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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 communic

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?

flipbrad 17y ago
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.
tptacek 17y ago
No. It's just plain wrong.
anigbrowl 17y ago
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.
- brown9-2 17y ago
  Well that is how they are designed technically, but I doubt most of the senders and recipients of the pages were aware of this.

flipbrad 17y ago

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.

tptacek 17y ago

No. It's just plain wrong.

anigbrowl 17y ago

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.

brown9-2 17y ago
Well that is how they are designed technically, but I doubt most of the senders and recipients of the pages were aware of this.