I’m not sure if this Wired News story about how to visit a top-secret nuclear site makes me feel better or worse about my own day-to-day challenges.

The first rule of Site R is: You do not talk about Site R. Or, as the security guidance about the Pentagon’s nuclear war bunker (AKA Raven Rock Mountain Complex, or RRMC), states: “Avoid conversations about RRMC with unauthorized personnel.” The other two rules of Site R are: “Do not confirm or deny information about RRMC to reporters or radio stations,” and “Do not post RRMC information on Internet web pages.”

We might suggest a fourth rule: do not send information about RRMC to reporters working on a travelogue about nuclear weapons.

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But our interest in Site R was piqued by an announcement that was posted in 2006 on the website of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), the Pentagon’s nonproliferation agency.

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If Site R is so gosh-darn secret, why did they post this notice, and more importantly, how did we get our grubby little mitts on documents relating to this conference, including an an informational overview, a “Welcome Package”, an agenda, security guidance for attendees, and a schedule of shuttles to Site R (which we are not posting)? Cunning subterfuge? A Deep Throat inside the mountain? A Freedom of Information Act request?

Sadly, we just asked for them. We e-mailed the contact person for the conference, provided our affiliation, and asked for the conference materials. We did say “please.”

Welcome to my life. If the Pentagon can’t keep people from posting information about Top Secret sites which only have value if they are complete secrets (Yeah, right!) on the Internet or disclosing it to journalists, what chance do I have?

Actually, I could excerpt and comment on pretty much the entire article, but they do a good enough job you should just read it for yourself. They discuss the obsolescence of bunkers both as a countermeasure (”if it’s not a secret, what good is it? A modern thermonuclear warhead would destroy it in an instant.”) and as a a base of operations for emergency response operations:

Are bunkers good for combating terrorism? Probably not. As the nation learned on September 11, what you want in the event of a terrorist attack is information: immediate, accurate and unfiltered. Site R, where government workers are stripped of their personal cell phones and PDAs, is arguably the worst place to be.

In fact, based on the conference agenda, the bunker is a problem in search of a solution:

So, what do bunker managers do at meetings like this? Judging from the conference agenda, they look for things to worry about: pandemics; electromagnetic pulse weapons; and biological attacks. But as one item on the agenda hinted — “Tunnel Collapse Briefing” — possibly the most dangerous threat to life in the bunker is the bunker itself.

This article is like a parable of the entire IT & IT Security industries. Even the people who supposedly know how to keep secrets don’t. We have tools that are only effective if they are a secret, but which we then must publicize so they can act as a deterrent. Much of the time, we are running around trying to find problems which match the solutions we have available, and even when we manage to get them up and running, we spend inordinate amounts of time trying to keep them from failing and taking the whole place down with themselves.

It’s only encouraging insofar as realizing you have a problem is the first step to fixing it.

Shhh, don’t tell anyone but that’s the decoy bunker. The real bunker is at .

I see Veryard was silenced before he could spill the beans. Allow me.

The real bunker is at …..

Site S.

Ah, should I add “ridicule” to my list of how to unravel secrecy, perhaps?