Exact grid locations of various assets. you've GOT to be kidding me... EXACT grids NEVER need to be released other than on a NEED TO KNOW basis let alone put into a report. just damn...
Posted on 05/01/2005 8:24:11 AM PDT by Phsstpok
Posted by CmdrTaco on Sunday May 01, @09:43AM from the hate-when-that-happens dept.
cyclop writes "In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying "hidden" text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor (Italian). The uncensored report can now be directly downloaded (evil .DOC format, sorry)"
Why is the government keeping that information secret
A vdiff between the censored and unmasked versions suggests that much of what was redacted is operational details, such as:
- An itemization of IEDs and VBIEDs deployment techniques which have been most effective,
- An analysis of the tactical strengths and weaknesses of specific checkpoints along "Route Irish",
- Combat readiness assesment of the units and soldiers involved,
- A detailed description of how the checkpoint is laid out,
- Exact grid locations of various assets.
- Details of how checkpoint searches are set up and executed
- Details of how checkpoints are expected to deal with approaching vehicles, including threat assesment methods.
- A statistical analysis of "normal" traffic approaching the checkpoint.
It names the soldiers involved and details the specific actions taken by those soldiers. It names the soldier who killed Calipari.
It briefly describes U.S. Embassy procedures for transporting VIPs along Route Irish and in general.
It details movement of U.S. and Italian Embassy personnel.
It describes possible future procedures and configurations for checkpoints.
In other words it has a lot of information of potential use to an insurgent mission planner and a lot that is nobody's business.
I'm beginning to really dislike leftists, particularly the Italian journalist ones.
NOTE TO ADMIN MOD: if you consider this "loose lips" please pull.
this is already all over the itallian press and the blogosphere.. i dont think loose lips is even an issue now.
I am concerned about soldiers who will no doubt be targeted now.
Also, this is what happens when you use programs like MS word which keeps track of almost every edit to the file in the file. God know what PDF program was used.
There really should be a lesson learned from this.
the same thing occured once for me, while using adobe's pdf-to-html conversion tool on a pdf document on the US Trustee's site for documents in re: Enron.
I am at the bottom of the barrel in terms of computer literacy ...but it seems to me the redacted copy should have been turned into a hard copy and that could then be scanned and released
The thing about this kind of "leak" of classified information is that you never know if it is really part of a sophisticated disinformation campaign, ie., meant to be "decoded" amd leaked by scumbags.
> it seems to me the redacted copy should have been turned into a hard copy and that could then be scanned and released
That would ahve been the way to go. Print it out, MAgic-Marker the naughty bits, feed it back into a scanner/photocopier and turn into PDF. Takes about 1 minute (got a photocopier at work that will scan, PDF and email... it ain't that hard). Probably no longer than doing it all - ineffectively - electronically.
Maybe the people doing it don't get that, and did it without knowing it. The government is like that. They don't have that many high skilled people.
A consulting opportunity for you.
in the 1980's I received mant magic-marker-redacted USG docs pertaining to agent orange.....I found that by lightening the photocopier darkness I could as often as not read what was behind the magic marker.....this worked on even multi-generational photocopies......the image behind the magic-marker is always darker than the magic-marker.....so lightening to the point of "thinning" the redaction revealed the underlying type :)
the image behind the magic-marker is always darker than the magic-marker
I could have written that better, such as:
the image behind the magic-marker is always *in addition to* the magic-marker.....so lightening to the point of "thinning" the redaction revealed the underlying type :)
That is why the copy that was released(with the redacting) should have been printed out, then scanned back in, and then they should have released the scan. No chance to play the copier game. Either that, or use the software correctly to begin with.
Exact grid locations of various assets. you've GOT to be kidding me... EXACT grids NEVER need to be released other than on a NEED TO KNOW basis let alone put into a report. just damn...
This problem with redacted PDF files isn't even new. It's happened in several fairly high-profile cases over the past year or so. THere are ways of doing this securely that weren't followed.
There is some one in the DOD who violated the law, declassifying reports that are classified. I hope that person will be fired and be challenged at the court.
Nevermind, I didn't read the whole thing first...
Emily? Emily Litella? Is that you?
Believe me. I know how you feel. ;^>
Better still, never, ever use any microsoft products at all.
I was once involved in a project where a bunch of firms submitted highly confidential data to an outside (highly paid) attorney who was hired to combine the data for a public report and then destroy the confidential data. When I got the final report as an MS Word file, it showed some of the data in graphic form. I double-clicked on the graph and the software opened an Excel spreadsheet containing all the confidential data. I notified the attorney of the breach, and he immediately "recalled" the document with instructions to all recipients not to open it because it contained a nasty virus. LOL. Thanks for the confidential information, Bill Gates.
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