Posted on 01/17/2005 12:08:09 PM PST by RatherBiased.com
The handling of documents appears to have tripped up CBS News again, and once more bloggers have provided instant - and biting - critiques of the incident.
After an independent panel published its findings on the use of unverified documents relating to President Bush's National Guard duty on "60 Minutes Wednesday," the entire 234-page report was made available on the CBS News Web site and that of the law firm hired to handle the inquiry, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart Nicholson Graham. But several Web sites noted that the posting of the report had been altered two days after it was placed on the Web page.
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"I'd written a couple of pieces on the document earlier in the week," said Ernest Miller, a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who writes a popular blog on Internet law (www.corante.com/importance). "Then I noticed that I couldn't copy and paste from the report as I did in days past."
With the help of Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and fellow blogger (sethf.com/infothought/blog/), Mr. Miller found that the document's encryption settings had been changed and, as a result, the text could not be copied. Anyone who downloaded the panel's report from either the CBS News servers or those of the law firm would have to retype any passages they wished to include in, say, an e-mail message or a blog post.
In the lightning-fast realm of online commentary, the change was akin to dumping molasses on a blogger's keyboard. "Now why would CBS News do that?" Mr. Miller asked on his Web site. "What happened to the transparency?"
According to Linda Mason, a CBS News executive who served as a liaison between the network and the independent panel, an attorney from the law firm called her on Wednesday and asked that the digital restrictions be made - including the prevention of copying and pasting. The fear, it seems, was that an enterprising ne'er-do-well could copy the text into a new document and begin circulating a faked version of the report.
"The bloggers and anybody else can do what they want with it," Ms. Mason said. "It's out there for the public to see. We're not trying to hide anything."
But few bloggers were buying that. Many sites were suggesting ways to beat the encryption settings, and others, like rathergate.com, were more than happy to make available the earlier, unrestricted version of the report.
"They're just putting up speed bumps," Mr. Miller said. "It makes CBS look bad."
CBS is going down.
C-B$ ping.
There's a Tonight Show joke lurking here.
Edit
Select all
copy
open word
new document
paste
save
Ahhh... don't you just love irony?
Add to the fact that Thornburg is an on retainer attorney for CBS and their entire "independent" investigation goes out the window.
Didn't someone post the whole thing here ... in text?
Haha ... that's funny. Wouldn't want any fake documents out there, would we!
One of these doesn't belong in this grouping.
Yep I noticed this "problem" with copying.
At work, I printed the entire document then used the fancy Xerox workstation to "scan to PDF" and email it to me.
An extra step or two but nothing difficult.
Nyuk, nyuk, I knew it. Thank you, sir.
Doing a screen capture and "save as PDF" works fine for me.
True to form, CBS runs behind the bloggers.
Time to take them all down, they have become nothing more than the mouthpiece of anything or anyone that is Anti American. They are the Pravda's of Socialism.
They have Sold their Souls and broken the Bond of Trust that once existed between the MSM and the People. Their Treachery has been discovered and the People will turn their backs on them. We must establish other means of information or take over one of the Alphabet Networks.
"I'd written a couple of pieces on the document earlier in the week," said Ernest Miller, a fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School who writes a popular blog on Internet law (www.corante.com/importance). "Then I noticed that I couldn't copy and paste from the report as I did in days past."
With the help of Seth Finkelstein, a programmer and fellow blogger (sethf.com/infothought/blog/), Mr. Miller found that the document's encryption settings had been changed and, as a result, the text could not be copied. Anyone who downloaded the panel's report from either the CBS News servers or those of the law firm would have to retype any passages they wished to include in, say, an e-mail message or a blog post.
What a bunch of losers at SeeBS!!
Curses! Foiled again!!
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