon, and he's only barely
secretive about where they are (to me anyway). Everyone at Old Ox and Crooked
Run breweries seems to know, etc.

~~~
Terretta
Agree.

The Google Maps tiles are labeled “Amazon Datacenter Complex” or such on at
least one cluster. I don’t mean Wikileak’s pins, I mean the public rendered
tiles.

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mtmail
The address in Palo Alto is right off University Avenue behind the Walgreens.
The one in Luxembourg is an office building as well. I don't see much value
unless one wants to destabilize internet infrastructure.

~~~
halbritt
Most of the ones in the Bay Area are, to my knowledge relatively small
"retail" colo spaces.

200 Paul, 528 Bryant is PAIX, 11 Great Oaks is Equinix. SV2 got shut down
years ago. I don't remember AWS ever being in 3000 Corvin, which is a tiny,
poorly powered data center.

As an example of how old this data is, I reported to someone in 2014 time
frame that led data center operations for some AWS regions including North
America. He told stories of vacating 200 Paul, I'm guessing in the pre-2010
timeframe.

In any case, none of this information is that big of a secret. It's all in the
public record. It's pretty hard to build something that size and with that
degree of power consumption without others noticing. There's generally plenty
of news media about such things:

[http://www.eastoregonian.com/eo/local-
news/20170317/amazon-k...](http://www.eastoregonian.com/eo/local-
news/20170317/amazon-keeps-building-data-centers-in-umatilla-morrow-counties)

~~~
rconti
I thought the datacenters on Corvin were newer; I've spent a lot of time at
the Walsh Ave ones next to Nvidia and Corvin stuff looked new.

~~~
halbritt
I just checked and you are correct. I guess they probably leveled the old
building, which was 3030 Corvin. Anyone that was there in the mid 2000s
remembers when Facebook heated the place up and they had box fans every where,
an extra generator parked in the parking lot, etc.

~~~
rconti
Makes sense, I never visited that area until a job I started in 2011.

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ubersoldat2k7
Great! Now I'll know where to go when I need to restart my EC2 instance.

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amatecha
The timing on the release of this information is very _interesting_,
considering:

"Currently, Amazon is one of the leading contenders for an up to $10 billion
contract to build a private cloud for the Department of Defense. [...] Bids on
this contract are due tomorrow."

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bogomipz
>"In some cases, Amazon uses pseudonyms to obscure its presence. For example,
at its IAD77 data center, the document states that “Amazon is known as
‘Vandalay Industries’ on badges and all correspondence with building
manager”."

This made me laugh. Vandalay Industries is a reference to a very funny
Seinfeld episode. Someone at AWS has a good sense of humor:

[http://seinfeld.wikia.com/wiki/Vandelay_Industries](http://seinfeld.wikia.com/wiki/Vandelay_Industries)

~~~
blakesterz
Seems like using ‘Vandalay Industries’ is a terrible idea. Doesn't everyone*
know that anything called ‘Vandalay Industries’ is an obvious fake?

* Maybe anyone over a certain age? Do people under... I dunno, 40? 30?... watch much Seinfeld? Seems like TV shows are largely generational things... I'm aware of MASH and Dick Van Dyke, but I wouldn't get the semi obscure jokes from those shows since they were on when I was super young.

~~~
SpicyLemonZest
I'd guess the goal is more to keep this list from coming up in public records
searches than to serve as a truly effective disguise. I can't imagine the
datacenter employees are expected to lie to everyone about where they work.

~~~
saalweachter
Which reminds me of the article on HN a few months/years back about how you
could identify most spies because they all appeared the same way in embassy
listings (which was all public information).

With a lot of things like this, you're really squatting at a particular point
in the effort-reward curve. You're not going to make something of this scale
absolutely secret; there are hundreds of people involved, deliveries of
material over years, and ongoing services. It's not like Amazon can bury the
workers on site after they finish their work, like people always claim the
pharaohs of old did but probably didn't.

But being a _little_ secret might solve some problems, so if there are low-
effort ways to make it a little secret, you go ahead and do those. You make a
shell company, even if it has a stupid name. You don't tell contractors or
delivery people who the real owner is. You don't drive up to the building in a
car that says "AMAZON1" on the license plate.

It's not going to keep the place totally secret, but if it makes a few things
easier - you get fewer break-ins, you have fewer troubles with the local
planning boards, whatever - it's probably worth the tiny bit of effort.

(Also, did you know that Dick Van Dyke is still alive and active? He's in the
new Mary Poppins.)

~~~
bogomipz
>"Which reminds me of the article on HN a few months/years back about how you
could identify most spies because they all appeared the same way in embassy
listings (which was all public information)."

Might you have a link to this post?

~~~
saalweachter
"How to Spot a Spook":
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14335310)

------
hkai
Seems to be outdated. One of the folks named in the document as responsible
for a China site is not working for Amazon since a few years ago and is now at
Google Cloud, according to his linkedin.

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N0RMAN
Again you can clearly see WikiLeaka mission: Randomly attacking and
potentially damaging businesse.

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hacknat
Their justification for releasing this is crap.

~~~
giarc
But they made a 'game' of it! /s

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have_faith
Like others, I'm confused to the reasoning of the leak. What public good does
it promote? What can anyone do with this information that is productive?

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Akinato
I agree with many of the others. I don't see how this information could be
useful for anything except someone with malicious intent.

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mikehotel
The leaked document is from October 2015.

It’s missing new regions in Ohio, Mumbai, Seoul, Canada, Paris, and GovCloud.

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mvanbaak
This release shows how desperate wikileaks is. Very old and outdated data that
is far from secret. We should all simply ignore them nowedays, thank them for
what they did in the past and tell them to move on. The only reason I see why
they published is: get some new media attention because tomorrow they might
get a contract with Y who we dont like blabla.

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booleandilemma
Wikileaks, if you leak _everything_ indiscriminately like this you’re like
that gossipy person no one likes or trusts.

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romed
The most shocking thing in this release is that amazon internally uses Twiki.
Happy hacking, black hats!

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kylegordon
The metadata of the PDF doesn't seem to include a date, but it's not
particularly new. It doesn't have the London or Paris availability zones
listed.

~~~
lavezzi
Doesn't it say late 2015 in the article?

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juscallmerico
..geo-awareness fail? or faith in bombing range containment?

[https://imgur.com/HcVFJ0K](https://imgur.com/HcVFJ0K)

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Upvoter33
Amazon competitors, like Google and Microsoft, already study these things
through their mapping products. <yawn>

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amai
Interesting. A company which wants my real name as a customer is using fake
company names to hide away.

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erentz
This looks old. It doesn’t include their Columbus data centers for example.

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ape4
Would it be possible to find the general location by checking ping times?

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expathacker
Not the most exciting, or revealing of leaks. Less interesting, then, say,
their leaks of Turkish dessert recipes[0]. Great attempt at clickbait though!

Compare the locations with
[https://www.internetexchangemap.com/](https://www.internetexchangemap.com/)
and you'll see that most of these are just the natural locations for
datacenters. Most of these locations are within a few kilometers, sometimes
within a few hundred meters, of other commercial datacenters.

They generally fall within: Close to major population and finance centers with
affordable power, abundant fiber, and local/state governments willing to give
subsidies... like every other datacenter.

0\.
[https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/757649656650297345](https://twitter.com/zeynep/status/757649656650297345)

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ucaetano
A lot of the locations look more like POPs, not data centers. The multiple in
Brazil are just coloc and meet-me sites run by local companies (UOL, Algar,
TIVIT).

What a shitty service, WikiLeaks...

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patrickg_zill
This in no way harms Amazon in terms of security, though it may have a PR
implication or possibly allow others to take Amazon to task in some way.

Security by obscurity cannot be relied upon.

~~~
MaxBarraclough
Well, Amazon had a very deliberate policy of keeping this stuff secret, and
went to some lengths to keep it that way.

I agree it's hardly a death-knell for them, it's more of a hiccup, but they
didn't want this to happen.

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azinman2
I’ve lost all respect for Wikileaks. How about actually leaking documents on
day, I dunno, how the Chinese government is trying to brainwash Uighurs and
erase their culture and religion? Instead, it’s always the US that’s been the
bad guy, and now it’s not even really the government directly. There’s no
cultural suppression or a larger public benefit from knowing where amazon data
centers are located.

What a joke.

~~~
Apfel
You're assuming that anyone with these sorts of documents:

1) wants to leak them (most of the Chinese people who I've met in China,
especially those who work in a government or military capacity, will bend over
backwards to defend China from any level of perceived foreign criticism)

2) has the capability to leak them (most Chinese people are unlikely to know
much about Wikileaks)

~~~
creaghpatr
Pretty safe to assume wikileaks will not show up in Google Dragonfly searches.

