9/11, Seen Through Emergency Pages

Wikileaks is releasing over half a million intercepted messages from a 24-hour period surrounding the 9/11 terrorist attacks, sent over alphanumeric text pagers that "range from Pentagon, FBI, FEMA, and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults at investment banks inside the World Trade Center."

Here's one batch.

The message logs are raw in the extreme: they're massive, and many of the messages are phone numbers, codes, or computer-generated response protocols. But some of them are discernable as government or emergency-response messages.


Some of them are personal, like "CALL ME AT HOME AS SOON AS YOU GET THIS MESSAGE," and some relay rumors and news headlines, like "Y! || American Airlines says it ``lost'' two aircraft carrying 156 people."

The message logs are being released in chronological sequence over a 24-hour period by WikiLeaks, to simulate, in a way, the response to 9/11.

The logs are aesthetically hectic, or crazy, for lack of better words, to look at--which is fitting, because that's what trying to piece together the events of 9/11, as they happened, was like. They're a very stripped-down way of reliving it.