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Student Uncovers US Military Secrets
karthik_r085 writes "According to The Register, An Irish graduate student has uncovered words blacked-out of declassified US military documents using nothing more than a dictionary and text analysis software. Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University was given the problems by her PhD supervisor as a diversion. David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, challenged her to discover the words missing from two documents: one was a memo to George Bush, and another concerned military modifications to civilian helicopters."
This is why I don't work for an intelligence agency. On the other hand, I'm still probably better qualified than people who think blacking out a few words in a document strips them of contextual information...
Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates M'dna wgah'nagl fhtagn.
The other way to get around this problem would be to do the blackouts against a digital version of the document, so that the words are all replaced with blocks of equal size without revealing any information about how long the oriignal words were.
Change the length of the blacked out portion to some standard generic length to avoid disclosing the word length? Then you could only use context.
Or if you wanted to be really sneaky, randomize the length of the blacked out box, to spur wild goose chases.
I suspect there would be a 50/50 chance that the visit from the intelligence goons would be a job offer. US intelligence sorely needs people who can read between the lines and actually come up with correct answers.
What did the documents reveal??
I think you'd be surprized how much irrelevant 'intelligence' ends up classified. Often, it's stuff which is already public (although not always general) knowledge but which the administration wants to deny.
A lot of ass-covering, basically.
But it gets even stranger. For instance the case of the de-classified CIA documents relating to the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. (Whups, now there's a piece of flamebait..)
Anyway, a bunch of these documents have been re-classified by the current administration, apparently to hide such disturbing secrets like what Señor Pinochet's favorite drink was. (Scotch)
If people knew how easy it was to "break" simple means of protection, we'd see far less in the media.
If you film a person in backlight, his face will be dark when you see him on tv. Cranking up the contrast (in most cases, just the contrast on the tv will do) shows the face clearly.
If you pixelize the face of a person, he's not recognizeable. But unless he stands completely still, his movements will give enough info to calculate the originating pixels after a couple of minutes.
If you apply a standard mixer filter to a persons voice, it sounds dark and unrecognizeable... Until you run the reverse algorithm.
If you black out sentences with a marker, it's often just a question of holding the paper up agains the light to read it.
I never understood this behaviour anyway. Why show a person on TV that obvoiously not want to be recoznized (however carefully concealed by the production)?
As for documents - I'm pretty sure most documents are available electronically. Why not just delete the stuff you don't want people to see?
quote of memo to bush from the article:
"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXXXX service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike."
and from the article itself:
"This eliminated all but seven words: Ugandan, Ukrainian, Egyptian, uninvited, incursive, indebted and unofficial. Naccache plumped for Egyptian, in this case."
AH-HAH!
so an egyptian operative told an *egyptian* service....
man this is some tricky work! uncovering covert secrets for sure!
seriously though the technique is pretty awesome
Exactly wrong. What is needed is RANDOM width fonts.
The folks at typografica suggest the "ransom note" type fonts
Sorry, but in at least one of the cited examples, the methodology used requires an assumption that is false.
The proposed method depends on the calculated length of the missing word(s).
I believe that the "memo to George Bush" is the now infamous PDB of 8/6/03 (it was released in a PDF format). In this, the actual letters in the missing words were changed to nonsense characters (including non-alphanumeric symbiols) before the black box was drawn in. So the spaced taken up by the "redactions" have nothing to do (except by chance) with the length of the original words.
Sorry. Try again.
Another pretty good read is the New Yorker column on Copper Green:
_ fa ct
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040524fa
This SAP (Specal Access Program a.k.a Top Top Secret) was a highly successful program to kill, capture and use exceptional interrogation techniques, especially sexual humiliation tactics, against high value Al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan. Apparently there is an old book call "The Arab Mind" the neocons are using as their bible on how to interrogate Arabs.
Unfortunately Rumsfeld and his deputy Cambone decided to apply the same techniques on taxi drivers in the prisons in Iraq. They went from using highly secure interrogation sites to a big insecure prison in the middle of Iraq. They went from using highly trained, disciplined and cleared special forces to do the interrogation to untrained, undisciplined Army reservists(ordinary people). The CIA was so disgusted with Rumsefeld and Cambone's efforts they withdrew, both because they knew the secrecy would be blown thanks to DOD sloppiness and they ethically objected in taking these extra legal tactics from use on top Al Qaeda, who probably deserve it, to Iraqi prisoners in a conventional war. The Army's own number suggest 60% of the Iraqi prisoners are wrongfully detained. The Red Cross thinks its more like 70-90%.
All indications are Rumsfeld, Myers, and Cambone are between a rock and a hard place, they either commit perjury in front of Congress by denying knowledge of this project or rat it out and commit treason by exposing a top secret project. George W. is the only one who can declassify the program so the people really responsible are held accountable and that appears to be Rumsfeld, Meyers and Cambone.
If this article is true, and it appears its sourced by people in the CIA and DOD who are exacting revenge on Rumsfeld and Cambone for there arrogance and stupidity then Rumsfeld is flat out lieing when he pretends like he didn't know about what was going on in Iraq and in fact ordered it. Its fundamentally wrong to charge a bunch of reservists, ordinary citizens, for following orders when they implemented this top secret program.
@de_machina
Are those documents redacted in the final photocopy, or are they redacted by hand (very expensive, but they're spending our money, after all)?
There are two simple solutions that go beyond and below high technology.
Unless they crank down the brightness as far as possible, most photocopiers put down a varying amount of toner to paper. A cloth soaked in, say, spirit solvents, when wiped across the page, will expose part, if not all, of the text. Similarly, this can be done with most magic marker inks.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
in the US, 50% don't even vote, and in the popular vote it was an almost even split, so only 25% of eligible adult voters elected bush.
Of course, we have an electoral college, they actually decide. It varies state to state how they do that though.
I support "no professional politicians". Single terms for every elected office. No more than 10 years total government service or involvement, and no pensions whatsoever. Medical and survivors bereavement benefits for veterans, or people in current employ only. Limit campaign contributions to 100$, from individuals only, no soft money from corporations, no lobbying gifts, trips, speakers fees, etc. Let's call bribes "bribes" and finalize outlawing them. It's not a free speech issue.
And stuff like that there, along those lines.
Basically, turn government back to being a peoples government, and not a separate class of connected washington insiders.
How to get people to vote? Easiest way,not my idea, but, I heard this before and it's really cool, make income tax deadline day be the day before the main elections, instead of april 15th. You'll get much higher voter participation, no doubt about it.. We could also declare voting day a national holiday, so no one has to choose between going to work or voting, and make it a full 24 hour vote period. It SHOULD be patriotic to vote, and it SHOULD make a difference. Maybe if we even had runoffs instead of just any number majority wins, call it you need 2/3rds to win, like a supermajority in congress, it would help, and having a ranking system on the candidates, with a zero being a legitmate number. There's lots of possibilities.
People are still "afraid" to vote third parties or independents, they got brainwashed into that "lookout! you'll 'waste' your vote" meme, and you hear party activists from both the democrats and the republicans saying that. Don't "waste" your vote. Phooie. They just want to keep a lock on the process, like it's written someplace that we can only have democrats or republicans, forever and ever, like it's the law or something. To me, a vote not cast is the only wasted vote. I've been voting for decades, hardly ever got my guy in, so what, I voted who I wanted, not who I thought would win, and I won't vote against someone either.
Besides that, don't know. Whenever I hear people in meatspace bitching about somethin in politics/government, I question them, it's tricky but effective.. usually they get embarrased quickly, they can't hardly name any persons in politics, don't really know what's going on, but sure can rattle off their "teams" roster and the latest scores, or how their favorite band is doing, craplike that. I then nail them on some current events or names, get blank stares, and I go "How do you come to your opinion if you aren't aware of the issues or names?" Along those lines. Basically, I shame them, politely, show them they really don't know what's going on, then point them in a few directions in case they decide they SHOULD find out more and get active. Probably not effective, but dang if I'm going to stand there and nod my head "yes" to blather from people who really have nothing more than the most meager 15 second sound bite awarness of what's going on, then they think I should value their opinions or something. I just can't do that anymore, lost my patience long ago with that.
I can appreciate someone I really disagree with, AS LONG AS they have at least done some reading and research into a topic. Those people can learn from you, and you can learn from them, it's important to be honest and open to new data and be able to adjust your opinion, I certainly have over the years, I'm not static except from the POV of always trying to find out the real truth in a matter. I DETEST being lied to.. But the "don't bother me with any more facts, my mind is made up" crowd are nuts, better to just shine them folks on, it's a waste of calories dealing with them on anything more than the most trivial matters. doesn't mean they can't be nice people in all other aspects, but if it's anything important having to do with politics and directions and government, if their minds are locked, they are lost, they drank the kool aid, poisoned themselves. Just move on then.