What Secrets Are Your Documents Telling?
Here’s a fun one. The U.S. military released a report last week clearing American troops in the March gunfire incident that injured Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena and killed Nicola Calipari, an Italian intelligence agent, as they were driving to the Baghdad airport. Kevin Drum of the Political Animal at The Washington Monthly tells of the information left in the document:
But here's a question: do you think the Italian computer whizzes will be any more competent than their American counterparts when they release their report? The U.S. report is full of redactions, as you can see in the picture above, but once again an American agency has used the searchable PDF format to distribute a report, and all you have to do is save the report as a text file in order to recover all the redacted parts.
Click on the link and take a look at the picture. Lots and lots of blackouts. Unless of course you save the document as a text file. Then it’s all readable. Ouch. Our government in action.
First of all David, thank you for your wonderful site. Great, pertinent information, well-developed and delivered. Here's my question after reading "What Secrets Are Your Documents Telling?", how should we send files to ensure that earlier redactions are removed? I have been telling my staff to re-save word docs in rich text format (RTF)in order to avoid passing along earlier redactions and additions when emailing interrogatories and requests for production. Is this the gold standard? Do we just convert to .txt format and send unformatted?
Mark,
Thanks for the nice words. I've enjoyed doing the blog. To answer your question, there are programs that strip out the meta-data.
I use WordPerfect, so am less worried about it, but I have to admit that I'm not 100% up to speed on those programs. I'll do a bit of looking around and let you guys know.
