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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."
Oh OH, i can see it coming already, text analysis and dictionary software declared as Weapons of Mass Destruction! That, and Ireland is going to become the next member of the "axis of evil"
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.
...said
"Please please please let the army attack Iraq"
Apparently the word that was blacked out was please.
Obviously, the next step the government will take is to require all documents be written in fixed-width fonts. Either that or they will require that all documents be converted into fixed-width before they are released for FFIA inquiries.
Don't see how this is a big threat.
The Monde (famous French newspaper) published an article on the story a few days ago. An English translation can be found here.
The student didn't actually solve for any real US secrets, because the documents she was using were already declassified. However, as an academic exercise this demonstrates that there's still information being conveyed in the typical black-out way of "redacting" certain words from documents.
And, since the information was known, we're sure that she did come up with the correct solutions.
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.
Perhaps the US government should start using text message lingo in their memos.
"An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an Egyptian srvic @ d sAm tym dat bn l@n wz plnin 2 exploit d operatives acces 2 d us 2 mount a terrorist strike"*
Could make decoding sensitive documents much more difficult and at the same time provide jobs for teenage cryptologists.
*lingo courtesy of transl8it.com
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)
Nuculer.
Dictionary-based approaches seem to miss this one for some reason.
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?
On the contrary, the Project for A New American Century group, a coupla dozen high ranking neocons, CLEARLY outlined what they were going to do once they got in power. It's all on their publically available website. Some of it is in PDF downloads, but it's there. They planned to invade basically the oil producing nations of the middle east, and some others. They got in power, in charge,and wow, they invaded. They also said they needed a "pearl harbor" like event in advance to justify the invasion, and get the US people all enthused around it, and golly gee mother of all coincidences, that event occurred..
I mean, it's real, it's there, you can see the names, the documents, it's written clearly, and the mass controlled media won't hardly ever mention it. I've seen very brief mentions at the best. I have yet to meet anyone in meatspace who has ever heard of them or their documents though. Wonder why that is? And I know it's been posted on slashdot several times, by various people, as well as on literally thousands of other forums and blogs. Radio talk show hosts all over have been clued in, but only a small handful even bother to acknowledge it, let alone come to the obvious conclusions looking at it. Journalists by the thousands have been clued in, yet there's a severe lack of coverage by most of the big names out there.
No I don't blame democrats, or republicans, I blame the US people in general for being so unbelievably stupid and naieve and un-caring for this disaster. We are a nation of sports and entertainment addicts more than anything else. No one gives a crap. They are taught from the time they are toddlers to NOT give a crap. They are taught to parrot one of two party lines that are always essentially complete lies, and to be happy with that, and to never go further than to keep corralled into one of those two parties and to swallow down the 6 o clock news pablum. So they do it, brainwashing since being able to understand human speech is quite effective apparently. They simply refuse to learn from history,and they refuse to acknowledge reality, and that's why we generation after generation keep getting hosed. You are force fed you are either a liberal-democrat, or a conservative-republican and that is SUCH A LOAD OF CRAP. I am so amazed people keep falling into that trap.
oh well...
Well, there are two solutions to this method of cracking. The first is never release classified documents. However, this does not work well in a free and open society.
Nowdays, most, if not all, classified documents are created electronically. Perhaps the source document should be kept in an archive. When it is declassified, they just delete the text needed to lower the classification, or maybe replace the text with a few '#' to show were text was missing (but never a one-for-one character replacement). Then the released document is a little harder to crack.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
The Memo Went like this:
URGENT: MSG from GEORGE W. BUSH
TO: JOINT CHIEFS OF STAFF
1. ATTACK IRAQ
2. ____???____
3. PROFIT!!!
Claire has finally revealed the second step!
Read the article to find out.
but I've been looking at that site, and haven't found too much alarming stuff, speaking as a life-long, well-traveled american. Their principles are clearly stated... do you think other nations don't have groups strategically plotting their future course? The difference in America is that you can go on a website, see the players, and read what they have to say. My cursory perusal didn't turn up much objectionable material. Can you point me to some specific papers and/or citations? I'm genuinely curious.
I also never found a position paper advocating a conquest of the middle east and theft of their oil. For pity sake, americans want to buy the mideast's oil, not seize it (if the US military seriously wanted to take it, there'd be little to stop them... but that's not how americans see themselves on the world stage).
One can attempt to argue whether American prominence is good for the world... but I would challenge you to put forth a better choice (China? Russia? Iran?). It's the nature of world affairs for the dominant powers to emerge... I would also submit to you that "the United Nations" is not an appropriate alternative... the UN's lack of action has resulted in much pain and suffering around the world, and their ludicrous committee appointments (Sudan and Cuba in the human rights group, for example) bring the credibility of that body into serious doubt.
The US is the "big boy" on the block, and an easy target for derision... but on the whole I'd consider the US a force for good in the world... our track record in confronting various evils, and settling/winning various wars and conflicts speaks for itself.
Granted, whether we have the political will to make Iraq work out remains to be seen. We certainly have the physical ability, but unfortunately that's not america's achilles heel... it's politics.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
The title of this article sounds impressive, but the results are wishy-washy. It can only narrow down one missing word to maybe half a dozen possibilities. Who is to say the word is not North Korea instead of South Korea? And since most blackouts are several words long, it is not useful at all.
Also, considering the political state of Northern Ireland (which is part of Great Britain, etc.) last year, most of these terrorist groups have just become glorified drug gangs, since a major way they go their money was through the drug cartel, now with a cease fire, there is more infighting and killing between the protestant militant groups over drug issues, than between the catholic and protestant groups.
One can enumerate the reasons for Iraq's invasion as follows:
Establishing a precedence for preepmtive war. Now America has bybassed the UN, and global opposition to this unilateral action. If the will to build an empire arises, then it will be done without any regard to what the rest of the world think or say. You can read the following articles too:
The True Rationale? It's a Decade Old by James Mann, March 7, 2004
PBS had a good program before Iraq was invaded called the War Behind Closed Doors. You can watch the entire program in 30-60 minutes intervals:
Specially interesting is this page in the Project for the New American Century Statement of Principles where you can see who signed this document. Interesting to note that all of them are either now in the Pentagon (Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, ...etc.), or are
aids to Cheney (Libby, Abrams, ...etc.)
An overview of who is who in the neocons circle of power.
Securing cheap oil. That is obvious. Bush's family history in oil makes that an easy one to figure.
Complete Dad's job. The personal desire of G.W. Bush to continue where his father has left, to finish the job, and do better.
The Israel Factor. Read the Israel connection, and how Zionism influences US foreign policy. If you take a look at the players in the PNAC above, and you will find them all staunch Zionists, whether Jews or Christians.
Construction Contracts. The Infrastructure contracts for US corporations to rebuild Iraq is a lucrative business. Of course the Halliburton link has been reported several times (Cheney used to be its manager or director). The defence spending, plus the contracts should fuel the US economy for a while, or that is what they thought would happen.
The planning to invade Iraq was done before September 11, 2001 attacks, as ex-secretary Paul O'Neill has revealed
As many would notice, Bush is not running the show. Bush is the ideal front for such an operation. He thinks he is doing the right thing, and that God has to do something with it. You can see this PBS program The Jesus Factor.
There are two factions grappling for Bush's attention. The moderate pragmatics (Powell, Armitage), and the extremist ideologue (Cheney, his subordinates, Rumsfeld, his subordinates). Powell's position is almost identical to Shimon Peres when he was the Foreign Minister in the Sharon government, a rational pragmatic dove amid the ideologue extremist hawks.
What is funny and sad at the same time, is that the US Foreign policy is now crafted by the Pentagon and the Vice President in accordance with neocon think tanks like the PNAC. No role whatsover is given to the Department of State (where it should really belong), and Powell is merely a messenger (go tell the UN we are doing so and so, try to sell it diplomatically, ...etc.). No wonder Powell has said that he will not seek a second term even if Bush gets reelected (and repeated it a few weeks ago). Not nice thing being in his shoes I guess.
I would not go as far as to say that they intentionally planned and executed the September 11 thing. But the neocons sure did exp
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