9/11: The day we lost our privacy and power

[Jack]

Investigative reporter Duncan Campbell reflects how 9/11 has torpedoed resistance to intrusion and undermined privacy rights born of earlier struggles. It may, irreversibility, have changed the way we think.

9/11 was a savage nightmare that took too long to happen for some in the West.

For 12 fallow years, from the fall of the Wall to the fall of the Towers, there was a brief golden period in which no great common enemy menaced all unseen beyond the distant horizon. There was no simple spectre of fear on which to construct, fund and operate surveillance platforms, or reason to tap data funnels into society's communications and transport arteries.

Through the '90s, in debates about the control of communications and electronic security measures – amid a US-led hue and cry for government control of all cryptography (remember the "Clipper Chip"?) – the "what if" question hung always in the mouths of the proponents of more control. What if terrorists had a nuke? A new virus to plague civilisation?

But the bad guys largely stayed off stage. The inter-Irish conflict that had dogged the UK had subsided into a peace process. There was a global terrorist shortage.

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[jamescv7]

From survivors the tragic 9/11 is ain't easy to forgot on how a big tragic were happened to them.

So on the anniversary of 9/11 a respect on those people were died on that attack.

 

[K__M]

It was one of the worst days i can remember!, i remember getting out of school early and seeing the news and my family crying... it was horrible!

 

[jamescv7]

Well I was 5 years old (lived in Saudi Arabia) when watched the news about 9/11 attacked, unforgettable how the building collapsed with a known hijack airplane.

 

[WinAndLinuxTutorials]

I was 3 years old when that attack happened

 

[moonshine]

Most shocking things I saw when I was a kid. :/

 

[Deleted member 178]

i was going to my job (a video games shop in a maul) then i saw the maul empty, abnormal at that time (9am) and many people watching the tv in the big electronic store, i check there then saw i plane crashing on the towers, at beginning i thought it was a new movie ! then i saw the CNN badge then i understood...

 

[McLovin]

We were actually in Saudi Arabia at the time and was on edge of what will happen. We were always worried when going out to the shops, and stuff. A day that no one wants to remember.