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)"

Comments

Mirror, as HTML

[lewww]

Mirrored here in html format: http://213.160.111.174/unclassified.htm

Pdftotext does it

[orzetto]

Download the pdf and run pdftotext on it, it works.

Marx was right: Military intelligence is a contradiction in terms.

Who really made the scoop

[dotmaudot]

Needless to say, no Italian newspaper ever cares to cite that the news was pointed out by an Italian blogger, Gianluca Neri of Macchianera.

Re:No smoking gun?

[KidHash]

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...

Re:Congratulations, you are a great example

[KarmaMB84]

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).

It case anyones wondering...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:We'll find out

[theonetruekeebler]

Why is the government keeping that information secret

A vdiff between the censored and unmasked versions suggests that much of what was redacted is operational details, such as:

• An itemization of IEDs and VBIEDs deployment techniques which have been most effective,
• An analysis of the tactical strengths and weaknesses of specific checkpoints along "Route Irish",
• Combat readiness assesment of the units and soldiers involved,
• A detailed description of how the checkpoint is laid out,
• Exact grid locations of various assets.
• Details of how checkpoint searches are set up and executed
• Details of how checkpoints are expected to deal with approaching vehicles, including threat assesment methods.
• A statistical analysis of "normal" traffic approaching the checkpoint.

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.

Re:Oh dear

[Kymermosst]

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.)