Thirteen years ago today, a 31-year-old man–a former Israeli Defense Force commando, a brilliant computer scientist, a successful Internet startup entrepreneur, and a husband and father of two small boys–tried to stop terrorists from hijacking a Boeing 767 and flying it into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Sadly, he was killed in the attempt. He is believed to have been the first person to die on that horrible day.
His name was Daniel Lewin. He couldn’t single-handedly prevent the atrocity. But the algorithms he developed as co-founder of Akamai Technologies were critical in keeping the Internet from crashing that day. Lewin’s research as a grad student at M.I.T. focused on improving the efficiency of online content retrieval through web caching, in which content (particularly images and videos) is replicated across a number of servers for faster retrieval. On the day of the attacks, Lewin’s colleagues at Akamai observed a five-fold increase in the amount of traffic on company servers as millions of Internet users frantically refreshed news sites and clicked on videos, trying to find out what they could as the day’s events unfolded, but thanks to Lewin’s work, the servers stayed up.
I’m not the sort of person who reminisces yearly about what I was doing on terrible days like September 11, 2001. It was an awful time, and one I don’t particularly want to relive. But today I’ll make an exception, for Danny Lewin’s sake. That day at the Enrico Fermi Institute, we were supposed to have had a rehearsal for a DOE site visit later in the week (which wouldn’t take place for another month or so, because all flights were canceled for the rest of the week). Instead, we ended up wandering around in confusion all day long, some people watching the news coverage on a small portable TV in the conference room, others calling everyone they knew–family members and friends on the East Coast, especially–to make sure they were all right and accounted for.
I was one of those people obsessively checking all the news sites over and over for updates, reading forum postings, trying to sort out genuine information from noise. Behind me was a north-facing window with a view of the Chicago Loop five miles away. We were in a major metropolitan area and economic center, and at the time, the possibility that Chicago could also be a terrorist target was all too real. I kept looking over my shoulder through that window to reassure myself that the Sears Tower was still standing and that the skyline was intact. I was panicked and teary and in despair, but in retrospect, I think being able to see new information as it came in, making the picture less murky, gave me comfort and a sense that there was still order in the universe, made me less fearful for the immediate future. The Internet was my constant companion that day.
It was something I took for granted then, that in the face of disaster one could reliably go online and find information, knowledge, perspective, community. Since then, we’ve observed repeatedly how critical social media and other online communication mediums can be for people dealing with disasters and crises in real time, how important it is to keep those channels open, responsive, and dependable. Danny Lewin gave his life to try to save his fellow passengers. But in the years since his death, the technology he was instrumental in developing may have helped save countless more.
G-D of overflowing compassion, Who lives in the highest and all worlds, give limitless rest to him who is now under your holy sheltering spiritual wings, making him rise ever more purely, through the Light of your brilliance.