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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
... the average consumer.
...
how righteous of you. in fact, if you look and know a little about intelligence analysis techniques, i think you'll find that the NSA already know about this approach for 'interpreting' typewritten redacts, even as far back as the 50's.
what this story really seems to point out is the naivete of a lot of people about computers, and the powerful simplicity to seemingly difficult problems that they offer
it wasn't so long ago that the idea of having massive dictionaries in ram and font and calculations on this order to make a practical approach was considered relatively 'resource difficult'.
but moores laws and fry's electronics has certainly changed that.
for the price of a nice night out, i could buy an extra computer for brute-force hacks against any target, stick it in my closet and forget about it. used to be, not so long ago you had to have a halon system and power room to do things like that
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
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