WikiLeaks publishing over half a million intercepted pages from 9/11/2001 | Hacker News Reader

2001

911.wikileaks.org

108 pointstlrobinson36 comments

Am I the only one who feels a little ... wrong reading these?

This isn't a leak in the usual "whisteblower" sense of the word.

Instead it's a leak of communication between individuals that was intended to be private.

If someone "leaked" emails from Gmail or Facebook, I think most of us would be angry about it and feel as if some sort of privacy was violated. So why do we feel different about this - because these messages are eight years old, or because it's wikileaks?

there are a few reasons - not all of them individually convincing, granted, why this might be viewed as OK:

- public interest (not voyeurism, but clear relevance to major international consequences, and a mass casualty incident) - as real, instant and broad a reaction as you might get, to a major incident. unfiltered and true (and resistant to network overloading unlike most other systems that day). there's interest and value in seeing that and learning a bit about the pager-using mob, no? - i don't want to get into the debate about the value of indulging conspiracy theorists, as I simply don't know which way the evidence points on the utility of that - noise v small chance they're right - it was more than 8 years ago. the chances that geeks poring through logs of messages limited to <200 characters (no idea what the real limit was) will somehow have effects on these persons lives is limited - existent, but should be weighed against upsides

we have to wait and see what the effects will actually be - either way, it's a very good test case to see what the impact of something like this can be, and whether it ought to be controlled.

I wonder if a tiresome 'national security' angle will be raised - giving terrorists insights into reaction times, etc... weak, imho.

I do feel sorry for numbers and email addresses released here that will henceforth get spammed.

No. It's just plain wrong.

The pager network was/is more like a twitter stream. Messages are sent in a plaintext stream of the format [date][time][network][destination #][msg type][content] and individual pages just pull their own messages from that stream.

I don't really think there is an invasion of privacy, and in any case I think it has sufficient historical value as to override privacy concerns. True, someone will probably get divorced due to the revelation of some old affair, but I am not going to lose sleep over it.

Well that is how they are designed technically, but I doubt most of the senders and recipients of the pages were aware of this.

Good analysis at http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/25/taking_liberties/ent...

"It's not clear how they were obtained in the first place. One possibility is that they were illegally compiled from the records of archived messages maintained by pager companies, and then eventually forwarded to WikiLeaks.

The second possibility is more likely: Over-the-air interception. Each digital pager is assigned a unique Channel Access Protocol code, or capcode, that tells it to pay attention to what immediately follows. In what amounts to a gentlemen's agreement, no encryption is used, and properly-designed pagers politely ignore what's not addressed to them. "

Wow, there's a lot of confidential info in here. After just glancing over one 5 minute interval:

Joe_Brady@Mastercard.com||From:Joe BradyF.Y.I. - Ops is calling a PRT on a SAM (Settlement Account Maintenance) failure - This is NOT a network issue - Unix Ops is working this issue - They are looking to fail over to LKS

kfoxwell@lucent.com||Steve, I have an outage in Northampton, PA. They had a power problem and lost the CNI ring. 21,000 lines effected. call me at 717-227-0334. Kevin

appworx@db02.gefa.capital.ge.com||PROD Chain Fail for SITERICP Chain=OBI_MF_GL_P

300~MPfetchData:openConnectionToManager:ERROR CONNECTING:192.168.35.97 : www36 connectToServerPort:socket/socket timed out at /home/crdtdrv/creditderivatives/script/MPfetchData.pl line 342, <SOCK_192.168.35.19> chunk 178126.

monitor@ccbill.c|HTTPD Frontend front2r.escrub.co|ERROR: could not connect to front2r.escrub.com on port 80 (httpd). Timestamp: 20010911015701

kaccount.intel.com/service_status.asp Detailed message is URL: http://networkaccount.intel.com/service_status.asp ??does not contain: SFSA0005 SUCCEEDED

etc etc etc

Well, thats what you get for sending confidential information over plaintext. Most of the stuff I've seen is just status updates anyways, probably irrelevant after 8 years.

It can be irrelevant after 8 years, but could be relevant for someone that could act on it at the moment it was captured. Maybe for some social engineering attack.

2001-09-11 06:27:40 Skytel [003928287] D ALPHA TOM. THIS IS RAY, MY CONTINENTAL FLIGHT CANCELLED MHT TO EWR. NEXT FLIGHT IS AT 9:40 AM ARRIVING 11 AM. PAGER NUMBER 1 888 935 8317

EDIT: sorry - the proper place for comments like that is http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/a7xpt/conspiracy...

Is this some kind of joke? On http://911.wikileaks.org/files/messages_2001_09_11-08_25_200...:

> 2001-09-11 08:26:01 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 93-if you want to say goodbye, i will understand but i will always be in love with you. that...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:03 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 2...will never change. if i don't hear from you, i probably won't bother you when i get to...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:05 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 3...work. so if you want to talk to me, in this case, you will have to make a move first. if...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:07 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 5...how much. i miss you and i miss us.

> 2001-09-11 08:26:09 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 4...not, then i get it. i told you i'm not stupid. I LOVE YOU!! so much in fact, i hurt with...

> 2001-09-11 08:26:07 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 5...how much. i miss you and i miss us.

Sounds like either an affair or someone paging the script to the Young&Restless….

This looks like episode 2:

> 2001-09-11 08:21:37 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 92-i was hoping i would have heard from you anyway. please don't be angry.i guess what i need...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:39 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 2...to know is do you really love me? i know you tell me you do and that i am everything you...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:41 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 3...want, but why do i feel as though there is something going on with you? if i am wrong,...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:42 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 4...tell me. if i'm right, then please tell me the truth. there is nothing you can say to me...

> 2001-09-11 08:21:44 Arch [0948817] A ALPHA 5...that will change how i feel about you.

I've gotten almost that exact txt. Girls really do write like that.

And some guys...

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/1octb/reddit_cof...

A surprisingly detailed and informative news summary of this story: http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/11/25/taking_liberties/ent...

In case you found the title confusing, these are intercepts of pager text messages sent on 9/11 (possibly leaked from some US goverment agency?). There's no explanation of what geographical area or what network providers are covered.

There is readily available software that allows you to intercept pager communications. The two protocols mostly used by the paging companies are FLEX and POCSAG, and the nationwide paging networks all operate(d) on the 929-931 Mhz band.

The two most prominent intercept applications are: - POCFLEX, a DOS based software package that requires a 4-level FSK interface to the scanner - PDW, a windows based software package that uses a soundcard to recover the pager text from the scanner baseband.

You can download both packages here:

http://www.discriminator.nl/software/index-en.html

Most likely someone setup a few radios and archived all pager texts from the different major nationwide paging networks, and then consolidated the data into one set of files.

is this common practice? why would someone collect all this info at this point in time?

I suspect, although I don't know of anyone doing this myself, that there are people doing this all the time, just as a hobby or for the hell of it. The equipment required is minimal and so are the storage requirements, so you could easily log everything. Even in 2001 it wouldn't have been cost-prohibitive.

There are probably people sitting on years worth of data, just because that's a hobby for them. 9/11 is probably one of the only dates that's of interest to the general public.

2001-09-11 08:47:46 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA Someone just told me there was an explosion at

2001-09-11 08:47:48 Arch [0901509] B ALPHA wtc....BR

This appears to be the first transmission about the actual attack.

(Edited to remove garbage in between from other pages)

Can someone who works on Wall Street explain how pagers are still used? I had no idea that anyone had pagers anymore.

This was eight years ago...

I had no idea anyone had pagers after 1992.

Still have pagers where I work. We (developers) share one and rotate it around the team (each person has it for a week) for application support. As far as I can tell, it's better than any of the alternatives.

Better than email on a mobile device?

No return on that investment. Hardly anything can be solved via e-mail. Call comes in, 99% of the time I need to log in remotely to solve it.

We have a hunt group in our phone system for on-call that forwards incoming calls to an individual based on a schedule. It can try multiple numbers and also send e-mail alerts. No SMS functionality though which is a downside.

Interesting, but do we know that these messages came from a reliable source?

How do you know anything on Wikileaks came from a reliable source? Or anything on the web or the news or from your friends?

You basically have trust, first-party confirmations, alternate sources giving consensus, and guilty reactions—none of which can be relied on for accuracy either.

A couple news organizations are reporting their own internal communications are included. Seems legit.

This really looks like a wonderful opportunity for visualization freaks to get their blit on .. I'd love to have this massive database visualized in some way ..

I wonder how that would function, ie whether a collaborative tool could be set up to sort through them. I can see easy analysis possibilities employing spreadsheets, but it would be most useful for historical research if there were some way to tag them, filtering out automated status messages and the like.

That's already going on at the Reddit post, e.g. an import into MySQL for querying, filtering out the numerical-only posts, and so on.

I do not think that is gonna lead to something useful, people can fall into "chinese syndrome" syndrome, when a movie predicted what hapeened a week later...

Yet it is very chilling to read.

We're currently T -4 hours from the raison d'être.

1 point by lsb 6 hours ago | link We're currently T -4 hours from the raison d'être

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