CNN iReport

Wikileaks.com recently released a list of over half a million text messages that had been recorded throughout  the day of the WTC bombings. A variety of private, automated, and governmental messages are all posted, and journalists at the scene confirm them to be (as far as we know) legitimate. The value of this list for social-analysis and conspiracy theorists is obvious and is being readily discussed the entire gamut of news websites, including CNN's article. A frightening unlerlying issue arises, however, when we consider that Wikileaks is able to publish emotional, personal messages such as:

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

or-

"mike - call the office - kelly wants to make sure they are evacuating you guys from your building - even though you are not in the building that was attacked)"

-without the knowledge or permission of the texters. Many people feel if the privacy of these victims and their families is at stake, and their concerns have generally boiled down to a few basic questions:

How were these texts tracked in the first place? Who gave the tracked links to Wikileaks? Is this even legal?

So far we don't have any definite answers, but CBS writer Declan McCullagh gives some likely scenarios. Either the data was illegally copied from the archives of the pager companies and given to Wikileaks by some rogue employees, or an interception hardware network had been set up by a group of private citizens who had been secretly collecting enormous amounts of text message records.  After taking a look at the industry standard for enabling government intercepts, I would have to agree with McCullagh that the latter scenario is more likely. Encryption technology was far from foolproof in 2001, meaning a determined individual with enough time and server space could realistically track the text communications of a huge area for a long period of time. Both of these explanations are almost certainly illegal, but the act of releasing the texts themselves seems to be in a legal gray zone.

We should also consider a third possibility- that the US government had received these records through legislation like the Patriot Act and had kept them in storage until a very dedicated group of hackers managed to break into the servers and download these files. It has happened before, and we could expect that a skilled group of hackers would have eventually found this set of data given some luck and a decade to work on the task.

Some more probing into Wikileak's sources is obviously needed. Regardless of whatever service they believe they are providing by releasing these files, we need to know who really tracked these logs and where this Big Brother-like surveillance is being held in other parts of the country. Hopefully the some feds will get involved in pushing for some answers, as Wikileaks will be in some serious legal hurt if they try to use the "freedom of the press" card as an excuse to dishonor the victims of the attack. Some wounds were best left forgotten.