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Comment by bwooce | Hacker News Reader

Misleading title - these are pager intercepts (people still use pagers? Who knew?)

Text messages would commonly be referring to SMS for mobile phones.

You'd be surprised how many companies still use pagers for oncall alerts. After all, they're cheap, the batteries last a long time, the coverage can often be better than a cell phone, and most importantly you won't accidentally silence your pager when you silence your cell.

The biggest reason to use pagers over SMS: pagers have a guarantee for arrival by the service provider - if the device is on at the other end it will get through. SMSes have no such guarantees.

On 9/11 I was working for Citigroup in the UK. One of the other services that was working was Blackberry emails.

I remember my team getting an email from a NY employee (who was based at 7WTC) to our group email address asking us to call his wife and tell him he was safe.

We're talking about 11 years ago.

on another note, here's a random message from the files:

|whats up listen tomorrow let me go alone to overnite ok its not cause i dont want you to go is that i need to think about somethings that i need to clear my mind dont get mad or trip i need to do this fo

Is it me or this is wrong? It cheapens whatever mission Wikileaks had. I do not want my private messages broadcast all over the world, especially when I'm a private citizen.

>I do not want my private messages broadcast all over the world, especially when I'm a private citizen.

Then maybe it's not a good idea to send them unencrypted over the air.

Only, because I send something over an unsecure channel, does not give anybody the right to repost it publicly for the whole wide world to see. Even, if (as a coincidence) something as awful happens, as 9/11.

Sorry, but I have to agree with the parent post. Your argument could also be:

> Then maybe it's not a good idea to send them unencrypted over the air.

Even, if the channel is insecure, people used it, believing, that the private messages they sent, were/are/will be private.

I am living in Germany and I really would hate to see, if every postcard ever sent would be there for the whole wide world to see.

Yes: Unencrypted, unsecure, open, readable as a channel, but non the less protected by privacy-law.

People that want their messages private should be minimally aware of the technology they're using to transmit said messages.

Nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy when sending a postcard, and that's a decent analogy to email and other communications mediums - even HTTP for that matter. Unfortunately, because technology (or, I suppose, the protocols that power it) tends to mask that, most people just make incorrect assumptions.

No, people should not have to make these assumptions or do research into this. That's why it's important for us to design secure tools. Users assume stuff is secure, so it's our duty to ensure their assumptions are true. Let's not give people a false sense of security.

Nobody has a reasonable expectation of privacy when sending a postcard

Expectation of privacy isn't boolean. There's a big difference from a few postal offices reading it and it being published online (which, at least here, would be illegal).

I agree with this entirely. Two guys standing in line at a concession at a crowded football stadium talking might have no strict expectation of privacy, but they might have an expectation of privacy from a particular audience (hypothetically, let's say their wives). When you record their conversion, you are not violating their expectations of privacy, because many people could have heard that conversion. However, were you to broadcast the recording, at that point you have violated the assumptions they thought the privacy was affording them. Some of the hackers here would argue that they shouldn't speak in plain English, but should always speak to other humans in an encrypted spoken language and because they didn't do that they deserve no privacy for speaking in English.

I would disagree with those people.

When I talk to my wife or mother or boss over the phone, I just pick it up and talk. There is a reasonable expectation of privacy, and even if I was as smart as you to know how to encrypt things, 99% of people wouldn't know how to. So my point still stands.

Lives can be ruined by exposing private messages, website visited etc., so Wikileaks dropped a lot of notches in my opinion.

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