The War on Terrorism at Port 80: Charthouse

The tragic events of September 11, 2001, prompted web creators around the world to respond. This special collection of archived web sites preserves this unique moment in our history.

September's terrorist attacks on the U.S. created a new kind of war. What kinds of new technologies will be used against an enemy with no real geopolitical boundaries? And what will happen to the freedoms American citizens have come to expect, as concerns for security grow?

What causes the documented high level of civilian casualties -- 3,767 civilian deaths in eight and a half weeks -- in the U.S. air war upon Afghanistan? The explanation is the apparent willingness of U.S. military strategists to fire missiles into and drop bombs upon, heavily populated areas of Afghanistan.

What happened on the Internet?

How the Internet was used by millions after the terror attacks to grieve, console, share news, and debate the country's response.

This list, updated on an ongoing basis, provides an inventory of government information that has been withheld since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

In an open society we run enormous risks. Any individual or group of individuals can cause great damage. We try to protect against such damage, but the potential remains. One way is to make ourselves as aware as we can of the risks and take steps to ameliorate them. An alternative is to limit the free flow of information, which is how totalitarian societies operate. While security may improve, the spirit of civil society is lost. We cannot let that happen here. Already, valuable information is being pulled from agency web sites.

Technology, which has enabled American culture to spread throughout the world, is now allowing that world to strike back at us. It's tying us all together in one big, sticky web. Globalization is no longer simply about putting KFC in Tienanmen Square and Baywatch on TV sets in mud-daubed huts. It's no longer just the story of multinational corporations and favorable labor markets. It's now the story of how, through technology, we are all connected: How boardrooms in New York can exert control over villages in Nigeria; how a straw hut in the Afghan desert can wreak destruction on Manhattan. How the whole world can watch as buildings crumble and burn.

Indeed, "globalization" is a misnomer because it implies a process that is ongoing. It would be more accurate to say that the world has been globalized already. Technology has already opened the door, and we've already seen a few things come through it.

The question is, what is going to come through that door now?

The terrorist attack reinforced a trend that we have been witnessing since the World Wide Web burst onto the public scene. Consumers of information no longer wait passively for those relevant bits and pieces of news from established editorial sources. They know the Internet offers them an avenue to find what they want by themselves. Sometimes, those roads lead to savvy companies that make the commitment to become journalists.

The conflict in Kosovo was widely anointed as the first "Internet war."

But that was a myth.

The aftermath of this week's terrorist strikes in the U.S. shows what a real Internet war looks like.

Yesterday, another co-worker of mine bought a copy of Flight Simulator to see if the software could replicate the approach to the World Trade Center. After about an hour or so of fiddling with the application and downloading a hack from the web for a Boeing 767 configuration, we were watching a pixilated Manhattan through the simulated 767 cockpit window on our computer screen. And then we crashed it into the World Trade Center. It was just an image on a computer screen, but it was chilling nonetheless.

The Web has been criticized in many corners for failing to adequately cover the unfolding horror of Tuesday's terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

On a day when many people were glued to the TV, the complaint was that the Net initially failed to provide the kind of in-depth coverage available from the TV networks.

People have complained that sites for the big news organizations, like CNN, The New York Times and the BBC, were unavailable for much of the day due to high traffic.

And what newspapers and portals were available simply ran wire copy.

But under the radar, the Net responded magnificently; it was just a matter of knowing where to look.

What happened to the Internet?

Despite the intense traffic generated by a global search for information on the worst terrorist attack in history, the Internet proved its survivability on Tuesday.

In the immediate aftermath of the worst terrorist strike in U.S. history, the hundreds of thousands of people who went online for news and information found it slow going on major news sites. But overall, the Internet remained intact as it withstood the greatest stress in its 32-year history.

A few weeks ago, I went to Seybold SF and listened to Dave Winer talk about how great blogs were during the recent terrorism crisis, and other new media types talk about how fabulous their coverage was, and generally how wonderfully the Internet performed during the disaster. Despite all of their back-slapping and self-congratulations, I left the show really pissed off. The whole time, I kept thinking how badly the Internet sucked on 9/11.

For years we've been hearing about how the Internet was designed to withstand nuclear attacks. Well, at least we know it can resist terrorist bombardment, as was proven on Sept. 11 when the World Trade Center's collapse took out a massive chunk of Manhattan's telecommunications capability.

But the Internet itself remained strong, as data was routed around the damaged switches and transmission lines, taking alternate paths exactly as its designers intended.

The result: In the hours and days after the attack, I found -- as did many others -- that while phone lines to New York were jammed, people could be reached by e-mail and instant messaging.

And while major news sites suffered crushing levels of traffic, the Internet as a whole wasn't crippled by the surge in usage.

How did search engines react?

This is both an analysis of how search engines reacted to the terrorist attacks in the United States and advice on how to find the latest information about the disaster. Click here to bypass the analysis and skip straight to the advice.

Following the unprecedented terrorist attacks on the United States today, web users turned en masse to search engines for information. It took those services some time to adjust to the demand, but as the day progressed, many came up to speed.

U.S. place in the world

Americans cannot ignore what their government does abroad.

Nearly two days after the horrific suicide attacks on civilian workers in New York and Washington, it has become painfully clear that most Americans simply don't get it. From the president to passersby on the streets, the message seems to be the same: this is an inexplicable assault on freedom and democracy, which must be answered with overwhelming force - just as soon as someone can construct a credible account of who was actually responsible.

Shock, rage and grief there has been aplenty. But any glimmer of recognition of why people might have been driven to carry out such atrocities, sacrificing their own lives in the process - or why the United States is hated with such bitterness, not only in Arab and Muslim countries, but across the developing world - seems almost entirely absent. Perhaps it is too much to hope that, as rescue workers struggle to pull firefighters from the rubble, any but a small minority might make the connection between what has been visited upon them and what their government has visited upon large parts of the world.

But make that connection they must, if such tragedies are not to be repeated, potentially with even more devastating consequences.

At the Lighthouse's Global News Desk, you'll find links to non-U.S. mainstream news sources.

In our clearly righteous quest to demand justice for the victims of terrorism, we do not necessarily have to repeat the mistakes of the past. The battle against terrorism will indeed sometimes be bloody, and sometimes largely invisible. It will be a process, not an event--a state of mind, not really a war. Part of that process will involve an awareness that terrorism is the result of both attitudes and situations that are not always obvious, often are difficult to understand, and usually not subject to simple "solutions" of any sort. The most difficult task facing us is to achieve our goals in this battle without destroying the better parts of ourselves in the process. We have our work cut out for us.

If we choose to adopt attitudes like "they didn't care about killing women and children, so we'll do the same back to them," then in the name of accepting "collateral damage" we'll have excised a significant chunk of our humanity and handed it to the terrorists as a trophy. If we allow our civil liberties to erode in the name of expedience and an illusionary veneer of security, we'll be denigrating those very aspects of our society that are among the most precious concepts we fight to protect, not only for today but for untold future generations as well. Such paths may appeal to both our anger and fear, but choosing them condemns us to nothing but Pyrrhic victories, for we will gradually become that which we despise, and terrorism will have triumphed after all.


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modified: October 12, 2001 by Douglas Anderson http://RicciStreet.net/port80/charthouse/present/war.htm