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Wikileaks Publishes 500,000 9/11 Pager Messages
An anonymous reader writes "Wikileaks is preparing to release 500,000 intercepted pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11 terrorist attacks. The messages show emergency services springing into action and computer systems sending automated messages as buildings collapse. Wikileaks implies this data came from an organised collection effort."
Every conspircay theorist in the world just simultaneously orgasmed. All those messages to pick through; I'm sure they'll be able to prove it was the US Government/Al-Qaeda/Joseph Fritzel/The Cookie Monster/Scientologists all along.
You can advertise in this sig from as little as £99.99 a month!
You still see them in the medical community (ER docs, nurses, etc), but that's about the only place I ever seen them nowadays.
What next 7 foot lizards are real now?
Yes.
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Pagers can be more reliable than TM. And a lot of people turn off their cell phone when they are sleeping. Ringing cell phones often aren't loud enough to wake you up anyway. Not everyone has a cell phone. (I don't) A lot of automated systems are still only able to do a broadcast-style alert to multiple pagers, not text messaging. (volunteer fire departments are good examples) Pagers can run a month or more on a single AA battery which increases their reliability. Lots of reasons to stick with pagers.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I have one!! I don't have a phone either. And I am in IT. And yes, the young-ins make fun of me.
I'm sure this will lead to rational debate, as well as this information being added to our view of those tragic events as a whole and will finally lay to bed some of the misconceptions that have surrounded the events of 9/11, rather than becoming the source for thousands of snippets of information that will get used in barely contextualized, ill-thought out, and poorly worded conspiracy theories.
Also, when you bring me my pony, make sure it's pink.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
You do realize that 9/11 occurred over eight years ago. Even if pagers didn't exist now, they did exist then.
This seems to be a really good move on the part of Wikileaks. Its one of those things, where in the digital age, that information lasts for a long time, but I think the significance here is that this data was collected within a day of the attacks. What this does is give us a clearer picture of lots of things, including emergency response methods and efficiency, the way people react to catastrophic events, and information that may have previously been unknown, and things like that. There has been a lot of controversy surrounding Sep 11. and simple data being released to the public is always a good thing. Yes, there will be both ends of the extremist section, both conspiracy theorists and their counterparts, who may try to find specific data to backup their preconceived theories, but its still a good thing. Just browsing over to the TFA and their shortened excerpt, I found one very interesting message.."WTC HAS BEEN HIT BY AN AIRPLANE AND A BOMB." This does nothing as far as credibility and in situations like that people are known to panic and see and hear things that aren't there, but regardless, it will be interesting to see where this leads. Data by itself sometimes can be useless, but in context can have implications you don't expect. My personal opinions are far to complex to list here, but people should learn how to use logic and think for themselves.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Who needs to make backups anymore? The NSA has all your data and communications stored for you. Maybe they should sell backup services to fix the budget deficit.
Plus they are the only comm devices allowed in classified facilities.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
"computer systems sending automated messages as buildings collapse" 8:46 a.m. - "Ow, something hit me!" 8:47 a.m. - "Anyone else smell smoke?" 8:47 a.m. - "Admin has logged off" 10:28 a.m. - "System failure"
2001-09-11 09:05:13 Metrocall [0902425] C ALPHA HQFPSCORP2:Backup Exec Job Failed
That one brings a tear to my eye.
In God We Trust, Others We Monitor
I thought pagers used the cell networks a la text messages; indeed, I thought a pager was essentially a dedicated text message device.
I was in NYC on Sept 11 and the only thing that *was* working that day was the Internet...phones, both land line and cell were unavailable. We were trying to contact my brother-in-law who lived in Manhattan (we were in Brooklyn) and every phone we tried, including the pay phone down the street (still had 'em back then...) gave us the "fast busy signal", indicating "We didn't even try to make your call..."
So we spent the rest of the day IM'ing people as that was the only way to verify who was where. Bad times...bad times.
Tech related: intercepted private pager messages from a variety of sources. Someone managed to collate these en-masse and distribute them.
Politically related (Slashdot has a politics section): suggestion of interception and storage of pager messages on a grand scale beyond that needed for operational reasons (this is 24-hours worth, don't forget, from several sources).
Privacy related: A release of otherwise private information, including private communications between ordinary people, presumably gathered direct from telco's, to a website known for doing that with politically-sensitive material. If nothing else, this shows you where your "private communications" end up when you're texting something erotic to your girlfriend... not "analysed", not "anonymised", just saved onto a disk somewhere at the telco for a random person to collect and leak to the Internet.
I think it's relevant and I have zero interest in 9/11, conspiracy theories, or even most of the things the US does.
For that text pager message: "Finished arming the detonating device, Herr Cheney".
After the next major event it will be the twitter stream which will be subject to such analysis
I'd question the ethics of it. The very existence of this database is of huge political and social importance, thus falling under Wikileaks' remit, but by putting it into the public domain they're infringing the privacy of the citizens involved even further. You can bet all the TLAs, not to mention police forces, lawyers, insurance companies, and so on are having fun with it now it's in public view.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Can there be moderation for editors please? I love how comments can be modded to oblivion, but useless editors and stories can't.
If you log in then you can hide stories from particular editors (like that newbie CmdrTaco). Also, you have the chance to mod a story down using the Firehose before it gets approved.
Finally, there is also the option of just not clicking on the link if you are not interested in the story. Woah, I've gone too far there!
You've never known anybody who is on call? SMS is unreliable, and if you're paying someone to be on-call, you want their service to be reliable. You don't want the message "Critical production server down, administrator needed" to be delayed 15 minutes because of some SMS issue. It doesn't matter nearly as much if "LOL, at movies" gets delayed, but the on-call message can literally be worth thousands of dollars per minute it is delayed. Of course on-call folks have cell phones too, but the pager tends to be the first method of communication employed.
I read the internet for the articles.
Ringing cell phones often aren't loud enough to wake you up anyway.
Some are. Mine is. I used to have an old LG phone that sounded exactly like an old fashioned landline phone, the kind with a real bell in it. It was loud enough to wake you up, too.
I use my phone for an alarm clock.
Free Martian Whores!
At one place I worked years ago, we used pagers. As cell phones became more popular, we stared switching over to them. Every once in a while, we'd test to see which ones worked better. Text messages emailed to the phones were usually faster than the alphanumeric pagers. In time, we ditched the pagers entirely, since they were slower to receive, and we felt silly carrying around too many devices.
For completeness of coverage, the messages were sent to 5 different people via two methods each. Usually it was email and phone. If there was an emergency, and no admins checked in, the phone calls started going out. Most events were handled in 5 minutes, even if the primary person was unavailable. That wasn't bad considering not everything happened during normal working hours. Actually, most emergencies didn't happen during normal working hours. That would have made them too easy. :)
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Pagers still exist?
These are texts and pages from 9/11/2001, which is some 8 years ago.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
SMS is unreliable? Where?
Unreliable as in you get no guarantees if and when a message will actually be delivered. Try to find a carrier anywhere that offers you a contract with an SLA on SMS delivery. Granted, you won't often run into problems with SMS, but if you are bound by an SLA with a customer, you'd better have your underpinning contracts (yay for ITIL terminology) at the same level as that SLA.
Wikileaks is simply an outlet for sensitive information. So what you're implying is that their privacy wasn't infringed by whichever entity collected the information, but by Wikileaks? That doesn't make any sense. I do see your point, but I think the potential benefits by far outweigh the cons of such a release. Now that the data is out there, nothing can be done to get it back. On top of this, Wikileaks has some serious credibility when it comes to their methods and what and when they decide to release, I'm sure their lawyers have thought out the consequences and variations thoroughly. Their statement as to the source is “While we are obligated ... to protect our sources, it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11.” If anything, THIS is what people SHOULD be mad about, that a (potentially governmental) organization has been collecting this data without their consent in the first place.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
I still see them in use for certain IT folks in the defense industry. The key is that they will permit them into secure facilities, as the old one-way versions cannot transmit.
Read the Project for a New American Century's statement of principles here. Now read the PNAC letter to Clinton on Iraq here. Note that Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Jeb are all big supporters. Now read about their plans here.
The choice quote is: "Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor."
My theory is that they had intelligence stating that the attack was going to happen. Just as many suspect happened at Pearl Harbor, they deliberately stood down defenses in order to get the catalyzing event that they need in order to enact foreign military operations. They may have done this truly believing it was in the best interests of the country, but the truth needs to come out, and those responsible punished.
I don't think they knew that the towers would collapse. It explains the look on George when he was first told we were under attack, and the look on his face during his address.
I've never met anyone who had a pager, I've never seen a pager in real life or heard of anyone using one outside the US.
Your experience must be limited to geographical areas with pervasive cell network coverage.
I live in an area of NH with moderate coverage, but prefer to head up to the mountains for R&R. But I'm on-call, so I carry a pager, it works nearly everywhere (cell phone start working again well above tree-line).
I use procmail to duplicate messages to pager + SMS - between the two coverage is nearly 100%.
Pager is $15mo for alpha paging (longer messages than SMS) and my pager (Motorola design made in China) runs about two months on a AA. It will give me a warning about the battery a few days before it gets really low, and then beep at me annoyingly for a couple days before the battery is dead.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Was Reichstag fire just as unbelievable as 9/11? It was done to further gov't agenda.
From Wikipedia: The Reichstag fire... is seen as pivotal in the establishment of Nazi Germany.
Don't think gov'ts now aren't capable of the same thing, or that they aren't doing it.
But then it's much more comfortable to bury one's head in the sand.
I have a pager as a workplace emergency responder. I too have the messages sent as text to my (private) cell phone, and I receive them as a work email.
In general my phone and the email arrive simultaneously, followed about a minute later by the pager.
That said, at least once the phone text message stopped working when my cell phone provider changed something. At our last ERT group meeting last week, when we did a test page, at least two members did not get the texts (including one who had the week prior during an actual emergency). He was on AT someone just next to him also on AT&T got the page.
Ultimately, we have a big team and could probably afford a few members missing the texts if we switched away from pagers entirely. However, after-hours emergencies are triggered by the security company rather than the building receptionists, and the third-party security company's system can only send numeric mass pages, not emails, so we can't switch.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
There are no dead zones
Not true. They're RF devices and suffer the same limitations as any other radio receiver. With most pagers, they are not bidirectional and so if you are in a dead zone the person sending the message does not get any notification that the delivery failed or was delayed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
SMS is more reliable in this sense than a pager message. If a receiving mobile is out of radio range then it will be buffered for retransmit. Pagers are receive-only devices and don't send acknowledgements, so if they are out of range when the message is sent the message is permanently lost. My father used to have a pager but his company switched to sending SMS because at least then he'd get messages late, while previously he would sometimes never get them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Oh. You're THAT guy.
Everywhere. The protocols used don't provide for guaranteed delivery.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
All the TLAs almost certainly had access to it already. Putting it in the public domain means that the public now has more of a clue about the amount of information the TLAs have on them. If it leads to more opposition to things like the USAPATRIOT Act then it will have served a beneficial purpose.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'd question the ethics of it. The very existence of this database is of huge political and social importance, thus falling under Wikileaks' remit, but by putting it into the public domain they're infringing the privacy of the citizens involved even further. You can bet all the TLAs, not to mention police forces, lawyers, insurance companies, and so on are having fun with it now it's in public view.
Exactly- and especially true when you browse through and see messages like " " Andre-are you at work today? Gimme a call - 301-555-5555. Gerry". (number obviously changed in my repost) There's no doubt that these people will be targeted for 9/11-related scams and other obnoxious behavior in short order. You think Gerry's not already getting a call from someone looking to cash in, or who just thinks they're being funny?
If this list were filtered so that it was just automated systems, non-personal, etc , that's fine -- but doing it in this way is just opening the door for all the abuse and stupidity that we're capable of. As it is - it's a gross breach of privacy, published in a way that ensures that there will be no accountability for any abuse of personal information found in it.
2001-09-11 08:58:33 Skytel [002399634] A ALPHA Initial reports indictate that AAL11, B767, after initial hijacking on flight from BOS-LAX, has crashed into the side of the World Trade Center in NY. ATCSCC/bl
That was an insane amount of detail at a point when everyone else was going: "It's possible something may have happened somewhere."
7 Skytel [002380116] B ALPHA Frank.Heisler@ubsw.com|FW: Exchange IT Event - CANCELLED| -----Original Message----- From: Bucher, Gisela Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 2:54 PM To: DL-Perot-STAM-Permanent Cc: Subject: Exchange IT Event - CANCELLED
This confuses me greatly. On one hand I utterly despise the terrorists for what they did...but I really hate Exchange too...
There's no place like
This, too, seems to be a peculiarly US problem. I've heard of many many more lost and delayed SMSs in the US than in Europe. Perhaps that's because Europe has been making significant use of text messaging for far longer, so the systems there are now more reliable?
Perhaps US users just have lower expectations, so cell networks can get away with such things?
Agreed, another side effect of the dead zone with a two way pager is the same page will come to the pager multiple times at random time intervals. It makes it confusing because you don't know if the person paged you again or if it was a repeat. I've been burned both way with that, I've called clients an hour later when they were sleeping and I've ignored what I thought were repeats missing an attempt by a client to contact me. Both times I had to explain myself by comparing my house location on Google maps to the Skytel coverage map to my boss and the client. I thought it was odd that people really thought that a pager just worked everywhere. What made the whole thing even more frustrating was every time I was on call I explained to everyone that it did not work at my house and had the emails to prove I had told them.
Yes, I am a New Yorker. Yes, I was in the city that day. My Cellphone was useless, probably due to a combination of losing a major relay point, and everybody in town trying to use their phones at the same time. Landlines were flakey (probably due to losing a major chunk of the infrastructure). My Obsolete and Archaic text pager kept working. (I wonder if the pager "I'm OK, R U OK?"messages I exchanged with my sister are in this archive?)
http://visualizecommonsense.com/
I searched a whole bunch of these for the word "fuck" and couldn't find a single instance. I find it hard to believe that nobody got a page from their girl/boy friend saying why don't you come over and fuck me or a message saying holy fuck a plane just hit the WTC.
That's just the opposite of my experience.
Several years ago I was working on a contract where I was frequently on call, and carried a pager.
After a while, they upgraded my responsibilities, and decided that the calls I would be answering after hours were too important to allow delays and issued me a cell phone.
The main difference is that when you call someone on the cell phone, you know immediately if they've gotten the call - with a pager, there's no feedback until the person locates a phone and calls you back. So you don't know if the person got your page and will be calling you back soon, or if you should escalate to the next person on the list.
Communication with a cell phone is just about as reliable, and always faster.
Oh, yeah, and you can call from any phone. See, in addition to SMS, many cell phones also allow voice communication.
If the masses can keep you down, you're not the Ubermensch.
WTC 7 was NOT a hardened building. It was constructed in the early 80s as a run of the mill office building. The only thing unique about it was the unusual arrangement of the load-bearing members. This was needed because the thing was constructed on top of a massive utility vault. The Emergency Command Center was shoehorned into the building and not everyone thought the location made any sense for obvious reasons. (It was located there AFTER the '93 bombing)
As for the collapse, it looks "controlled" because buildings don't usually fall down for any reason other than controlled demolition. That's the only point of reference most people have. That aside, physics ensure that buildings tend to fall straight down, or twist a little and then fall straight down.
But if you want more in-depth detail about how stresses were distributed and how the building was comprimised, then check out this link or or this one.
Pagers operate at a lower frequency than cell phones, the likelihood of a dead zone is lower.
I'm clueless as to how pagers work, but SMS does not have guaranteed delivery.
Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS#GSM
"Message delivery is best effort, so there are no guarantees that a message will actually be delivered to its recipient and delay or complete loss of a message is not uncommon, particularly when sending between networks."
What a depressingly stupid machine.
Slashdot in a nutshell.