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More PDF Blackout Follies
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jun 22, 2006 10:35 AM
from the it's-even-secret-what-they-want-secret dept.
from the it's-even-secret-what-they-want-secret dept.
georgewilliamherbert writes "The latest installment of "As the PDF Blackouts Turn" hit today, with a U.S. government apparently releasing a redacted version of their court filing in the Balco grand jury leak case
which merely stuck a black line over the text, which remains available in the document. As with prior documents, entering text cut/paste mode in a normal PDF browser such as Acrobat allows a reader to access the concealed text. Previous incidents include an AT&T filing in the NSA case." This works with Xpdf and KPDF, too; for KPDF, use the selection tool (under the Tools menu) around the redacted section, copy to clipboard, then paste into the text-manipulator of your choice.
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Entertainment: FBI Wiretapping Audit Secrets Uncovered Via Ctrl+C 231 comments
mytrip notes a story in Wired's Threat Level blog on the latest boneheaded government moves with redaction. (We've been discussing redaction follies here for years.) This time it's an FBI report (PDF) on implementing CALEA — you can select text from redacted areas, copy it, and paste into a text editor, as University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze discovered. From Wired: "Once again, supposedly sensitive information blacked out from a government report turns out to be visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl+C keys — and that information turns out to be not very sensitive after all... [Among] the tidbits considered too sensitive to be aired publicly: The FBI paid Verizon $2,500 apiece to upgrade 1,140 old telephone switches. Oddly the report didn't redact the total amount paid to the telecom — slightly more than $2.9 million dollars — but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid."
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Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Maybe (Score:5, Funny)
It was good enough back in the days of wood-burning computers;
it should be good enough now.
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History repeats itself (Score:5, Funny)
Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
My grandfather used to say that there is one irreducible requirement for training a dog: you have to be smarter than the dog.
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Re:History repeats itself (Score:5, Insightful)
Alternatively, perhaps the technology is at fault. If the same mistake is made over, and over, and over again, many user interface experts would start investigating whether it's the UI, not the user that's at fault. The argument is that the mistake is being made because the correct solution is not intuitively obvious.
I'd be curious to know what tool the users are using to black out the text. Are they just exporting from Word but, before exporting, "blocking it out" in Word? If so, how? Are they putting black blocks over text, or setting attributes of the relevent text? If these are the wrong techniques, what can be done to make the right techniques obvious (and the wrongness of these techniques equally obvious)?
I've designed enough crappy UIs in the past and justified them with "It's user error! All they have to do is hit the OK or CANCEL buttons, of course it's not going to work if they close the window instead!" and other such stuff that, with hindsight, was utterly wrong and elitist of me, to know that technically skilled people are not the best judge of intuitiveness. The fact is, I'm a programmer. You're probably technically minded too. The average user isn't. We can't avoid making assumptions about what the user thinks works that are, on occasion, completely, 180 degrees, wrong. What we can do is own up to them and try to determine how to steer the user in the right direction.
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which? (Score:5, Funny)
Which U.S. government?
Works in Safari directly (Score:5, Informative)
Even more shocking (Score:5, Funny)
Redacting right is HARD (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Redacting right is HARD (Score:5, Funny)
This page intentionally left blank.
I was going to say, those guys are goooood.
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Re:Redacting right is HARD (Score:5, Funny)
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blonde joke (Score:5, Funny)
A: There is magic marker ink all over the screen!
The New Way for Gov't Transparency (Score:5, Interesting)
Leave PDF the way it is. In fact, make it really hard to actually redact something, but put a tool front-and-center that looks like its redacting something.
Then - remove any delete capability from Outlook. Trash is fine, but not delete.
Then - configure all Windows machines to be inherently wide open, so that we may all peer into gov't computers. Oh wait, this is already true.
Sometimes I think those in positions of high gov't power should forfeit practically all privacy for the duration of their term. Put a webcam on these fuckers 24/7. Does that sound... draconian? Unreasonable? Maybe. But after losing billions of dollars in things like Iraq military contract debacles, I don't trust any of these people. They certainly don't trust us.
Someone missed the memo (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.nsa.gov/snac/vtechrep/I333-TR-015R-200
Hush! Hush! (Score:5, Funny)
This frightens me!!!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Normal average government workers should NOT be redacting, the people who redact should be those who know that if they screw-up, they may be screwing themselves or good friends in the process. Have people do it(redact) who have something to lose.
Just my 2 cents.
We have to act! (Score:5, Funny)
This law would instruct the FCC to create a program to certify approved PDF viewers; such viewers must make it impossible for users to steal the redacted data in a file, along with technical measures to prevent tampering with the viewers by hackers. Certified viewers will be made available to the public by software companies on a list of government-approved PDF vendors. After it becomes illegal to own a non-certified pirate PDF viewer, these dangerous information leaks will thankfully become a thing of the past.
Congratulaitons. (Score:5, Informative)
Oh, yeah - it's a no-knock warrant, so put your pants on now.
Re:People...learn...? (Score:5, Insightful)
You would think that people would have learned after the first time around. Apparently not.
You're giving people too much credit; as has been noted in this forum many times, the average computer user is not exactly bright and doesn't read Slashdot, so they would have no idea that this is a problem. People just assume that if something appears to work a certain way, it in fact works that way.
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Re:People...learn...? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:People...learn...? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're giving people too little credit. Most people who use computers are probably fairly bright -- they're lawyers, doctors, accountants, and all sorts of things most people on Slashdot can't do. Reading Slashdot doesn't make you bright (in fact, given much of hte drivel, just the opposite.)
But, they expect computers to work like a friggin' toaster, and to them, if the text it blanked out, it's not readable. They're not going to realize the 'black' is a representation of a rectangle in a different document layer, and that the actual internal tree of the PDF still contains the actual text. Really, how could they?
They understand computers by metaphor and analog to the real world. They don't know or care about the actual internal stuff. Since the paradigms have been done to look like the real-world, these people assume that the rest of the things also apply.
Many people use computers who don't have a full grasp on all of their intricacies. However, I haven't looked inside of a TV in 20+ years, but I'm comfortable using one.
Cheers
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Re:A redacted document? Say it ain't so! (Score:5, Informative)
For lawyers/courts/etc., redacted (Per Black's Legal Dictionary) means:
The lesson here is this: if you see a word used in a legal context (or any professional context) and it sounds entirely wrong...ask yourself first whether it might have a special meaning before complaining.
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They're correct. (Score:5, Informative)
If I am releasing a document for publication and decide to remove information from it, this is redaction. It's editing for publication, which can include the removal of information. It could also include the addition of new information, but that's not what typically happens. Redaction can be a form of self-censorship, but it's not always the same.
Censorship is when a third party, generally a person in authority, suppresses information which is considered objectionable. The 'authority' can be the same as the author (e.g. 'self-censorship'), or the suppression can be indirect -- it need not be editing per se.
It's my understanding that "redact" is used only in reference to written documents that are being edited, while 'censor' is more general and can refer to anything. The terms are closely related, especially in their typical use, but they're not exactly the same. "Redact" is actually a more specific and precise word for what's going on in this instance. We can argue about whether censorship is also going on, but redaction definitely is.
Anyway, arguing about definitions by citing dictionaries is always a bit pedantic, since dictionaries are not authoritative except as a historical reference: they can tell you what a word meant at the time the dictionary was written, but not what it means right now, since a word's definition is determined by its usage. All language is inherently arbitrary: they're just sounds we make or things we write down in order to convey ideas, and the relationship between the sounds/characters and ideas is not fixed, but infinitely variable. If everyone were to decide tomorrow that 'redaction' meant the same thing as 'censorship,' that's what it would mean, and next year's dictionaries would have to be updated to reflect that.
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