Twenty-five years ago this morning, I arrived at The Eagle-Tribune newsroom at 4:30 a.m.
I was the assistant New Hampshire editor. I was 31 years old, married, the father of a five-month-old son and, though I didn't fully understand it at the time, headed toward a personal breakdown.
A few hours later, an editor walked into the newsroom and told us a plane had hit the World Trade Center. Like everyone else, I initially assumed it was an accident involving a small plane. Then the second plane hit.
We watched it happen on the newsroom television.
Everything changed.
The Eagle-Tribune had a particularly painful connection to what was unfolding. People aboard those planes came from the communities we covered: Haverhill, Methuen, Andover, Amesbury, Plaistow and elsewhere across the Merrimack Valley.
When the first tower collapsed, Editor Steve Lambert climbed onto a desk and told the newsroom to collect itself because this would be the most important story we would ever cover.
He was right. But I wasn't ready for it.
Fear
I've written about that day many times since. One thing I have never tried to do is make myself sound heroic. I wasn't. I was terrified.
The newsroom was exploding with activity, and while my colleagues rose to the occasion, I largely shut down. I was already struggling with depression, anxiety and other problems I wouldn't get under control until years later. The events of Sept. 11 poured gasoline on all of it.
I went home very late that night and hugged my wife and son.
I remember looking at my baby boy and wondering what kind of world he was going to grow up in.
For a while afterward, fear dictated a lot of my decisions.
Erin and I were supposed to fly to Arizona for a family wedding a week after the attacks. I couldn't get on the plane. We canceled the trip.
I still regret that.
In the months that followed, I drank too much. I ate too much. I gained 30 pounds. My mental health continued deteriorating.
And I became obsessed with 9/11.
Every September, I would watch the documentaries again. I would replay the footage and stories. The planes. The towers. The firefighters climbing the stairs. The people helping strangers get out. I still do.
The helpers
Years later, I visited Ground Zero while in New York for a cybersecurity event. At first I was angry. People were rushing past the place where thousands had died. They were going to work. Talking on phones. Getting coffee. Catching trains. Living their lives.
How could they walk past that place like nothing happened? Then it hit me.
They weren't dishonoring the dead. They were defeating the people who had attacked us by living. That realization changed how I thought about 9/11, and eventually how I thought about my own life.
The lesson wasn't that terrible things stop happening. The lesson was that we get back up. We rebuild. We help the person next to us. And we keep moving.
I saw another version of that lesson years later while walking through a cemetery in Newburyport, Massachusetts. I stopped at the grave of Thomas Pecorelli, a 30-year-old cameraman who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11. He was flying home carrying an ultrasound image of his unborn child.
There, surrounded by death, I found myself thinking about life again.
A person's existence is more than the moment when it ends.
That seems obvious.
Sometimes it takes a gravestone to make you understand it.
An unexpected turn
There is another reason Sept. 11 matters to the story of my life.
It helped lead me here.
My career eventually moved away from daily newspapers and into technology journalism. In 2004, I entered the cybersecurity world. I've now spent 22 years covering this industry.
I've interviewed hackers, CISOs, researchers, government officials and people responsible for defending some of the most important systems on Earth. I've watched cybersecurity evolve from something many executives considered an IT problem into an issue of national security and, increasingly, human survival.
Today I'm VP/Editor-in-Chief of CYBR.SEC.Media. Not a destination I could have imagined while standing in that chaotic newsroom on Sept. 11, 2001.
But looking backward, the path makes more sense than I once thought. The story I've spent the past two decades covering is ultimately the same story I watched unfold that morning.
People are trying to destroy things. Other people are trying to protect them.
Twenty-five years later
I wish I could say the world feels safer than it did when I held my infant son that night. It doesn't.
In many respects, it feels more dangerous.
We've lived through a devastating global pandemic.
Nation-state threat actors from Iran, North Korea, China and Russia routinely target the infrastructure modern civilization depends on. Water utilities, energy systems, communications networks and other critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical targets discussed at security conferences. They are targets.
And now we have artificial intelligence advancing at a speed that would have sounded like science fiction not very long ago. We live in a moment when warnings about AI eventually posing an existential threat to humanity can enter the public conversation without sounding completely absurd.
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the threats are different.
The responsibility isn't.
Protect people.
Protect the systems they depend on.
Help each other.
Keep civilization functioning.
Cybersecurity practitioners protect hospitals, water systems, electrical grids, financial networks, communications systems and governments. Researchers expose weaknesses before someone else can exploit them. Defenders sit in SOCs at 3 a.m. trying to figure out whether an alert is noise or the beginning of something catastrophic.
Journalists have a role, too. Our job is to ask questions, explain what is happening, challenge bullshit, amplify useful research, hold powerful organizations accountable and help defenders understand what is coming over the horizon.
That is the perch I occupy. And I intend to keep using it.
We rise
There's a phrase I've returned to repeatedly when writing about Sept. 11 over the years:
We rise.
I used to think that meant recovering after catastrophe.
At 56, I think it means something more. Rising isn't something you do once. It's maintenance. Civilization itself requires maintenance. Democracy requires it. Infrastructure requires it. Security requires it. Mental health requires it. Families require it. Communities require it.
None of these things survive because somebody built them once and walked away. They survive because people keep showing up to protect, repair and improve them.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I watched people do exactly that under circumstances more horrific than most of us can imagine.
Twenty-five years later, that's what stays with me. Not the terrorists. Not the collapsing buildings.
The people climbing the stairs. The strangers helping strangers. The people rebuilding afterward. And the millions who got up the next morning and kept going.
So today I'll remember the people who never got that next morning.
Then I'll get back to work.
There is a civilization worth preserving.
From my little perch as a writer and editor, I'll keep doing everything I can to help preserve it.
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