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"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.
America will lose the Iraq war. Mark my words.
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
stuff
Here's a translation via translate.google.com...
Babelfish link
Not that I was able to decipher much of it anyway even with the fish.
to the victors go the spoiled.
If Iraq is going to be another "Vietnam" just remember that to America's ~50,ooo they lost 1 to 2 MILLION. The insurgents are taking more disproportunate casualties this time around. And the American people will more or less demand to leave behind a bitter reminder. I wouldn't look for a cut an run. But even in the aftermath the purges would probably be nothing less than dramatic.
If I was a Sunni in Iraq, I would be all about America man. I'd be out everyday in a star-spangled-banner jogging suit shaking hands with every soldier I saw, talking about how A-rod being traded to the Yankees exemplifies everything that is wrong with the game, and what the prospects for the Pats are this year.
Unprecendented secrecy in the present U.S. administration. You are not allowed to know what your government is doing.
He lied. They died.
1) My attention span is accurately described as gnat-like
2) In French gammer, did Yoda speak.
If they wanted to keep everything secret they'd release it on C-Span.
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.
Why read a description when you can have a PDF of the August 6, 2001 PDB.
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
If only someone was able to "decrypt" everything Bush says.
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
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.
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.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
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.