Over half a million paged messages from US emergency and security services sent as events unfolded during the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York have been leaked to a website and published online.

Wikileaks says the transcripts were sent anonymously. Their spokesman Daniel Schmitt told Radio Netherlands Worldwide that the source had wanted the messages in the public domain as a matter of historical importance, and that Wikileaks had published them for similar reasons.

Listen to the Newsline report:

Verification
The authenticity of the transcripts has of course been called into question. Declan McCullagh is a senior correspondent with CBSnews.com in the United States. He contacted journalists who were working on 9/11 – and whose messages have appeared in the transcripts. Three of them confirmed that the messages were theirs, leading Mr McCullagh to believe the transcripts should be considered as genuine.

He says that while the transcripts won’t change our overall understanding of 9/11, they do provide insight into how US intelligence agencies and emergency response agencies were caught unawares on the day.

“The secret service was [internally] sending a lot of false alarms; about a Korean airliner that had been hijacked en route to San Francisco; that there was a plane heading for the Bush ranch; that two Middle Eastern men were detained after asking for directions to the presidential retreat. These things turned out not be correct, there was a lot of misinformation, which is understandable. Maybe a little less understandable is how the US emergency response agency [FEMA] didn’t seem to have its act together.”

Mission statement
Mr McCullagh says the transcripts reveal how, four hours after the attacks, response staff were complaining there was still no mission statement, and how action plans were changed and reversed.

“The initial thought was that there were bombs going off and no one really knew exactly what was happening. Maybe the moral of that story is don’t necessarily trust the authorities, email messages going back and forth between the FBI were saying watch CNN, so you should trust your own instincts as much as what they say.”

The messages also reveal the human side of the tragedy, how loved ones were desperate for contact with relatives in New York or how everyday needs continued to occupy people’s minds as the Twin Towers collapsed. But beyond the new light these transcripts will shed on 9/11, they also raise questions about our own privacy.

Privacy issues
While technology has advanced since 9/11 and many electronic messages sent now are encrypted, the fact is that anyone with a  cheap bit of hacking kit can gain access to all those personal, sensitive and supposedly secret messages flying through the ether.

Declan McCullagh says that if we want to protect our privacy, we shouldn’t be complacent.

“Use encryption whenever you can. It’s built into a lot of modern operating systems, you can add it to modern emails clients. If it’s not encrypted and it’s transmitted over the air or the internet, someone, if they are suitably skilled, can perhaps read it. Protect yourself and protect your privacy - trust technology and not the law to do that.”