9/11 pager messages released on Wikileaks Over half a million intercepted pager messages sent on 11 September 2001 are being released by Wikileaks. The messages began appearing at 3am and will continue being released in order until 3am tomorrow. Early messages were mostly server status updates and the likes of "NATALIE NEEDS SOME HELP ON HER SLIDE...THANKS IN ADVANCE …
That site should be ashamed. Those texts were never meant to be publicized. They were private correspondence between private citizens who had no reason to believe that these jackals would come along nearly a decade later and publicise these. This is entirely a promotional gimmick and is one of the most distasteful things I've ever seen. What's even worse is that they left the people's phone numbers visible in many of the messages, which means that they'll start getting prank calls from deranged psychos. Absolutely sickening.
Surely rather than be disgusted, you should find it grounding. If it serves any purpose, this sort of thing should remind us that regardless of the political and ideological clashes that led to 9/11, and ignoring the global shit-storm that followed it, whatever your views on Bush's war on terror, that day was a day when a lot of ordinary people lost their lives or had them irrevocably changed. Ordinary people who'd just got into work, had their coffee, maybe just started checking their emails and prepared for the daily trudge, with only the prospect of going home to their loved ones to keep them from going crazy. Suddenly, through no fault of their own, the world exploded.
Everything that has followed was a result of that day. Almost a decade later it's really easy for those who weren't there to think of it as just another event; to get blinded by the big picture and forget to look at all the little ones.
Something definitely eerie about reading these messages. Just hits you that these are/were people, just normal people, going about their normal everyday business, then suddenly this huge event happens that just sweeps through all their lives, affecting it n so many ways. The very short message lengths force your mind to start filling the possible missing details.
I stopped after a few pages, just seemed to too ghoulish to continue reading.
Contrast the clinical detachment of seeing the data lines goin down at Cantor Fitzgerald, with the increasingly desperate messages sent when someone hasn't called for an hour, to the multiple medication reminders sent from an HIV clinic.
It may not have changed everything, as some would have us believe, but it certainly altered millions of lives in countries around the world for a very long time to come.
"breach of trust"? I don't think these were leaked by the pager companies but are instead just captured out of the air where they are sent unencrypted on known frequencies with a PC and a radio scanner.
I'm not saying it's not a breach of privacy, but very unlikely to be on the part of some unscrupulous person working at a telecoms firm.
Steve.
Most pager messages are (were? Does anyone still use pagers?) transmitted openly in cleartext on a radio frequency that anyone with a cheap receiver can listen to. Privacy isn't built in to the system or expected.
In the case of this leak, I doubt it was an amateur due to the volume and range of networks. Only a government agency would have the resources to collate such volumes of data. This, in my opinion, is a more interesting privacy issue - not who leaked the data, but who was collecting and analysing it all to begin with.
Totally agree with the 'Conspiraloons' comment. Anyone that questions the actions of our leaders and pays heed to vulgar "evidence" and "motive" is clearly a loon and is probably evil too. Either way they deserve to be socially ostracised. Now I'm off to hunt down communists, terrorists and Jews safe in the knowledge that my socially approved "opinion" is "right". You're either patriotic, good and with me, or you're probably French.
Yes, very eerie, odd. The effect is a bit like the opening of the Matrix, the mix of tones and voices in which two suddenly become clear. In this case the last comforting scraps of digital normality from a world that changed irrevocably a few minutes later.
In all the things I've read or seen on Sep 11th, I think this is actually the most poignant, and in many ways emphasises the very individual human nature of what happened.
I'm sure reading the material is depressing (unless like some posters above who're apparently too busy jacking off over it). Not half as depressing to me as the fact that someone felt it appropriate to publish it all.
Someone above mentioned that there was no expectation of privacy where pagers were concerned? Horseshit. How many ordinary people using the things actually knew that? And even if you were one of the more tech-literate users at that point, who was dimly aware that some nearby hobbyist (or the feds) could access your comms if they cared to, would you expect them to end up as part of a ghoulish/mawkish public spectacle like this?
Most of today's Reg commentards regularly shit bricks over the merest whiff of their personal comms being snooped by anyone, let alone published online for the edification of the world at large. *Please* explain to me how the external context of the day's events makes that okay, as opposed to a thousand times worse?
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