There was no effort to protect the litany of documents that escaped from the World Trade Center, but there was also no need to do so for a number of reasons.
Markets: President Bush ordered the securities exchanges to halt trading until 17 September to avoid a panic. This pause eliminated the need for firms to scramble. Cantor Fitzgerald, for example, had continuity of operations through its offices in London although the firm was greatly diminished through the loss of 600 employees.
Duration: After the first airplane hit the World Trade Center, the city continued to operate in shock albeit without telephone service. By 9:21am, all points of entrance into the city had been closed. While documents continued to leak out of both towers, the duration that intact documents would have been available for examination would have been relatively small: there was a gap of slightly more than 30 minutes in between the two crashes, and no more than 90 minutes in between the first crash and the mandatory evacuation of lower Manhattan below Canal Street. While business papers did indeed make it as far as uptown Manhattan -- I remember seeing some on the street walking home from school -- for the most part they were illegible or useless without context. People were generally more concerned about their safety.
Utility: Most business papers at an investment bank are drafts of projects rather than final deliverables. These drafts are kept in what is called a "data room", a secure virtual environment where analysts prepare powerpoint and excel presentations. While this is admittedly anecdotal, I worked in private equity for several years and cannot think of a single page in a pitch book that would be fatally compromising.
Cleanup: While the entire City of New York was under lockdown, the New York Department of Sanitation was not. Sanitation and cleanup became integral as it became clear that asbestos was in the air, in addition to general concerns over possible additional terror attacks that were abounding in the imaginations of many New Yorkers. Most business papers were picked up by NYC Sanitation or the maintenance staffs of local buildings and disposed of as found.
Retribution: The SEC would have taken enormous steps to punish any firm that would have attempted to use confidential documents recovered from the World Trade Center. If an event like this did occur, the SEC would have made sure that it reached a fever pitch in the media to deter future violators.
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People often want to know what are in the removed comments. As a matter of policy, we don't generally make those accessible, but we do occasionally provide insight as it is important for users to feel there is transparency and and not go thinking we're removing amazing answers for shits and giggles.
As such, here is a screenshot of all the removed comments in this thread as of this morning. This is a fairly standard example of what highly upvoted "Comment graveyards" on this subreddit look like.
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