9/11 tragedy pager intercepts (2009) | Hacker News Reader

9/11 tragedy pager intercepts (2009)

911.wikileaks.org

38 pointsbyhemechi11 comments

Every time these get referenced I think about the alert messages from servers[0] that got sent in the seconds after the first plane hit. It's chilling and makes it all very real for me.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4504035

Makes me wonder how long some IT guy spent trying to diagnose the problem before hearing the news

"Damn it Jim, Barry on floor 88 killed the server again.."

Makes me think of one of the pilots' first reaction when 2 planes collided on the runway in Tenerife, from https://askthepilot.com/essaysandstories/tenerife-we-gaan/ :

> Knowing they’d been hit, Bragg instinctively reached upward in an effort to pull the “fire handles” — a set of four overhead-mounted levers that cut off the supply of fuel, air, electricity, and hydraulics running to and from the engines. His arm groped helplessly. When he looked up, the roof was gone.

One thing about these messages is that they kind of give a broad snapshot of everything going on in text form. So you get messages from people mixed with background automatic messages from news websites and so forth, with system messages due to infrastructure damage, to all sorts of things.

One thing that's struck me during 9/11, the pandemic, and some other natural disasters I've been around (I wasn't in NY 9/11 but similar ripple effects that day) is this kind of eerie intermediary time when things are breaking down, but people aren't sure whether to go on as normal or might not even be aware of what's going on, etc. I feel like these 9/11 messages capture that really well if you know what you're looking at, and know the timeline of events.

Looks mostly like spam, system messages, and gibberish.

What am I missing?

Many personal messages interspersed throughout, especially after it becomes clear what's happening.

I feel like I scrolled through several log files and couldn’t find anything that looked real and relevant?

The first line has two errors. First, 9/11 was on a Tuesday. Saying it was a Sunday is just foolish, as it happened at the start of a busy workday. Many of us still remember it like it was yesterday. Also, the line says 2011.

Further question - how do we know these intercepts are authentic?

> From 3AM on Sunday September 11, 2011

The first line does not have two errors, it makes perfect sense. Here it is below for others to actually see that everything is fine there.

> From 3AM on Sunday September 11, 2011, until 3AM the following day (US east coast time), WikiLeaks is re-releasing over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.

It doesn’t say that the original 9/11 incident was on Sunday or in 2011. It says that Wikileaks will be re-releasing their US national text pager intercepts on sunday 9/11 in 2011.

I see. It's a different reading of the first word "from". Thanks for pointing that out.

Yeah. I see (or notice) more and more use of "from" where "starting" might have been clearer. I have also seen this usage in old texts, so it's not purely new.

I used to think this usage of "from" had to originate from another dialect than my own native one, but now I'm not sure at all. It can seem awkward and slightly jolting to me still, but I have worked at being more accepting of it.

The "From...until..." hopefully makes it clearer in TFA, though your initial reading could still be interpreted.

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