September 11 Commission Report - Gnostic Liberation Front

“response” server. One server simulates buys, and the other simulates sells. It does
not take a lot of effort to switch simulations from targeting test database servers to
real-life production database servers. However, if the war game servers are
simulating banks, none of the originating bank trade data ever gets copied to a
disaster recovery server (test servers are not copied to disaster recovery sites), nor
does it get found on an originating bank server. Hence, under a scenario like this, one
half of the clearing and settlement data would be missing – which is exactly what
caused and led to the US securities settlement problems in the weeks that followed
the attack. (This situation is described at length further on in this Section.) At least
two of the traders who knew how to run those programs were present and died in the
attack.
One of the many strange observations from the technology reviews of the events
September 11 is that the government security trading system(s) never went down and
trade data was never lost! Much is made on Convar’s observation that there was lost
data of illegal trades, but subsequent reports suggest the data was never really lost!
"All the data and software was mirrored to Rochelle Park," said Noviello, adding that the facility
was established as a full-fledged data center, not just a recovery site, in February. Many Rochelle
Park systems are primary, as well as backup… A triangular architecture, with points at the WTC,
Rochelle Park and London connected by DS 3 pipes, worked exactly as planned. "When one
corner went down, we never stopped trading," Kiewel said. "The system kept functioning in
Europe and Asia." …said Noviello, adding, "we did not lose any data." [Cantor Fitzgerald - Forty-
Seven Hours, Edward Cone, CIO Insight and Sean Gallagher, October 29, 2001, Copyright ©
2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in eWEEK]
“With many key facilities for the fixed income markets located in or near the World Trade Center,
the loss of communication services prevented market participants from interacting with one
another and with clearing and settlement providers, such as the GSCC and the Bank of New York
(BONY). Clearing and settlement of fixed income transactions in general was a major problem in
the days and weeks after the attacks, especially since the bulk of government securities cash and
repo trading occurs early in the day – meaning that significant amounts of data from the IDBs on
almost a full day’s trading in this area was lost and had to be meticulously reconstructed. BONY,
which was the clearing bank for many major market participants and maintained some ofGSCC’s
settlement accounts, had to evacuate four facilities including its primary telecommunications data
center and over 8,300 staff located near the WTC. BONY conducted processing activities as part
of clearing and settlement of government securities transactions at several of these facilities.
…The critical payment systems, such as Fedwire and CHIPS, continued to operate with minimal
disruption on September 11, 2001. While both Fedwire and CHIPS (as well as some of their
customers/users) were affected by communications disruptions in the aftermath of the terrorist
strikes, transactions could continue being processed because the actual processing facilities are
not located in lower Manhattan. Retail payment systems, including check clearing and ACH
transactions, also generally fared well following the attacks and continued to operate without
significant disruptions. Some check clearing functions were delayed, however, due to the
grounding of air transportation. The U.S. banking system as a whole continued to function
relatively smoothly on and after September 11, 2001.” [Survey and Analysis of Security Issues in
the U.S. Banking and Finance Sector – September 2003 Institute for Security Technology Studies
AT Dartmouth College , Copyright 2003]
What a detailed review of the technology experts review of activities that day
suggests is that the primary trading systems did not go down and data was not lost
THE SEPTEMBER 11 COMMISSION REPORT Page 187