As we announced on August 31, 2010, the International Center for 9/11 Studies has secured the release of tens of thousands of photographs, and hundreds of hours of video footage, from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) under the Freedom of Information Act. We are working on ways to get this data in the hands of interested researchers, we need the community's help to examine this material, much of which has not been seen before.

We are pleased to announce that we have made our first release of this material available for download. This first release is the "NIST Cumulus Video" folder which is part of the NIST Cumulus Database we received. It contains over 6500 video clips that NIST used in its investigation. It is important to note that NIST did not voluntarily turn over the entire Cumulus database to us. The alleged copyright holders of a small amount of material in the Cumulus database objected to NIST releasing their materials, and NIST complied with all such requests. We are currently engaged in litigation against NIST, and will continue fighting for complete release of these materials.

The original "NIST Cumulus Video" folder is approximately 924GB. To make it possible to distribute, we encoded it using the x264 software library. The result is roughly 86GB and has no noticeable difference in quality. (See http://911datasets.org/index.php/Release_14_-_NIST_Cumulus_Video_Database for the encoding details.). If you download the compressed data set and find interesting items you believe need to be examined in their original, uncompressed format, please contact the International Center for 9/11 Studies using the Contact Us page.

We are releasing the Cumulus database using the bittorrent network. If you dont have a bittorrent client please see http://911datasets.org/index.php/Bittorrent_Clients to install one. Then click:

http://911datasets.org/images/International_Center_for_911_Studies_NIST_FOIA_-_Release_14_-_NIST_Cumulus_Video_Database.torrent

to start downloading. Also, even after your download is complete, please allow your computer to act as a seed for other downloaders in the future.

We will be releasing additional data sets in the coming weeks and months. If you intend to archive all of this material, plan on purchasing a large storage medium, this release is numbered 14 of 30, so we have atleast 29 (of varying size) more to go. We expect to receive even more data from NIST. We are also working on a wiki-style website where researchers will be able to discuss interesting items that are found in this mountain of data.

One final note: if you do choose to download this data, you will be agreeing to the Terms of Use that are included in the torrent file. The Terms of Use contain important provisions with respect to the copyrights, if any exist, in the materials we are releasing. If you download the materials and do not agree to the Terms of Use, please delete the materials from your system. We regret having to include a Terms of Use with these materials, but NIST has been less than forthcoming with information about the origin of these materials, and we need to protect ourselves.

Our sincere thanks to everyone who has helped over the last month to make this information available.

http://ic911studies.org/