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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."
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'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.
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.
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.
The NORAD tapes, which were released long ago proved that there was a conspiracy by The Pentagon to lie to the 9/11 Commission and the American people. The 9/11 Commission had a closed meeting deciding whether or not to charge Air Force officials with perjury but chose not to because "it wouldn't be good for the country."
John Farmer, senior counsel on the 9/11 Commission said, "at some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened [during 9/11]"
6 of the 10 Commissioners have come out saying that they were lied to and that the report is not accurate.
http://patriotsquestion911.com/
“More than one-quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Report refer to CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives subjected to the now-controversial interrogation techniques,” writes former NBC producer Robert Windrem in The Daily Beast. “In fact, information derived from the interrogations was central to the 9/11 Report’s most critical chapters, those on the planning and execution of the attacks.”
We've been lied to about 9/11 from day one. It needs to be investigated further. If 6 out of the 10 Commissioners are distancing themselves from the report by saying they were lied to something isn't right. Burying your head deeper into the sand won't help.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
"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"
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.
A. A concerted effort by the Government and Department of Defence, and related military bodies conspiring together to launch an attack on the US people in order to further the aims of the Government and selected private corporations and individuals.
Or...
B. A concerted effort by members of the Government and Department of Defence, and related military bodies to cover up their own inadequecies in being able to deal with an attack by a small number of persons against several targets using simplistic weapons, causing a massive over reaction over the next few years, and resulting in the inability of the largest military might in the world to subdue a country that has barely hit the 19th Century.
Yes, there probably was a lie surrounding 9/11, but its almost certainly not the juicy one people are fantasising about...
For that text pager message: "Finished arming the detonating device, Herr Cheney".
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.
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
Can't I have both?
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
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.
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.
Follow the money....
If you wanted the USA to have the tallest building in the world again, where would you put it? Would you build it in some developing city that couldn't support the occupancy of the building to make money? Montgomery Alabama? Little Rock Arkansas? No....
You would build it in the most populace cities. The largest cities that can support that kind of building and still make money off of it are all out of land. So, what is someone to do... Knock down some of the existing buildings and build a bigger one. Do you know what the cost would be to bring down an existing building in New York? One can only imagine. Do you know what it would take to get it approved through the city council?
Come up with some terror threat, and bring down the buildings. No fussing with all the red tape. Jesse Ventura is very vocal in saying that with all his demolition experience in the Navy Seals, to him the buildings were detonated.
Do you know how extremely hard it is to bring down a building completely vertical? Just watching some of the shows on the Discovery channel will tell you that. If that were the case, demolition crews from now on would be using airplanes instead of the weeks if not months of preparing a building to come down.
So, now there is space in the most populated city in the US to build the worlds tallest building, the American public even get to foot the bill for building it and the American Government gets the war in Iraq that they have been hoping for even if it is the longest stretch ever to connect the two.
Also to me there has to be something magic about an airplane disappearing into a 6 foot wide hole in the pentagon.
If this was nothing but terrorism, the three buildings would have been built back by now 8 years later. Atleast one of them.
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.
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
It's mostly because you have a gross misunderstanding of how the military works. When something gets fucked up, somebody is responsible for the fuck up. While that statement at first makes you say, "Well, duh!" you need to understand how it functions in the military. That statement is an absolute truth. There are no "whoops, nobody's fault" moments in the military. If something fucked up, SOMEBODY fucked up, and therefore, SOMEBODY will pay. Usually an officer is in charge, a relatively minor fuck up might be a slap on the wrist. A moderate fuck up, or a string of minor ones will result in a bad evaluation report which will prevent your promotion, and essentially make you a dead man walking. Major fuck ups are the end of your career. There isn't a chart somewhere delineating all the fuck-up degrees, but I'm sure as they watched iconic building collapsing in flames, they assumed it was pretty major. This results in many waves of ass-covering, as really major fuck ups tend to take out swaths of officers and NCO's. To a third party observer, the ass covering to save yourself from the "SOMEBODY will pay" maxim probably seems sinister..as if they were hiding something. But in reality, they are just trying to hide what they assume to be their vulnerable behinds.
Stop it. Just stop it. Not only are you a coward by posting anonymously, but the nine mile debris field has been debunked REPEATEDLY, including by police officers on the scene.
The nine mile debris field consisted of bits of paper which may or may not have been from the flight when it impacted in the field.
Further, that nine mile figure is bogus. People used MapQuest to find the distance between the crash site and the supposed debris field. Sure, nine miles if you drive by road, but roughly 2.5 miles in a straight line.
The debris field WAS NOT composed of engine parts, seats, body parts or anything else heavier than a piece of paper.
Your friend is also an idiot as there are nearly a dozen eyewitnesses to the plane coming down, some of which watched the plane, intact, nose dive into the ground. Had the plane been shot down, it would have displayed some semblance of damage including smoke and/or fire trailing from it. Not one eyewitness described seeing anything of the sort.
End of story, full stop.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
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?
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.