damaged. Most significant for companies in Lower Manhattan, the collapse of Building 7 of the World Trade Center and the consequent damage to Verizon’s central office across the street disrupted voice and data lines that linked Wall Street to the world.² Another nearby Verizon office that served the New York Stock Exchange was also affected, with 20 percent of its high-speed data lines “out of action” and the rest “operating only sporadically.”³

Some local firms reported not being seriously affected. For example, the director of infrastructure at Blackwood Trading LLC was quoted as saying that “if he hadn’t seen the attack, he wouldn’t have known it happened.” Blackwood was relatively well prepared for such a disaster: while its data center is housed on Wall Street, the firm backs up all its trade data to remote centers in New Jersey, which is on a separate power grid; it was able to execute more than a “half-million trades before the NASDAQ voluntarily shut down,” according to that executive.⁴ Indeed, data loss was less of a problem than one might think. Most large Wall Street firms had responded to the earlier World Trade Center bombing (in 1993) by focusing their attention on crisis management,⁵ which resulted in the institution of thorough data-backup or co-location procedures. Cantor Fitzgerald’s eSpeed, for example, had mirrored the firm’s entire operations at other sites.⁶

Data on people’s usage of the Internet following the terrorist attacks came from a variety of sources. Probably the most detailed information available to the committee was from the Pew Internet and American Life