Pager messages capture horror of 9/11

The humble pager has emerged as the sole surviving means of communications during the 9/11 attacks.

A few minutes after the first hijacked airplane slammed into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, text pager services in New York and Washington DC lit up with thousands of messages from people trying to contact loved ones.

While internet servers and cell phone networks crashed across New York City, text pagers continued to function.

The Mobitex network allowed messages to be sent through the Skytel, Arch Wireless and Metrocall networks when many other services failed.

Mobitex has been used by emergency services and military since the early 1990s, operating on a wireless network separate to those used in 2001 by the major US phone carriers.

The whistleblower website Wikileaks last night began to publish some 500,000 pager messages sent on 9/11: many of the messages contain the names and phone numbers of senders and receivers along with intimate details of their relationships.

Wikileaks claimed its release of the pager messages was justified by the historical weight of the information, claiming the half a million texts make up "a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time".

The following messages were sent within minutes of the start of the attacks on New York City:

A small plane crashed into the World Trade Cent….Call me, Love Your Wife.

Cannot get through on the phone. Please call me. Are you okay? Love, Shira.

I love you. Please call me as soon as you can.

As the horrific scale of the attacks became clear, and internet and phone services crashed, the messages became more desperate:

We are being evacuated….not sure what is going to happen. love you!

Daddy couldn’t get through on yr office phone, just…wanted to say hi and make sure you were okay. I love you!

Can’t get thru to you. Phone lines all jammed. I love you. Cheryl.

Don't leave the building. One of the trade towers just fell. Please be careful. Love you

The pager messages also reveal the relief when those feared lost were located in the chaos.

Thank God you are safe. Please call me. I love you, Terry.

COME HOME NOW. Pentagon hit. I know u heard. I love you.

And finally, the calls for revenge began to hit pagers shortly after WTC Towers One and Two collapsed and killed more than 2300 people:

find out who did this and bomb the HELL out of them and their country

It’s time to kick ass!!

The report also includes coded but unencrypted messages from Secret Service agents — they are largely unintelligible to the uninitiated but when deciphered, give a fascinating insight into the workings of security forces:

2001-09-11 10:24:31 Skytel [005344006] B ALPHA TWINKLE AND TURQ ARE ACCOUNTED FOR AND SAFE

"Alpha" is the code word for Air Force One while "Twinkle" and "Turq" are President Bush's daughters.

While the release of the 9/11 pager messages have been extremely popular with internet users, the issue of privacy violations surrounding the release of the messages, the personal details of those who sent and received the messages has also been raised.

On BoingBoing.net, a reader asked:

"How dare we look through people's private messages without their permission, simply for our own amusement? The fact that it covers such an emotive period, where many people still have extremely raw feelings only makes matters worse"

Twitterer @goonjm was one of the more poignant critics of Wikileaks release of the 9/11 pager messages:

"It's interesting to read, but that doesn't make publishing it right."

On the argument that the 9/11 pager messages have historical value that overrides privacy concerns, @goonjm asked what happens in the future if someone at Twitter decided all the direct messages sent since 2006 were of historic value and should be released:

"This devalues an important service (Wikileaks) and is only just above tabloid."

CBS News published the first story on the 9/11 pager messages leak, and pointed out that while "this trove of messages is likely to become a boon for historians (and) a new source of concern for privacy advocates" it could also be "a point of embarrassment or pride for the government agencies and corporations whose internal conversations have been divulged".