Our Connected World and the Unseen Legacies of 9/11
Tom Drake arrived at work on his first day as a full-time employee of the National Security Agency before sunrise on a cool, clear morning: September 11, 2001. As he shadowed the NSA’s director of signals intelligence in a briefing about a new $4 billion plan, codenamed Trailblazer, that would better apply the agency’s spying to the Internet, an aide opened a door and interrupted with news: A plane had hit the north tower of the World Trade Center. Minutes later, the aide returned. The south tower had been hit, too. Drake, a thin man with severe, deep-set eyes, stood up and said the words everyone in the room had been thinking: “America is under attack.” The agency’s modernization plan was already too late.
The director, Drake remembers, was whisked onto an express elevator to a crisis war room. Drake and thousands of other employees were sent home, as rumors swirled that Fort Meade might be the next target. The exodus caused a traffic jam. “We just sat in traffic, stunned.”
In the weeks and months that followed, the NSA indeed transformed, along with the rest of America. “It was clear that it was going to be a different world…that this was not going to be a normal crisis, but a years-long crisis,” Drake says. Today you can see just how much that moment reshaped America, in how you travel, the buildings you live in, the things you fear, and the privacy you expect. That’s the technological legacy of 9/11—an almost incalculable change to the visible and invisible infrastructure of everyday life.
