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.
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.
"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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?