9/11 pager messages

Beginning at 3am New York time on 25 November 2009, I released through WikiLeaks more than half a million intercepted messages sent to US text pagers over the 24 hours from 3am on 11 September 2001 to 3am the following day, publishing them in blocks synchronised to the time of day each had originally been sent. The Guardian put the total at 570,000.

According to us, the messages range from exchanges involving the Pentagon, the FBI, FEMA and the New York Police Department to automated fault reports from computers at investment banks in the World Trade Center; the archive also includes corporate and personal traffic. Read in sequence, the messages record confusion and rumour as events unfolded — The Guardian noted an 8.50am message reporting that a bomb had been detonated at the World Trade Center.

We re-released the archive in the same real-time format on the tenth anniversary of the attacks, on 11 September 2011.

I declined to say how we obtained the messages, stating only that 'it is clear that the information comes from an organisation which has been intercepting and archiving US national telecommunications since prior to 9/11' (The Guardian). The security technologist Bruce Schneier suggested that the messages came from commercial pager networks and were more likely captured by over-the-air interception — pager traffic was unencrypted — than taken from carriers' stored records.