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Copy-and-Paste Reveals Classified U.S. Documents
cyclop writes "In March, U.S. troops in Iraq shot to death Nicola Calipari, the Italian intelligence agent that rescued the kidnapped journalist Giuliana Sgrena. U.S. commission on the incident produced a report which public version was censored for more than one third. Now Italian press is reporting that all confidential information in the report is available to the public, just by copying "hidden" text from the PDF and pasting it in a word processor (Italian). The uncensored report can now be directly downloaded (evil .DOC format, sorry)"
Mirrored here in html format: http://213.160.111.174/unclassified.htm
Download the pdf and run pdftotext on it, it works.
Marx was right: Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Needless to say, no Italian newspaper ever cares to cite that the news was pointed out by an Italian blogger, Gianluca Neri of Macchianera.
There were at least two publicized incidents Memory Hole Un-Redacts Redacted DOJ Memo and Iranian Coup Plotters Exposed By PDF File were the PDF was discovered to be layered with the graphic blacking out the text over the original.
You would think by now that the government would either distributed a tool for correctly redacting PDFs or prohibit them.
You don't zoom thru an armed checkpoint in Iraq.
According to the Italian version of the event, they weren't speeding through the checkpoint, nor were they given any warning that there was a checkpoint up ahead (no lights, signs, or soldiers waving them down).
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Should I expect less if I make jerky motions into my pockets when a police officer pulls me over for a routine traffic accident?
I guess it depends where you live. In the UK, if I made jerky motions into my pocket when puled over for a routine traffic accident, I certainly wouldn't expect to get shot.
And if I was, there'd be a public outcry. Don't assume we're all trigger happy...
Effectively not. You will notice that paragraphs in the document are preceded either by (U) or by (S//NF)
(U) simply means Unclassified.
(S//NF) means "Secret/No Foreign Nationals".
Any US citizen has not violated fundamental clearance issues by reading it (however, OpSec provides that this information should only be available on a need to know basis). Non-US Citizens outside the US aren't covered by US law in the same way.
The position of Non-US nationals in the US is probably different.
I am neither a Lawyer nor a US Citizen and I possess no US Security Clearance.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
Satellite photos with time differentials show that the car *must* have been going an average of 60+ mph to cover the distance it had covered between photos. Some of the papers were leaving that bit out of their stories (LA Times for example).
Since the majority of you /.'ers didn't read the link the reason it's classified is because it points out the following things:
a) It shows Enemy Tactics, Techniques and Procedures (TTP's)
b) It shows Coalition TTP's responsive combat dialogue with Enemy TTP's
c) It gives away the primary routes for incoming/outgoing US embassy personnel with technical, personnel and operational details.
Being a soldier who just got back from Iraq I'm actually pretty pissed at this because of the fucking dangers behind it. But I'll leave it at that.
A vdiff between the censored and unmasked versions suggests that much of what was redacted is operational details, such as:
It names the soldiers involved and details the specific actions taken by those soldiers. It names the soldier who killed Calipari.
It briefly describes U.S. Embassy procedures for transporting VIPs along Route Irish and in general.
It details movement of U.S. and Italian Embassy personnel.
It describes possible future procedures and configurations for checkpoints.
In other words it has a lot of information of potential use to an insurgent mission planner and a lot that is nobody's business.
This is not my sandwich.
I was a 10th Mountain Division soldier from Feb. 1996 to Dec. 1998.
I dunno about the impact. I expect the iraqi insurgents already have a much better idea of how our security operations work than they can gain through this document. After all they have the opportunity to actually observe this operations and how they react to their attacks.
Observation is one thing, but one thing your eyes don't necessarily tell you is what the opponent thinks about itself and its own tactics. This report now gives out that information to the enemy, and includes information about combat readiness and the perceived effectiveness of the enemy's tactics.
It also gives more extensive information on what the various SOPs (standard operating procedures) have to say about certain sitations than you can gain by observation.
I expect the information was just concealed as a matter of course in case it might contain something of value to the enemy. Still though your overall point is valid. There is no reason the public really needs to know this stuff and it is better safe than sorry with information which might let them kill more soldiers.
Precisely, and since this directly affects some of the units I'd worked with, I fully support the (time-limited*) "censorship" of this kind of information. The idiot that failed to do it effectivly needs some severe discipline.
I've got friends and former coworkers in Iraq, and the release of this kind of information doesn't help them one bit.
(* meaning that after the conflict is over, plus some time, the full report should be (have been) released.)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
You may be underestimating the horror of imprisoning the people there. Watch The Power of Nightmares by BBC. It looks weird, but it really seems that most of the terrorist threat was made up. It's very likely that 90-95% of all people in Guantanamo Bay are innocent. Do you know how flimsy the evidence was in those few cases of suspected terrorists caught on the US soil?
The whole thing is unjustified. If we ignore the US government propaganda for a second, the whole campaign was simply an act of unprovoked irrational aggression in violation of international laws. As Viggo Mortensen said about America commenting on parallels between war in Iraq and LOTR, "We are the evil guys".
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.