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E-mail @ 30

After three decades of growth, September 11's fallout threatens this ubiquitious mode of communication

by Saleem Khan

You've probably never heard of Ray Tomlinson, but odds are that you can't live without his invention.

Sometime in late 1971 (he's not sure of the exact date) Tomlinson modified a computer file transfer protocol to work with a simple mailbox program and sent the world's first e-mail message from one computer in his lab to another. The message -- likely "qwerty" or "hello" -- caused the two-computer network to crash, but from that ignominious beginning sprang a new form of communication that elevated an obscure symbol into a pop culture icon: @.

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of e-mail

"The @ sign seemed to make sense," Tomlinson says. "I used the @ sign to indicate that the user was 'at' some other host [computer] rather than being local."

Then an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) -- the company the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency contracted in 1968 to develop DARPANET, which would later evolve into the Internet -- Tomlinson nearly suppressed his invention. One of his colleagues, Jerry Burchfiel, says Tomlinson cautioned him, "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on!"

He didn't imagine that in less than 30 years, e-mail would go from being the preferred mode of communication of a few scientists around the U.S.A. to playing a key role in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, and even defining a generation.

Today, journalists, businesspeople, academics, students and millions of others start and end their days with e-mail, and even send and receive them wirelessly from mobile phones, pagers, and personal digital assistants, but at no time in recent memory was e-mail's critical role as apparent as it was after September 11's jet crashes.

E-mail servers (computers that manage e-mail) around the world were swamped, processing a flood of messages as jammed phone lines forced people to turn to the Internet to try to make sense of what had happened, even as they attempted to verify whether relatives, friends and colleagues were safe.

People inside the World Trade Center towers reportedly sent e-mails after the first and second planes hit. Among them was David Barkway, 34, an employee of BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. in Toronto. He was visiting bond trading firm Cantor Fitzgerald on the 105th floor of tower one and used his two-way pager to e-mail his office at about 9 a.m. -- 10 minutes after the first crash -- to report that he was OK. At 9:15 a.m. "he actually sent us an e-mail from his Blackberry [pager] asking for help," says Sherry Cooper, BMO's chief economist. That was the last anyone heard from him.

News services reported record amounts of traffic on their Web sites and a commensurate spike in audience feedback. CNN reported sustained Web site traffic at 9 million page views an hour in the days immediately following the tragedy, compared to ordinary volume of 11 million page views a day. They tripled their server capacity.

On September 13, Bell Sympatico -- one of Canada's largest Internet service providers -- posted a message on its Web site: "Internet users across the globe have been experiencing e-mail and Web slowdowns in the past several days... Extremely high Internet traffic in the wake of the tragic events in the United States has also affected speed and e-mail delivery globally... We have added five additional e-mail servers and are taking additional steps to protect the network."

The Internet problems were made worse by a pair of computer viruses that infected computer systems around the globe.

But slow messages and rampant computer viruses were not the only fallout from the September 11 attacks. Law enforcement authorities and legislators in the U.S. and Canada were quick to seize on claims that Osama bin Laden -- the wealthy, CIA-trained and equipped Saudi the U.S. government accuses of engineering the September 11 attacks -- used e-mail encryption among other means to secure his communications away from prying eyes. (Lost in the news cycle was the U.S. government's subsequent self-contradiction that stated bin Laden was not using technological means to communicate, a step apparently meant to explain why spy agencies had not learned of the September 11 attacks in advance and why bin Laden remained elusive.)

Within hours of the suicide jet crashes, the FBI reportedly asked major Internet service providers and Web-based e-mail outfits to let them install the bureau's infamous Carnivore device on the companies' systems until the FBI could set up their own facilities to tap major Internet traffic hubs. Carnivore -- a customized computer that is attached to an ISP's network and records electronic communications like e-mail -- rose to prominence in 2000, when electronic privacy advocates first learned of the FBI's plans to implement the system. (It has since been inocuously renamed DCS1000 but its purpose remains unchanged.)

U.S. legislators rapidly approved a raft of measures that allow law enforcement agencies to intercept and monitor electronic communications -- including e-mail -- without a warrant, and enshrine into law a legal loophole that enables authorities to spy on American citizens, among other provisions.

Civil rights and privacy advocates fear the measures go too far and will lead to an attempt to place limits on encryption software people can use to enhance their privacy.

Quick to follow the U.S. lead, Canada's federal Justice Minister Anne McLellan said, "We are working to develop better methods to counter the use of information technologies that facilitate and assist terrorist activity."

At press time Parliament was set to debate an omnibus bill that would give Canadian police sweeping new powers similar to those passed in the U.S., including ones related to the Internet and e-mail.

So, happy 30th birthday, e-mail. What a way to celebrate.

Saleem Khan is a journalist who covers technology and international affairs. This column first appeared in the Fall 2001 issue of MEDIA magazine.