Posted on 05/04/2005 3:06:42 PM PDT by Panerai
Experts are warning people to be careful with electronic documents that contain sensitive data after a breach in which classified U.S. military information thought to be hidden in a PDF document was uncovered.
Portions of the document had been "blacked out" by electronic means. But apparently, it was possible for outsiders to copy and paste the blacked-out sections into another file--and see the text that had been hidden.
The document is a report written after an investigation into the death of Italian citizen Nicola Calipari at a checkpoint in Iraq. It contains both classified and unclassified information about what happened at the traffic control points in Baghdad on March 4, the day of the incident. The U.S. military has since removed the document from the Internet, but not before it was copied and republished on several Web sites.
The military apparently made an error when it chose to use an electronic technique for obscuring certain words and paragraphs from the original document. (According to a report by the Associated Press, a representative of Adobe Systems, owner of the PDF format, has suggested that whoever attempted to censor the report did so by placing black rectangles over the text in question, rather than deleting the text.)
(Excerpt) Read more at news.com.com ...
And I work with these type of folks everyday...sheesh...
Live and learn. Sounds like all they had to do was highlight the blacked out text to see it.
!! boy howdy these secrets are safe now !! freakin morons!!
You can cut and paste this to see whats in between the 2 paragraphs
Just highlight the stuff
No kidding...
Nobody can now claim that what was redacted embarrassed the US.
This was just stupid.
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