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Documents Reveal US Incompetence with Word, Iraq
notNeilCasey writes "The U.S. Coalition Provisional Authority, which formerly governed Iraq, accidentally published Microsoft Word documents containing information never meant for the public, according to an article in Salon. By viewing the documents using the Track Changes feature in Word (.doc), the author has been able to reconstruct internal discussions from 2004 which reflect the optimism, isolation and incompetence of the American occupation. Download the author's source document or look for more yourself. 'Presumably, staffers at the CPA's Information Management Unit, which produced the weekly reports, were cutting and pasting large sections of text into the reports and then eliminating all but the few short passages they needed. Much of the material they were cribbing seems to have come from the kind of sensitive, security-related documents that were never meant to be available to the public. In fact, about half of the 20 improperly redacted documents I downloaded, including the March 28 report, contain deleted portions that all seem to come from one single, 1,000-word security memo. The editors kept pulling text from a document titled "Why Are the Attacks Down in Al-Anbar Province -- Several Theories." (The security memo and the last page of the March 28 report can be seen here, along with several other CPA documents that can be downloaded.)'"
C-A, C-C, C-N, C-V, A-F, A
(create new document that looks like, but is not, the old one)
before sending onward. Otherwise, somebody WILL find something untoward, even if it's not track changes, it could be a now-unused hunk of crap in the OLE2 file, etc.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
of course if you use a format that you can just link the formatting in at the end then you are gold but
all final documents should always be converted to text to break the meta data chain.
even if you have to save the document to a cdrw and then shred the disc when you are done remove the meta data
or replace the meta data with the "correct" public data never have a document with privileged meta data "floating around"
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
yeah, I think you're right..everything became much clearer after actually posting ;)
Actually, a little further down in the document, it even says "the sharp and now continuing drop in attacks does give the coalition a much-needed respite whose continuation will be critical...Reinforcing this trend...will be crucial to ultimate success"
So it looks like I was wrong, sorry. Mods, please mod grandparent down.
Why do you think it's supposed to have been embarrasing? It's just somewhat interesting. It's history. That said, I'm not sure how much new information it provides. The fact that America had no idea what we were getting into is as plain as a 50-foot banner stretched across an aircraft carrier.
I take it you've never been in the military or worked in a large corporation. You NEVER write down anything that you don't want others to know. Malicious dealings are always done voice, behind closed doors. Motives are hidden. Orders are given that totally mask the real intent but achieves the result. The last thing they would do is actually write down something to damn them if for no other reason than what is going on right now on /. with these released documents. No, I have read TFA, but I doubt there's any real incriminating information. Or, if anything, they want your to believe they are incompetent. The rules are few: keep your enemies closer than your allies. Always compromise. Never show true motives. Appear agreeable. Appear incompetent if need be, but never malicious, gaming or ulterior.
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
Well, it just shows what we already knew, but in more detail. That is, the CPA had no idea what a mess things were going to turn into, even though the signs were there.
It's like watching somebody who has driven off a cliff, speculating as they fall about the lack of damage to the car.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I'm all for the Nelson-esque "Ha, Ha!" on this one, but isn't this Salon article revealing state secrets in some way.
I'm not looking to troll here. I'm serious. Wouldn't it have been better to quietly bring it to their attention than to go public. If this is typical government ignorance, who knows how wide-spread the problem is. Could revealing something like this to the public be considered treason?
I don't think the fact that the articles are right out in the open is any defense. Anyone who's close enough to see troops knows where they are, but it could still be considered treason to pick up a phone and call the enemy and tell them where troops are.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
I don't even remember how many years ago that there were lots of news stories on how MS Word stores "deleted" text within documents. When the story originally broke, lots of people went looking at company/government Word documents and found all sorts of embarassing stuff.
Those who don't learn from history...
Anyone using Word in any kind of sensitive capacity needs to know how to make sure the changes are all really gone. Training should address this specifically. Other word processors also store deleted text within a document and users of those need to also know how to make sure deleted text is really deleted.
Perhaps it is time that word processors kept twin files - one the actual document, and if the user wants to track changes, another that stores deleted text. Or maybe encrypt the deleted text. It wouldn't keep everyone out of it, but it would keep most people from reading the deleted passages.
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The American military used to be pretty good at this sort of thing. Think post-WWII Japan and Germany. But I think you accurately describe the situation with the modern U.S. military. There are other nations that are better at policing and nation-building, so perhaps if we'd gone in with more international support, this wouldn't have been such an issue.
The really scary ones aren't the idiots who support Bush... it's the genuinely intelligent ones. My extended family contains an inter-racial (Jewish, Asian) couple, both with advanced college degrees from great schools, and neither is religious. The absolutely love Bush, and are convinced that every Bush backed idea is the gospel truth (no global warming, the Iraq war is good, AT&T should be able to charge Google a toll to reach it's customers, etc). They also are convinced that Bush's Supreme Court will not reverse Rowe vs. Wade (oddly, my Republican friends who are very religious feel otherwise). They absolutely believe that all those terrible appointments, from Brown of Hurricane Katrina fame, to Wolfowitz, were great appointments, and that Democrats are to blame for their failures. They think Colin Powell was fired for his own incompetence.
/.
In other words, they believe whatever Bush tells them, even though they are super-smart. It's a crazy world. A few such guys even seem to hang out here on
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.