On April 7, 1931, Daniel Ellsberg, an American military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers and whose office was broken into by burglars hired by the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), was born in Chicago. The break-in would lead to the Watergate scandal and the resignation of President Richard Nixon
On April 7, 1969, the Internet was born with Steve Crocker’s invention of Request For Comments (RFC) documents to help record unofficial notes on the development of the ARPANET, the world’s first operational packet switching network and the core network that would become the global Internet. RFCs have since become the official record for Internet specifications, protocols, procedures, and events.
On April 7, 1994, civil war erupted in Rwanda with Hutu extremists attacking the minority Tutsis after President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down. It is not known whether the attack was carried out by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi military organization, or by Hutu extremists trying to instigate the mass killing. But in roughly three months, the Hutu Interahamwe brutally murdered as many as a million innocent civilian Tutsis (and moderate Hutus) in the worst ethnic genocide since World War II.