Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

911realtime.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 523 posts

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#341

Post by knaik94 »

I was in elementary school at the time 11 miles away, just across the river, in NJ. They really didn't want us to see the news so they took all of us into the main auditorium and had us just sit. A few of the parents of the other children worked in the city. They made it an early release day.

One of my parents worked close by my school and my cousin lived close too. Her house had a clear line of sight to the towers with some binoculars. I remember seeing little black dots fall out of buildings and I remember wondering if they were chairs. I am older now and understand it was people. I missed the collapse of the first tower but saw the second fall through the binoculars.

A lot of my classmates didn't show up for a few days. I didn't understand the gravity of what had happened until was quite a bit older.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#342

Post by badsoftware »

ISL wrote: post #44

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

Comparing an intentional attack on our nation to a global pandemic is insulting.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#344

Post by kolanos »

JamilD wrote: post #108
mlcrypto wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too many coincidences. Also we couldn't mobilize any fighter jets at all when a plane goes off course?

Not quite an answer to your question, but in the 60s and 70s hijackings were quite common (86 hijackings in 1969) and weren’t seen in the way they are now. The common understanding was that the hijackers wanted to re-route the plane somewhere else, and that everyone would end up alive but inconvenienced. It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t wid…

> It’s also one reason why only the passengers in United 93 fought back; the idea of a plane as a missile wasn’t widely understood or considered until the planes hit the twin towers. Fighter jets were not even under consideration to be mobilized until United 93.

Sadly this is mostly a myth. It is a little known fact that there were five separate U.S. military war games being run simultaneously with 9/11 and three of them involved airliner hijacking scenarios, including flying airplanes into buildings. Worse, these war games involved simulated inputs into NORAD and FAA radar systems, resulting in mass confusion. There is an excellent documentary that covers these war games, including actual NORAD, FAA and EADS audio [0].

[0]: https://www.corbettreport.com/911wargames/

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#345

Post by davidw »

dotancohen wrote: post #123
davidw wrote: post #12

I'm old enough to have pretty vivid memories of watching a lot of this live. I don't really want to relive it. Keep the memories alive? Certainly. But rewatching? Too much. Also, while we can't change the past, we're facing a massive challenge that is devouring thousands of people on a daily basis; let's commit to doing everything we can to defeat that particular monster. That is something we can all help with, in ou…

> But rewatching? Too much. I remember seeing the SRB trails of OV-099 in the sky. Twenty years later it was possible to rewatch that on Youtube, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. But by now, I've watch that video and a few documentaries. I had no personal loss on January 26 1986, but it still took some time for me to be able to digest it. And I'm glad that I did.

Came in to my 5th grade elementary school class and found my teacher crying. She'd made it through several rounds of the selection process to be on board the Challenger.

I don't like to watch that either, but... at least it was far fewer people, who had also signed up to take a risk, and it was a case of negligence rather than malice.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#346

Post by GongOfFour »

bdcravens wrote: post #37

I'm actually seeing events I missed in real time - I was up overnight working. I worked for Sabre HR at the time, and kept going up to the office to run a massive PDF generation process for our performance reviews. (It was a terribly leaky VB process). I didn't wake up until after it happened, so I was hearing about it on the drive into the office. We all went home before noon. Within days the software we were writin…

Were you in the Trophy Club offices then?

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#347

Post by burgerzzz »

sharkweek wrote: post #5

I sometimes forget how surreal that day was. Was in high school at the time and sort of at “that age” where the world was still pretty small and revolved around me. Mom waking me up to say “you need to watch this,” with the TV on and both towers are on fire. The morning variety newscasters breaking their household familiarity speaking in a frightening shock that was so out of character. Still went to school that day…

I remember I was a freshman in high school at a new school having just moved from Texas to Montana and was shocked at the cavalier comments regarding it all from my classmates. Very oddly in the afternoon we heard an extremely loud/large airplane flying extremely low over our school which really freaked a lot of us out.

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#348

Post by Shank »

parsecs wrote: post #24

Is there a good way to download the video streams from this? I would really like to keep an offline copy for myself.

The Internet Archive has a lot of this material for download: https://archive.org/details/911 & https://archive.org/details/sept_11_tv_archive.

Many other materials are on other archives: https://www.archives.gov/research/9-11 + http://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/...

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#349

Post by cronix »

maybelsyrup wrote: post #224
photochemsyn wrote: post #62

When reviewing 9/11 attacks (likely the biggest and most disastrous intelligence failure in U.S. history, give or take Pearl Harbor), it's worth remembering that it could have been much worse. If the first plane had hit Indian Point nuclear reactor what, 30 miles from NYC and upwind? It's likely a Chernobyl/Fukushima disaster would have resulted with an exclusion zone well into NYC. That was reportedly part of the pl…

Never forget: the CIA, at the highest levels, knew that two of the 9/11 hijackers had multiple-entry visas to the US and were living in the country in the year before the attacks. They knew they were al-Qaeda, and they knew they were important enough to have been at a big AQ powwow in Kuala Lumpur in 2000. CIA management prevented this information from being disseminated by FBI agents posted inside "Alec Station", th…

Bill Binney (Tech Director/NSA) wasn't promoted. He quit just after 9/11 after He leaked that we had all of the intel to discover and piece together 9/11 in our systems, but the administration was prioritizing bulk collecting data over actually analyzing it.

> In September 2002, he, along with J. Kirk Wiebe and Edward Loomis, asked the U.S. Defense Department Inspector General (DoD IG) to investigate the NSA for allegedly wasting "millions and millions of dollars" on Trailblazer, a system intended to analyze mass collection of data carried on communications networks such as the Internet. Binney had been one of the inventors of an alternative system, ThinThread, which was shelved when Trailblazer was chosen instead. Binney has also been publicly critical of the NSA for spying on U.S. citizens, saying of its expanded surveillance after the September 11, 2001 attacks that "it's better than anything that the KGB, the Stasi, or the Gestapo and SS ever had"[11] as well as noting Trailblazer's ineffectiveness and unjustified high cost compared to the far less intrusive ThinThread.[12] He was furious that the NSA hadn't uncovered the 9/11 plot and stated that intercepts it had collected but not analyzed likely would have garnered timely attention with his leaner more focused system.[9]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_o...

Here's a really good interview with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3owk7vEEOvs

Re: September 11, 2001 media synced in real-time

#350

Post by shepherdjerred »

ISL wrote: post #44

If watching this footage makes you want to stand up and do something, remember that Covid-19 is killing as many people in the US every two days as died in these attacks. Take small steps to make the world a better place, helping your neighbors, and you can take a stand against entropy.

“9/11 wasn’t a big deal because so many people die of natural causes anyway”
Post reply on HN