Wikileaks, an aggregator and publisher of sensitive corporate and government information, has somehow come into possession of over half a million texts sent in the period shortly before and immediately after the 9/11 attacks (via BoingBoing):

Site operators say they plan to start rolling out the texts beginning at 3:00 a.m. New York time, paced to display as they were broadcast at the corresponding time on September 11, 2001. American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the World Trade Center’s North Tower at 8:46 a.m., and United Airlines Flight 175 hit the South Tower 17 minutes later.

“Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity,” reads the description on the site. “Messages in the archive range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.”

[...]

Wikileaks didn’t identify the source of the messages, but the site has a solid track record for releasing authentic information.

Where on Earth did it all come from?

This unusual glimpse into the events of 9/11 comes from messages sent to alphanumeric pagers that were anonymously published on the Internet on Wednesday. The pager transcripts, which total about 573,000 lines and 6.4 million words, include numeric and text messages also sent to private sector and unclassified military pagers.

It’s impossible to tell whether the logs have been faithfully reproduced in their entirety. But there’s evidence they have been: I spoke to three journalists working on September 11, 2001 whose correspondence appeared in the logs or who were familiar with the messages circulated in their newsrooms that day. All three say the logs appear to be legitimate.

[...]

The pager logs seem to represent messages transmitted on September 11, 2001 through the networks of Arch Wireless, Metrocall, Skytel, and Weblink Wireless.

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.

But an electronic snoop lacking that same sense of etiquette might hook up a sufficiently sophisticated scanner to a Windows computer with lots of disk space — and record, without much effort, gobs and gobs of over-the-air conversations.

But who? And why? Why now? And whose had them all this time?

Regardless, they are a fascinating (and troubling) window into a day of terror and heroism, and an invaluable contribution to history. The messages, which began rolling out today, can be found here.

UPDATE: I should note that this is what Wikileaks itself says about the source of the texts:

“While we are obligated by to protect our sources, it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11.”

Who has that capability? That’s a rhetorical question, of course.