BY SKYLAR LAIRD - SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 5:30 AM
COLUMBIA — At 8:46 a.m. Friday, K-12 schools across South Carolina will go silent.
Although most students know why they’re observing a moment of silence, none were alive the moment American Airlines Flight 11 struck the north tower of the World Trade Center. Twenty-five years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that killed 3,000 people, teachers are tasked with explaining to students the significance of what happened that day. Roughly one-third of the country wasn’t alive when the attacks took place, which means it’s even more important to make sure students understand the significance of the attacks and their consequences worldwide, educators said.
“It is increasingly moving out of (students’) lived experiences, into their historical memory,” said advanced government teacher Patrick Kelly. “It is incumbent on schools to make sure that memory is vivid and alive.”
Patriot Day
Under state law, every Sept. 11 is designated Patriot Day in schools.
On Patriot Day, representatives of certain organizations, such as Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boys and Girls Clubs, and Future Farmers of America, can request to speak to students about patriotism and civic involvement. As long as approved representatives give principals enough of a heads up, state law gives them the right to talk to students for up to half an hour.
Many schools also hold ceremonies to remember the attacks and the people killed, said Department of Education spokeswoman Christy Cox. Those might include history lessons, school choir performances and Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps presentations.
Those assemblies give “students across grade levels opportunities to remember the lives lost, honor the courage and sacrifice of first responders and service members, and reflect on the unity and resilience demonstrated by the American people,” Cox said in an email.
In the classroom
Although no state law requires certain discussion around the Sept. 11 attacks, teachers are expected to include them in lessons on major events in American history, Cox said.
“As we approach the 25th anniversary of 9/11, we recognize that an entire generation of students has grown up without firsthand memory of these events,” she said. “That reality makes our responsibility even greater — to ensure they will truly never forget.”
The state standards require one lesson focused on the Sept. 11 attacks. When students are in 5th grade, they are expected to learn about what happened and how the country responded through foreign policy, according to the state’s academic standards.
Teachers might weave the attacks into other classes about American history. For instance, during a unit in 8th grade on how world events affected the country or a 6th grade unit on global interdependence, teachers might use 9/11 as a way of exploring conflict, change and global connections, according to the education department.
High schoolers might learn about the attacks during their modern world history class, where students look at how the connections between the U.S. and the rest of the world changed because of major cultural, economic or political shifts. Or, the topic may become part of U.S. government classes, in which teachers could talk about the policy and national security shifts the attacks caused.
For the most part, specifics on how to address the attacks are up to school districts and teachers, Cox said.
Kelly, who teaches at Blythewood High School, considers the attacks an essential part of talking about modern government. Discussing the way government works in any great depth is impossible without at least mentioning Sept. 11, 2001, he said.
“That’s still shaping the way our government operates,” Kelly said.
On Sept. 11 each year, Kelly makes sure to mention the attacks and have a moment of remembrance. He lines up the anniversary with the start of discussions about federalism, using 9/11 and the government’s response as one of several case studies on how the U.S. government’s structure differs from that of other countries, he said.
The topic comes up again throughout his course, including during units on the country’s war powers and civic engagement, he said.
“It’s a constant source of discussion, because modern government was completely reshaped by Sept. 11 and its aftermath,” Kelly said.
Teachers can decide to talk about the attacks at any grade level. As part of the Palmetto Civics Project, which provides teaching resources on major historical events, the state provides teachers age-appropriate topics and activities to broach the subject.
For instance, elementary school classes might focus on the first responders who helped get people out of the wreckage, while middle school students might learn more about what people saw from the ground and how the country responded.
In all grade levels, teachers should make sure to branch out from talking just about the World Trade Center strikes, the handout suggests.
“Many students are familiar with the Twin Towers but may not realize that Americans were also attacked at the Pentagon and that the passengers of Flight 93 demonstrated remarkable courage in resisting the terrorists,” the pamphlet reads.
Changing memories
Although the events feel far removed for many students, some might still have personal connections through parents or other relatives, Kelly said. Especially in a city like Columbia, which has an active military population, students may know someone who fought overseas in the Afghanistan or Iraq wars.
Even for those without a personal connection, the Sept. 11 attacks feel closer to them than other major historical events, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kelly said.
That’s at least partially because of their recency and partially because of how many photos and videos still circulate regularly. Unlike the attack on Pearl Harbor, which is preserved only through black-and-white photographs and a few grainy audio clips, 9/11 is remembered through a huge archive of photos and video, he said.
“Our students are part of that media ecosystem,” Kelly said. “They are exposed to that.”
Jonathan Hepworth, a history professor at Clemson University who does research on how people remember historical events, asks his students each semester which historical event most interests them. A growing number each semester has said 9/11, including this most recent semester, he said.
The reasons varied, he said. Some had a personal connection to the incident. Others got intrigued after watching a documentary, either about the attacks themselves or the conspiracy theories that sprang up in the aftermath.
That suggests the attacks are still significant to students, though the ways they understand what happened is different from how people understood it 24 years ago, or 15 years ago, or even five years ago, Hepworth said.
“It’s always secondhand to them,” Hepworth said of his students. “There’s always a certain amount of distance.”
Over time, collective memory of historical events shifts because of what happens afterward, he said. What felt like a dividing line in history for those experiencing it, even from afar, might feel like more of a curiosity to younger generations, he said.
Making sure young people know what happened, though, is essential, Hepworth said. When people stop talking about major historical events, they disappear from the public consciousness.
Hepworth pointed to the 1918 influenza pandemic as an example. Although the flu infected about a third of the world’s population and is estimated to have killed at least 50 million, the pandemic fell out of popular memory within decades, he said.
People considered the mass tragedy too painful to talk about, Hepworth said. But that led many to forget it happened.
That’s not the case with 9/11. Even though students are more removed from the event a quarter-century later, they are still talking about what happened, which means the difficult work of talking about a massive tragedy is successful, he said.
Losing that collective memory would mean losing vital context about why the world is the way it is, Hepworth said.
“The fact is that everything that we have and decide at any given point is the sum of all the decisions made before us,” Hepworth said. “If we can’t understand what decisions were made and why and people making the decisions they did, we are not going to have a very good understanding of why we are where we’re at.”
Skylar Laird covers the South Carolina Legislature and criminal justice issues. Originally from Missouri, she previously worked for The Post and Courier’s Columbia bureau.
SC Daily Gazette is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
On the 25th anniversary of 9/11, States Newsroom editor remembers the heroes of Flight 93
BY SHALINA CHATLANI - SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 7:00 AM
On a rural stretch of land in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, an open meadow filled with bright wildflowers, a memorial grove of trees and a giant boulder marks the spot where United Airlines Flight 93 crashed on Sept. 11, 2001.
States Newsroom’s Pennsylvania Capital-Star Editor-in-Chief Tim Lambert recently revisited the national memorial on this field — where he happened to own a piece of land that was part of more than three dozen acres that made up the crash site.
“It’s always hard to come back here, but it’s always a chance to remember the sacrifices made by the passengers and crew of Flight 93 on that day,” Lambert said. “I think it’s important 25 years later to remember what they did and why they did it. They decided to act on a day that America was under attack.”
On that day, al-Qaida terrorists hijacked four commercial planes. They slammed two into the World Trade Center towers in New York City and another into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth — Flight 93 — crashed in an open clearing near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
The 40 passengers and crew are remembered for sacrificing their lives when they tried to wrest control of the plane from the hijackers and stop them from hitting what was believed to be their intended target: the U.S. Capitol. Nearly 3,000 people were killed in what is the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil. Forty-four people, including the four hijackers, died aboard Flight 93.
At the time, Lambert worked as a reporter for a public radio station in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
“It was around 4:30 in the afternoon — among the chaos of the newsroom — and I looked up at this TV that was on a cabinet, and the reporter from one of the national outlets was standing at the corner of the Lambertsville (and) Shanksville Road,” Lambert recalled. “And it was at that moment, I stopped and thought, ‘Wait, we still own land near Shanksville, and it’s awfully close to that intersection.’”
The next morning, Lambert said, he listened to a voice message on his home answering machine from his dad, who recognized the crash site on television, realizing that it was their family property.
Lambert was in a unique situation. While reporters across the nation and around the world were covering the tragic event, he was the only journalist who had access to the Flight 93 crash site. He realized he had a huge responsibility.
“I was well aware that history was at the door, and I wanted to do things the right way,” he said.
Lambert not only reported on the crash, but also assisted first responders and met with the families of the passengers and crew. He remembered what the land looked like that day. The plane had plowed into the ground at a high rate of speed, with the aircraft disintegrating into tiny bits and pieces, leaving a large crater.
Although the majority of the plane shattered and few bodies were recovered, authorities were able to identify the passengers and crew. More than 1,500 response members under the direction of the Federal Bureau of Investigation recovered fragments of the plane: twisted pieces of metal, tires, seat frames, luggage, clothing — most of which were no larger than a notebook.
The field was essentially a cemetery, and family members wanted to protect it. Only family members and some park rangers can visit the actual crash site. But the public can walk along the tall concrete walls of the nearby memorial, etched with the names of people who perished in the crash. Visitors can also go to a museum and walk through parts of the field to an overlook to view the crash site.
Through the years, Lambert has visited the site to pay his respects.
“It’s been a while since I’ve been here, so it’s almost like a little homecoming to visit with old friends, even if it’s just looking out on the field and remembering those who gave their lives that day,” he said.
The museum features photos of family members of passengers and crew, with details about their lives and memorabilia, including photographs, jewelry and uniforms. For example, the husband of flight attendant Lorraine Bay donated her United Airlines ID and one of her uniforms, along with a wine bottle corkscrew she used for in-flight service.
“You know, with these exhibits, I want to take something that’s very large and abstract and offer different avenues for different people to come in and relate to it,” said Betsy Keene, curator for the National Parks for Western Pennsylvania, which includes the Flight 93 National Memorial.
“Families say they want their loved one to be remembered as an individual person, as more than just this one day.”
She said there are about 9,300 objects collected from the crash site and from families that are cataloged at the memorial, including 800 pieces of the aircraft curated over the years.
“We want to have these objects to help people relate and to pull them into the story and to help them understand who these people were, what happened here, and what it meant to the world at the time,” Keene said.
Memorial Superintendent Stephen Clark said more than 400,000 visitors annually come to the park, owned and operated by the federal government and managed by the National Park Service.
“I think that this memorial, albeit 25 years, it’s still a glimpse. It’s still a blink of an eye in our nation’s history,” Clark said. “But I still think that even as the years roll on, this story will continue to be told.”
Through the years, Lambert said he’s had many chances to meet families whose loved ones died that day. As the 25th anniversary approaches, he said he plans to reflect on their stories.
“The memorial is beautiful. The memorial is very fitting. It’s a great tribute, and it’s a respectful tribute to the passengers and crew of Flight 93. But for me, I think about watching the land heal over the 25-year period,” Lambert said.
“To watch them sort of heal as the site heals through nature, and watch that sort of in tandem, is something that I will always think about anytime I look over that field.”
Pennsylvania Capital-Star reporter Peter Hall contributed to this report. Stateline reporter Shalina Chatlani can be reached at schatlani@stateline.org.
Shalina Chatlani covers health care and environmental justice for Stateline.
How 9/11 changed the way America surveils its citizens
BY AMANDA WATFORD - SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 6:00 AM
Twenty-five years after 9/11, the surveillance infrastructure built and expanded in its aftermath has become part of a far larger digital ecosystem — producing tools that can collect and analyze information on a scale unimaginable in 2001.
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, did more than reshape the nation’s approach to terrorism. They changed the architecture of American intelligence and policing. They expanded how government agencies collect, share and analyze information, and brought national security tools deeper into ordinary law enforcement.
The infrastructure built in the attacks’ aftermath has proved remarkably durable. Joint terrorism task forces and fusion centers brought federal, state and local agencies into closer intelligence-sharing networks. New laws expanded the government’s ability to obtain information. And police departments acquired technologies that once belonged largely to the realm of national security.
But the expansion of surveillance did not go uncontested. Civil liberties groups warned that the new powers could erode Americans’ privacy and constitutional protections, while many Americans accepted expanded government surveillance as a necessary tradeoff for safety in the aftermath of the attacks.
The country also entered a period of heightened scrutiny for people perceived as foreign or potentially threatening — with American Muslims and immigrant communities bearing a particularly heavy burden.
Then came the digital revolution.
Americans began carrying smartphones, broadcasting their lives on social media and generating enormous amounts of commercially collected data. Police gained access to license plate readers, networks of cameras, cellphone location information and other technologies capable of tracking people and mapping their movements.
Now, artificial intelligence is adding another layer: systems that can sift through those vast stores of information, connect previously separate databases and generate analyses in seconds.
Some surveillance and privacy experts say that the amount of information available to the government — and its ability to make sense of it — has fundamentally changed since 9/11.
That has taken on new urgency as surveillance systems have moved further into everyday life. Automated license plate readers can track where people drive. Facial recognition can help identify people in crowds. Commercial data can reveal where and how people live and travel. And increasingly, artificial intelligence can analyze and connect these streams of information at a speed no human investigator could match.
Those capabilities have raised concerns among some experts and advocates about how surveillance could be used to monitor protests, track immigrants and identify people seeking reproductive healthcare.
Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel and director of the security and surveillance project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, described the post-9/11 era as a “perfect storm.”
“That storm is both the expansion of the legal powers that have been conferred on the government to collect and share information, combined with the advance of technology, which has given the government more tools to collect information from more people in more contexts,” Nojeim said.
From intelligence silos to everyday policing
In the months after 9/11, officials sought to fix a critical weakness exposed by the attacks: Intelligence that could have helped uncover the plot was held across government agencies that failed to connect or share it effectively. The response was a sweeping effort to tear down those silos and build a more integrated intelligence network.
Federal, state and local agencies quickly expanded intelligence-sharing, and the government established and expanded networks designed to move information across traditional institutional boundaries. The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces brought together federal, state and local law enforcement and intelligence personnel.
Fusion centers, generally run by state and local governments with federal support, became another part of the post-9/11 intelligence architecture, with at least one operating in every state. The centers serve as intelligence hubs where law enforcement agencies can share information, analyze data and flag potential threats across jurisdictions.
Katie Kinsey, chief of staff and tech policy counsel at the Policing Project at the NYU School of Law, said the original goal was straightforward — prevent another terrorist attack.
Over time, some fusion centers began supporting investigations and enforcement involving lower-level crimes, Kinsey said. Local police departments also developed their own versions of centralized intelligence hubs, often called real-time crime centers, that can integrate information from cameras, automated license plate readers and other surveillance systems.
David Viola, an adjunct professor at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of “You Have Unleashed a Storm: New York City’s Descent into Chaos During America’s Most Explosive Era of Radical Violence,” said the post-9/11 period also marked a major shift in the kind of information available to investigators.
Before the attacks, he said, intelligence work relied heavily on traditional investigative techniques. Today, digital records can provide information about where people go, with whom they communicate, what they purchase and what they post online.
But technology is only part of the transformation. Viola said the institutional relationships forged among local, state and federal authorities after 9/11 are among the period’s most lasting legacies.
“These are institutions that have cemented the close coordination between state, local, federal, tribal authorities in the past 25 years, and they’re going nowhere, for better or worse,” he said.
Nojeim, of the Center for Democracy & Technology, was directing lobbyists in Washington, D.C., on 9/11. His office was evacuated as officials tried to determine whether the U.S. Capitol was the target of another hijacked plane.
In the aftermath, he said, civil liberties advocates understood that decisions made in response to the attacks could extend far beyond the immediate crisis.
About a month after the attacks, the USA PATRIOT Act was signed into law, dramatically expanding the federal government’s ability to collect information and conduct surveillance in terrorism investigations. Some of its most sweeping surveillance authorities were later curtailed or allowed to expire, but the law helped establish a new framework for national security surveillance that continues to shape how Americans’ data is collected and monitored.
“In the days after 9/11, we all realized that what the government did in the next few days to respond could have lasting implications for the civil liberties of Americans,” Nojeim said.
The data economy
The growth of surveillance after 9/11 also coincided with a separate transformation that would make those systems far more powerful. Americans were beginning to carry smartphones, use social media and spend more of their lives online, generating enormous amounts of digital information that did not exist before.
Kinsey, of the Policing Project, said that created a new dynamic for law enforcement. Agencies had expanded their ability to collect and share intelligence after 9/11, while technology was producing more information about people than ever before. Much of that information was collected by private companies for commercial purposes, but it could also become available to law enforcement, either through data purchases or when companies turned information over to authorities.
At the same time, Kinsey said, Americans have become accustomed to giving up personal information without necessarily understanding how it is collected or what can ultimately be done with it.
“There’s still a lack of awareness because there’s a lack of transparency on the part of law enforcement, but also on the part of these private tech companies about what they are actually collecting on us, and then what they’re doing with that information,” Kinsey said.
That lack of visibility extends beyond the cameras and other surveillance tools people can see. Personal data can be combined and shared behind the scenes, allowing the government to draw conclusions from pieces of information that may seem insignificant on their own.
“Never in human history has the government had more information about what we are doing, who we are doing it with, what we like to buy, and indeed what we are thinking about, than ever before,” said Nojeim, of the Center for Democracy & Technology.
Jessica Katzenstein, a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor at Arizona State University, said technological advances have also changed what Americans consider normal, making forms of live, mass surveillance that once seemed dystopian increasingly commonplace.
“The things that we would have taken for granted as forms of privacy we can all expect have just completely vanished,” she said.
That normalization can make surveillance difficult to roll back once law enforcement agencies have invested in the technology and incorporated it into their work, she said.
“Once you have a sense of both a need and access to tools, it will be very, very difficult to get you to give that up,” said Katzenstein, who also studies police in the U.S. as an ethnographer.
Communities living with the consequences
The expansion of surveillance after 9/11 also had consequences that were not felt equally. American Muslims faced heightened scrutiny in the name of national security, and advocates say the surveillance practices and assumptions that emerged in that period have since affected other communities of color.
Haris Tarin, vice president of policy and programming for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who also spent more than a decade working in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said many American Muslims experienced the aftermath of 9/11 as a “dual attack.”
“We were attacked twice. First by the terrorists, we were attacked for being Americans, and then we were attacked by our own government and people within our own country, where we were cast under suspicion, and that has continued for the last 25 years,” Tarin said.
Tarin said that suspicion soon extended beyond American Muslims to other communities.
“After 9/11, American Muslims were easy to go after because there was not much political consequence,” he said. “But it just didn’t stop with American Muslims. We’ve seen that now extend to immigrants. We’ve seen that now extend to anti-Semitism. We’ve seen that now extend to anti-Black hate.”
Lia Nitake, senior director of technology, telecommunications and media policy at Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said the consequences have been particularly pronounced for communities of color. She said the heightened surveillance of people based on their race, religion or other aspects of their identity has created a climate of fear.
“In a lot of ways, these surveillance measures have also eroded this idea that everyone should have an equal right to privacy,” Nitake said.
Both Tarin and Nitake said the growing use of artificial intelligence raises new concerns about how those disparities could be reproduced or amplified. Police agencies could increasingly rely on technology to monitor communities rather than invest in relationships with them, Tarin said.
“In the AI age, it will be easy for government agencies and law enforcement agencies to use technology to surveil and not do the hard work of community policing and engaging communities,” he said.
Stronger surveillance systems
Police departments nationwide are already using AI-assisted tools to analyze evidence, search databases, draft reports and translate conversations in real time.
North Carolina Central University Police Chief Robert Gaddy, who previously served as a Durham police officer for more than 25 years, sees the technology as a practical response to the growing demands on modern policing.
Information that once had to be gathered and shared manually can now flow through centralized digital systems, while AI-assisted cameras and license plate readers help officers identify suspects, gather evidence and solve crimes.
“If I can take this technology and at least give that (victim’s) security back to them by solving this crime, it’s worth every every bit of it,” Gaddy said.
Gaddy said technology can also help departments facing staffing shortages. But he said its use requires clear limits and oversight, including rules governing how officers access and share information and audits to identify potential misuse. Still, some experts and advocates worry that newer AI-assisted systems could make existing surveillance infrastructure significantly more powerful by connecting databases that previously operated separately. Some tools allow officers to search multiple databases using natural-language prompts and generate summaries, raising questions about accuracy, missing information and how much officers may rely on the results.
Nojeim, of the Center on Democracy & Technology, said those concerns become especially serious when AI is used in decisions that can affect someone’s liberty.
“We all know from our work or our play with AI that it can make mistakes and that it hallucinates,” he said. “Now we’re in a world where an AI hallucination can be the thing that set off an investigation that landed you in jail inappropriately.”
Modern law enforcement agencies have access to more information than any human could reasonably process, said Viola, the adjunct professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. AI could help investigators identify connections that might otherwise be missed. But Viola said those capabilities also come with risks.
“These are very capable tools that can be used to great effect for the betterment of American society and safety,” Viola said. “They can also be used for ill effect if there is an administration who wants to use them for such activity.”
Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at awatford@stateline.org.
Amanda Watford (née Hernández) is a national reporter covering criminal justice and public safety for Stateline. Her reporting focuses on how states are reshaping approaches to policing, crime victims' services, corrections, courts, drug policy, gun violence and more.
A Presbyterian College perspective here.
