"Decryption" of Bush Memo

jjq writes "A decryption of the so-called Bush Memo, see the CNN news, http://edition.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/bush .briefing/ was presented at Eurocrypt 2004 (Interlaken) during the rump session. David Naccache shown how to recover words from removed text in several memos. See more about this story at Lemonde.fr (sorry, it is written in French)." Just use the the fish.

Comments

google translation - have fun.

[krymsin01]

Cryptologists decipher a term censured in a "memo" addressed by the CIA to Geoges Bush
THE WORLD|07.05.04| 12h58 UPDATED 07.05.04|16h13
Les annales et corrig÷Ydu baccalaurïE depuis 1995.
Abonnez-vous au Monde.fr, 5? par mois

A passage covered with black ink in a document recently diffused by the White House was reconstituted. The method could be applied to considerable d¦classifi¦es files.
It "was bored" in front of television, the weekend of Easter, "when the memo of the CIA with George Bush was diffused" , remembers David Naccache, specialist in the coding of the data of the French company Gemplus. "I telephoned at once Claire Whelan, a coed of Dublin City University, from which I direct the thesis, to propose to him to attack the caviard¦s passages" , it tells. Mission accomplished, or almost.

The "memo" in question, addressed on August 6, 2001 by the CIA to president Bush and entitled "Ben Laden determined to strike in the USA", had been just d¦classifi¦ by the White House. This one wanted to prove that the precision of the warnings of the services of information was not sufficient to make it possible to the president to prevent the attacks of September 11. But five passages specifying the sources of the collected information had been covered with black ink.

For the cryptologist David Naccache, these illegible fragments were as many red rags. The result of its efforts - "conduits on a purely deprived basis" , specifies it, concerned not to imply its employer in his initiative - was presented Tuesday May 4 at the time of the conference Eurocrypt 2004 which joined together until May 6 with Interlaken, in Switzerland, the gratin of world cryptography. "the demonstration was extremely impressive" , judge Jean-Jacques Quisquater (university of Leuwen-the-New), specialist in the field, which greets this company of " reverse engineering of censured document" .

David Naccache and his pupil indeed succeeded in discovering one of the censured words. The term "Egyptian" seems the only possible one to them. They want to polish their method before returning their verdict on a longer passage, in order not to discredit it. And they straightforwardly threw sponge for a completely isolated word, for lack of sufficient indices.

Technology employed does not have, at first sight, anything revolutionist. The two researchers initially "rectified" the text, deformed at the time of its digitalization - the slope was only of 0,52ã. They then used a software of character recognition to determine the police force of the text which fixes the number of signs per unit of length. The simple recourse to an English dictionary then makes it possible to draw up a list of possible words. "1 530 corresponded" , indicates David Naccache.

But the article "year" preceding the word mystery implied that this one necessarily started with a vowel, which made it possible to bring back the list to 346 words. In French, an index provided by articles like "one" or "one", in the same way, would have made it possible to tighten research. The selection was also facilitated by the fact that the bill of character, Arial, is "proportional", i.e. the "hunting" of the letters varies. The space occupied by an I differs from that taken by W, which can give additional indices, compared to the police forces known as "monospace", like the Mail, often used, where all the letters are worth.

"Among" the surviving "words, five or six could make direction, but only Egyptian corresponded to the context" , indicates the cryptologist. This last stage raises more human intelligence than of the geometry of the text. To choose among Ukrainian, univited, unofficial, incursive, Egyptian, indebted and Ugandan, the two researchers were based on their good direction, Uganda and the Ukraine seeming too far away from the theatre of the operations to be retained, for example.

No doubt the analysis of the "memo" of the CIA reveals only one "an open secre

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay. They used software to analyze the memo and decipher what the blacked out words most likely were based on the use of the english language and structure of the rest of the sentences. After reading the above, I'm still unclear about exactly WHAT it is that they came up with as the end product?

Also, can you decipher english spoken by an idiot like Bush in the same way you could from an educated person? Just because the english language and common sense dictates that a certain missing word be one thing doesn't mean that's what a dumbass like Bush would use. Afterall, this is the guy who totally invents words out of thin air.

Besides, can't you usually guess the words are "evil", "good" or "jesus" 95% of the time?

Re:google translation - have fun.

[HughsOnFirst]

But the article "year" preceding the word mystery implied that this one necessarily started with a vowel,

Google translates Mais l'article "an" as 'But the article "year" ' it this case an means an not year.

I guess translating mixed languages is a bit harder .

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Hythlodaeus]

The result of its efforts - "conduits on a purely deprived basis"

A self-referential comment by the translation software?

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Hard_Code]

conduits on a purely deprived basis?
throwing sponge?
"monospace" police force?

Sounds like a conspiracy to me!

Re:google translation - have fun.

[m000]

They showed that the second of the three blacked-out sections of the released portion of the PDB was most likely "Egyptian."

In this particular case, the section was relatively short, so it wasn't tough to come up with a possible word list, but I wonder how well they'll do on the other sections, which are longer and therefore more likely to be multiple words. In the end, they rely on context to decide which of the possible strings is most likely the correct, which even in this case allowed for some close possiblities. A member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad would probably be most likely to interact with a member of an Egyptian service, but could just as well have spoken to a member of an unofficial (e.g., news) service.

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't look right to me. In the image showing the word Egyptian superimposed over the blacked out section "an _____ service", the spacing between the "n" in "an" and the "E" in Egyptian looks too close. Also the "n" in Egyptian doesn't seem to fit under the portion blacked out. I wonder why this is. Also, it looks like they measured the length of the blackout rather the distance between the end of the word preceding the blackout and the start of the word after the blackout. I would think that the latter method would give more accurate results.

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been to Eurocrypt where this was presented, the answer is simple: they exhaust all words and then they wish to feed the exhausted sentences one by one into a syntaxical analyzer to rule out these sentences that make no sense in English. They recognize that the method will disclose one-word hidden words, will sometimes find two-word combinations but they think that three-word combinations is probably the limit.

Beyond attacking this memo the method simply points to the fact that the way in which we censor documents before release should be changed.

BTW this presentation won the "best rump session award"... a cow-bell.

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

you can notice that there is another Egyptian on the same line and after printing the memo and measuring the length it fits perfectly into the blotted space - so their guess is right.

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Anonymous Coward]

Big deal. The third one's probably "TOP SECRET", and I can determine that without any special software :-)

Re:google translation - have fun.

[Peter Desnoyers]

Here's a cleaned up version of the translation. My French isn't great, but it's better than the fish. (although it's great having a computer do the grunt work...)

A passage covered with black ink in a document recently release by the White House was reconstituted. The method could be applied to a considerable number of declassified files.

He "was bored" in front of television, the weekend of Easter, "when the memo from the CIA to George Bush was released" , remembers David Naccache, a cryptographer at the French company Gemplus. "I immediately telephoned Claire Whelan, a student at Dublin City University, whose thesis I supervise, to propose to her to attack the blacked-out passages" , he relates. Mission accomplished, or almost.

The memo in question, sent on August 6, 2001 by the CIA to President Bush and titled "Bin Laden determined to strike in US", had just been declassified by the White House, which wanted to prove that the accuracy of warnings from intelligence services had not been sufficient to allow the president to prevent the attacks of September 11. But five passages specifying the sources of the collected information had been covered with black ink.

For the cryptologist David Naccache, these illegible fragments were red flags. The result of his efforts - "conducted on a purely private basis" , he specifies, concerned not to implicate his employer in his initiative - was presented Tuesday May 4 at the Eurocrypt 2004 conference, which met until May 6 in Interlaken, Switzerland, the gratin (???) of world cryptography. "The demonstration was extremely impressive" , judged Jean-Jacques Quisquater (University of Louvain-la-Neuve), specialist in the field, who applauds this technique of "reverse engineering censored documents".

David Naccache and his student indeed succeeded in discovering one of the censured words. The term "Egyptian" seems the only possible one to them. They want to fine-tune their method before rendering a verdict on a longer passage, in order not to discredit(???) it. And they totally threw in the sponge on a completely isolated word, for lack of sufficient indices.

The technology employed is not, at first glance, revolutionary. The two researchers initially straightened the text, deformed at the time of its digitalization - the slope was only 0.52 degrees. They then used character recognition software to determine the point size of the text which determines the number of characters per unit length. A simple recourse to an English dictionary then makes it possible to draw up a list of possible words. "1,530 matched" , indicates David Naccache.

But the article "an" preceding the mystery word, implied that this one necessarily started with a vowel, which made it possible to reduce the list to 346 words. In French, an index provided by articles like "un" or "une", in the same way, would have made it possible to tighten the search. The selection was also aided by the fact that the character font, Arial, is "proportional", i.e. the width of the letters varies. The space occupied by an I differs from that taken by W, which can give additional indices, compared to the fonts known as "monospace", like Courier, often used, where all the letters are the same width.

"Among the remaining words, five or six could fit, but only Egyptian corresponded to the context" , indicates the cryptologist. This last stage relies more on human intelligence than the geometry of the text. To choose among "Ukrainian", "uninvited", "unofficial", "incursive", "Egyptian", "indebted" and "Ugandan", the two researchers used their common sense. Uganda and the Ukraine seemed too far away from the theatre of the operations to be retained, for example.

No doubt the analysis of the CIA memo of the CIA reveals only an open secret, recognizes David Naccache. But the method automates the research. (???) In another memo, it revealed that civil helicopters militarized by the Iraqis had been bought in South Korea. And nothing prevents the automated application of this technique to an group of declassified documents, which might one day allow it to uncover "isolated words, or even groups of two or three words".

Re:google translation - have fun.

[TheClam]

gratin == cream?

As in "cream of the crop," the best guys in cryptography were there in Switzerland.

Re:google translation - have fun.

[nine-times]

Now, if only we can get these guys to decipher this article.

Direct Babelfish link

[Anonymous Coward]

Babelfish link

Re:Direct Babelfish link

[elmegil]

Which doesn't work either, if the editor had actually tried. There are commas in the URL and babelfish won't accept them.

Re:Direct Babelfish link

[Anonymous Coward]

It works. Click it to try. I got around the limitation by starting at Le Monde's front page. I entered http://www.lemonde.fr/ in Babelfish's form, then I clicked the Science section and there it was.

Corrent Babelfish URL

[xpccx]

Altavista's babelfish is babelfish.altavista.com not .net as provided in the post.

Not that I was able to decipher much of it anyway even with the fish.

Re:Corrent Babelfish URL

[technos]

Personally, I'm suprised babelfish.altavista.digital.com still works.

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

"insurgents", "purges", "Sunni"... man are you brainwashed by your biased media or what? The rest of the world is laughing at America's pussy apologizing leaders. Defeat is inevitable, accept it.

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Without the Americans the Sunni are toast. The shites will exterminate them. And praise allah for them.

The rest of the world can laugh all they want. Their pussy leaders couldn't stop our pussy leaders (and I'd agree about that) from doing anything. Quite the monument to your own insignificance, no? Not only does your voice not count, neither does your nations. Only if Florida hippies weren't quite so appathetic, haha. You're whole nation is less powerful than a few thousand burnouts in any one of about a dozen states. That must just suck.

Just remember to thank God that my people aren't calling the shots. We'd give the sandmonkeys the crusades they so desperately want. I (as an atheist) would make sure their kids, those that survived, were raised as hassetic jews out of a well developed sense of irony. There'd be none of this talking. Very berry little of the prisoner taking, and the interogations would only be so civilized that they yeilded relatively accurate information as opposed to confessions to anything and everything. Cities like Najaf and Fallujiah would be memory filled great smoking gravel quarries.

Every failure is one step closer to the reality I want to see. And I vote like a moderate democrat. You people ain't seen shit. If you don't like what you see now, it might be time to reserve your place in the cave of your choice now. We eat up that white hat black hat old west shit. After a certain point, justice only has to be "roughly" done.

How much ZnO does it take to protect against a neutron burn anyway?

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what, AC? I'm an American. And I live in Texas! Bet you didn't see that coming.

Unprecendented secrecy

[Anonymous Coward]

Unprecendented secrecy in the present U.S. administration. You are not allowed to know what your government is doing.

He lied. They died.

Re:Unprecendented secrecy

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a cat named Snowball --
She died! She died!
Mom said she was sleeping --
She lied! She lied!
Why oh why is my cat dead?
Couldn't that Chrysler hit me instead?

I've learned two things:

[Anonymous Coward]

1) My attention span is accurately described as gnat-like
2) In French gammer, did Yoda speak.

Re:I've learned two things:

[ResidntGeek]

French? It's possible, but I thought it was closer to German grammar, because they like their verbs at the end of the sentence. However, I haven't seen any of the movies in quite a long time, so it's likely I'm wrong.

That's not true!

[Anonymous Coward]

If they wanted to keep everything secret they'd release it on C-Span.

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

The war is over, you dumbfuck. Bush declared all major combat operations over almost a year ago.

The technique

[Anonymous Coward]

The memo was written ina proportional font. It's a standard MS Windows font, so he can easily find the exact width of each letter (and kern pairs and the like). By looking at surrounding words, and allowing for the justification stretch on the line, you can figure out the exact width of the blacked-out words.

Then it's just a matter of doing a dictionary search to find which words could possibly fit, and use context information to figure out which one of the possibles it is.

Re:The technique

[MooseGuy529]

That seems pretty obvious.

I actually wanted to make a "Font Scanner" once that would take an image of text and the actual text and compare it with all the fonts on a system to find the closest match.

Re:The technique

[belmolis]

To fill in a detail, they made use of the fact that the blacked out word is preceded by "an", from which they deduced that it had to begin with a vowel. The Babelfish mistranslation of this as "year" is therefore particularly misleading.

Re:The technique

[Anonymous Coward]

"Then it's just a matter of doing a dictionary search to find which words could possibly fit, and use context information to figure out which one of the possibles it is. "

that's precisely what they say in the French text, it seems that the authors explicitely recognize that this is a straightforward application of a dictionary search

Re:The technique

[colinrichardday]

That's not a mistranslation. "An" is the French word for "year"..

Re:The technique

[belmolis]

I know that an means "year" in French. But in context it is a mistake because it isn't the French word for year, it is a quoted English word.

Re:The technique

[colinrichardday]

But how is Babelfish (or whatever translation software) supposed to deal with it?

Re:The technique

[belmolis]

I wasn't saying that Babelfish is particularly bad as translation software goes, merely that the mistranslation was particularly unfortunate in this case because the word "an" was key to decipherment. The use of a word from another language is of course a particularly difficult thing for translation software to deal with. The fact that it is quoted is a hint that it might be something that shouldnt be translated but by no means a certain indicator. This is probably an example of translation that cannot be done correctly by a system that does not actually "understand" the text and have the ability to reason about it and make use of knowledge of the world.

PDB.pdf

[edalytical]

Why read a description when you can have a PDF of the August 6, 2001 PDB.

Re:PDB.pdf

[JamesP]

With a nice black rectangle superimposed to the original text, of course...

Re:fp

[Anonymous Coward]

The Iraqi rebels don't think so.

Re:Just remember...

[Lars T.]

Well, the Vietnamese were not famous for being willing to blow themselves up if they could kill a couple of infidels at the same time (at least not before the Vietnam War), nor for bringing the war wherever they want. If you think this war only means a couple of houndred dead GIs and many thousand dead Iraqis in Iraq, well, enjoy your life while you can.

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually the Vietnamese have a long, storied, and impressive history of effectively resisting vastly superior forces. Of all the peoples of indo-china they would be the ones you'd least want to mess with given their history.

As far as I'm concerned, I would rather we ramped up production of iodine pills and calcium supplements, nuked every islamic city that didn't unconditionally surrender starting with mecca. I would kill every Islamist everywhere for the sake of avoiding one wounded American. But that's me.

That said, the message is don't be too quick to laugh. An Iraqi victory won't be any kind of victory someone wants live with. In their case cooperation with the American forces is far more beneficial than resisting them.

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what, there are plenty of granola eating hippies in Seattle, and I'm not one of them. Guess what else? It's called a distribution. Look into it.

Re: Just remember...

[Black Parrot]

> If Iraq is going to be another "Vietnam" just remember that to America's ~50,ooo they lost 1 to 2 MILLION.

And the Johnson Administration kept harping on this as a sign that we were "winning".

You can always win, if you get to choose what "win" means.

> I wouldn't look for a cut an run.

I would. It's just a matter of when.

As soon as someone's up for re-election who thinks being out will garner more votes than being in, out we'll go.

Now...

[daishin]

If only someone was able to "decrypt" everything Bush says.

Re:Now...

[Mysticalfruit]

As an American, everytime that man gets on televison and opens his mouth, I just shake my head in disbelief. One would think, that after 3.5 years as president he could have gained some public speaking skills and/or a basic grasp of the English language.
<p>
What really frightens me is when I look at GWB, I have to ask myself, "Of all the great people we have in this country, the best we could do is this???"
<p>
I look at Kerry and Bush and I throw my hands up in disgust. They're both a couple of idiots and voting for either of them is like spitting on George Washingtons grave.
<p>
"Beware foreign entanglement" - George Washington

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I'm concerned, I would rather we ramped up production of iodine pills and calcium supplements, nuked every islamic city that didn't unconditionally surrender starting with mecca.

The 1930s called. They want their genocidal insanity back.

Re: Just remember...

[theglassishalf]

In LA, (which has a high proprtion of traffic deaths) there are 7.2 traffic deaths per 100,000 people per year.

130,000 Iraq troops, 721 dead in just over a year.

Yeah....

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've made my peace with what was done to the Native Americans. And remember pre-"manifest destiny" they were "Nature's Children" not "Savages."

Besides, I don't see islamists doing anything to keep me safer. Why shouldn't I pray a little for their genocide since they pray so fervently for mine. You're welcome to try and solve the problems with Coke and hugs of course. I do wish you the best of luck in your entirely futile endevour. Maybe they won't excecute you for trying to help.

And I'd also note that giving them the option to surrender basically means it's not genocide. More imperial conquest and subjugation. If you knew anything about history, you'd remember that the Jews submitted and that's when the Germans started rounding them up for their genocidal ends. When news of this got back to the Jews is when their spririted resistance began.

Feel free to throw around words you don't know anything about, cheapening them. No skin off my nose. I'm sure it helps you feel morally superior in some significant way that aids you in coping with the impotence you face in your daily grind. And the world does need happy workers.

side effect of proportional fonts

[Jeremy Erwin]

Some months ago, the US State Department announced that it would change it's departmental typeface from Courier 12 to Times Roman 14. According to sources within the department, the new typeface takes up almost exactly the same area on the page as Courier New 12, while offering a crisper, cleaner, more modern look.".

The Central Intelligence Agency may have instituted similar changes prior to August 2001 for similar reasons. Had they continued to use the fixed-width Courier, instead of the prettier Arial, the redacted portions would have proven much more challenging to decrypt.

Information Overload would work better

[Marxist Hacker 42]

I don't understand why a modern government in a computerized society hasn't tried this yet. Forget making things "secret" at all- just hire a few Weekly World News writers to release 5x as much BS as real information, and let it all hang out.

From the other story on pseudo-science, it would probably work quite well.

Re:Just remember...

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL

These.....people are our fellow human beings. Saddens my heart to see them giving in to the animal that's in all our hearts. We're not that far removed from dogs, really. I pray to God that when all this is over, we'll all be able to have a good time. I don't think dogs will be allowed to the party.

straightforwardly throwing sponge

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite line of this Babel is "straightforwardly threw sponge". This phrase is now officially part of my vocabulary. I am going to straightforwardly throw sponge whenever faced with a difficult task.