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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.)'"
How ironically appropriate...
Maybe I'm not paying enough attention, but I'm not sure why the musings about why attacks stopped in Al-Anbar in early 2004 are so particularly embarrassing. It seems to me that they were just trying to figure out what happened; I guess it might show some degree of cluelessness on the part of Intelligence, but, uh, they gotta figure stuff out at some point, right?
My blog
It just floors me they feel they have to cover up even the signs of progress.
:-(
The level of utter incompetence w.r.t. "controlling the narrative" just terrifies me.
Here are the elusive Microsoft fanboys. We don't notice them because they are so insignifiant and incompetent and unglamorous and dull.
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()?
Serves me right for posting without even the summary carefully. Looks like there is incompetance even in the documentation process! Releasing docs without purging history. Wow! Bad Govt Agency! No ISO 9007 for you!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This is a great reason to disallow the use of MS Word in government. Does ODF support this change tracking stuff? Or should they stick to ASCII files?
I remember when I had a job offer and could track the changes of the contract they emailed me, was interesting to see the changes they made! (in a good way, suprisingly) Is track changes on by default? I assume so...
This is outstanding news for the F/OSS community! My hope is that the "there's got to be someone else I can blame this on" politicians file charges against Microsoft under provisions of the Patriot Act for leaking vital government secrets. The irony in such a case would be delicious: charges without real justification leveled against a monopolistic company who markets software that doesn't really work. With each side forced to disprove a negative proposition, this should give the F/OSS community a little more time to charge forward while MS pukes all over themselves.
Remember when that Cat Schwartz girl from TV posted a cropped photo that accidentally had her boobs in the embedded Photoshop thumbnail? This is just like that, except Photoshop has been replaced with Word, the TV hostess has been replaced with the US Military, and the sweet sweet woman parts have been replaced with the absolute idiocy of those in charge of an ostensibly conquered nation.
I for one was happier about the tits.
Right now, I've taken a first glance but I don't even want to read this document as it'll just lead to a bad day (I'll read it all later).
But if you're interested in stuff about the CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority), I would highly recommend a book I read a few months ago entitled Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone by Rajiv Chandrasekaran. Pretty much details what's going on there, doesn't shove a lot of ideas down your throat but does do a good job of selectively relaying details that starts one thinking.
I could rant for hours on the information in this book but I'll try to relay one or two things that stuck with me. My biggest problem with how things were handled out there (one of the many issues the book covers) is that we had people more suitable for the job of handling post war Iraq but either sent them home or blocked their attempts to help because they didn't avidly support the person we wanted to take control of post-war Iraq, Ahmed Chalabi. If anyone was seen as competition for Chalabi, they were replaced with someone who was loyal to the American Republican party. The author reports that interview questions consisted of things like views on abortion or even your voting record. People with little or no past experience were put in charge of insanely high level authority.
We went into Iraq with the only plan to overthrow the government. In my opinion, we have the best army in the world and they did their job better than anyone else could. Unfortunately, in my opinion, we have some of the worst leaders in the world and, as a result, what ensued from overthrowing said government is a pretty bad debacle. I heard this author speak on NPR and was impressed so I hope you read this book to hear what Chandrasekaran experienced visiting Iraq. The information in this Word document doesn't even begin to describe what Chandrasekaran details in his book.
My work here is dung.
Had they not heard of PDF?! Why anyone would publish Word, ODF, or anything like this I don't understand. Convert to PDF, and job done.
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
Any government branch that releases information to the public (both "sensitive" and more mundane information) has a policy for how that information is to be released. That may be a set of instructions for how to make sure you're not unintentionally releasing extra information, or for more secured cases simply that the file must go through a group that does the process for you.
Obviously somebody skipped a step. Whats actually in the file is more interesting then how it got there, given that all we're talking about is human error.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Try contoling the Metadata with a tool that even Microsoft provides for free. http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA011400341 033.aspx
It can happen with .pdf as well:
http://news.com.com/U.S.+military+security+defeate d+by+copy+and+paste/2100-1002_3-5694982.html
Not sure about .odf
"Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's brains..."
In this excerpt the last bit (Item 2, at the bottom of the page) looks like a pretty good analysis.
Best Slashdot Co
Not everyone has access to MSWord, after all. Meanwhile, PDF readers are free.
Whenever I want to publish something in redacted form, I just change the color of the redacted text to black on black, then export to PDF. Duh!
Volume and quality of information is scarce, often due to decisions from people at the top. Support is never what you expect. Cost overruns across the board. Bloat. Local insurgencies.
So...Iraq has been invaded by MSCEs?
Blank until
I hate (US/Bush/Republicans/US Military) and I'll believe anything (Iran/Chirac/Democrats/Liberal Reporters) say they reinforces my beliefs without questioning anything. Lots of pinheads write lots of reports for other pinheads while other people do real work.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
An officer is supposed to protect the soldiers under his command. It is the duty of the Generals to make sure that the job given to his division is within the capability of his troops. Just because the civilian authority orders "Find a cure for cancer", they should not embark on ordering their colnels and majors to mess with test tubes.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
> So a handful of people don't know about or how to use the track changes features in Word and that
...
> means the "U.S." is incompetent?
No, it just means that *when people care* (i.e., on Wall Street) they know about this feature.
If you're just a drone in the streets of Baghdad - well, who cares
Obviously the *entire* US is incompetent, the evidence being (a) its use of Microsoft Word, and (b) Iraq, *or* (c) both.
/.? The mind boggles.)
Thanks. I understand. Thanks. No need to keep beating the drum. Thanks.
(Where would I be without
668: Neighbour of the Beast
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.
9/11 scared me shitless and I'll believe anything (The Bush administration/DOD/GOP/Rush Limbaugh) says that reinforces my beliefs without questioning anything.
...how previous wars would have fared had they been subjected to the microscopic scrutiny of today...
Okay, I just did a quick search and found out that you can't really turn off change tracking. You can hide it, of course, but it's still in there tracking. So the only way to get rid of those changes is to accept or reject each one individually. The information is here (this is for Word 2007, but I assume it's the same for previous versions as well). This is a silly and cumbersome thing to have to do, and you're right -- it makes it a bad way to distribute documents.
.doc files (which has never seemed like a good idea in any area of business or government for countless reasons anyway -- why distribute something that can be so easily edited?) is rife with peril.
Now, the suggestions elsewhere around here that they simply standardize on PDF would solve everything, and they could still use Word if they're used to it. But posting
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
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.
You show me one auditing company who would disqualify a gov agency from receiving an ISO certificate and I show you an auditing company that never gets government contracts anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
http://kellyanncollins.com/cat_schwartz_nude_photo shop.htm
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
I opened up Word 2k3. It seems that under Options -> Security (I know, a crazy place to expect the government to look). There is a checkbox that reads
Warn before printing, saving or sending a file that contains tracked changes or comments.I just tested it, and yes this feature seems to work.
Oh, sorry, what I meant is for a large no-bid contract, I can help the military prevent this in the future via real-time user warnings.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
This is why it's hard to subscribe to these huge conspiracy theories about anything involving the Federal Government. I mean, if you want to successfully lead a conspiracy, you have to be competent and you have to cover your tracks.
This latest example of bumbling incompetence shows us that you cannot trust the Feds to do either.
That's why we should fear the Feds when they want to help us: considering their track records at taking care of their own problems, only a suicidal madman would trust them to manage other people's lives.
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
So...Iraq has been invaded by MSCEs?
Actually, it was liberated by MBAs.
Seems to me what's lacking is security taxonomy overlay for classes of documents. If you assign a document to a class of security then there are certain operations which are required and others which are prohibited.
Hello military, I shall provide my consultancy service at a cost of $0 because I am feeling good today:
Create an email address that it is possible to send Word or PDF (or any other) documents to. The documents are automatically treated and returned instantly, according to:
- Word documents have all comments stripped out
- PDF documents have all the "censored" sections (read: sections where the black text has been made unreadable by adding a black background) be truly removed from the document and replaced by black boxes
The document gets renamed accordingly, e.g. REDACTED-[previous document name].
If you want to be truly generous you could also allow for putting a number in the subject line, where the number allowed different levels of treatment - e.g. for a Word document also stripping out all details of author, last modified, etc.
Wouldn't that make the reporter guilty of circumventing an access control mechanism?
That DMCA sure is a versatile tool, isn't it?
Having read my share of int briefs, that's actually a pretty good analysis with what looks to me like an honest attempt at figuring out what is going on.
I see no incompetence there - I see good, honest staffwork. Perhaps a touch informal in places, but that's about it.
Intelligence is a slippery fish, not an exact science. It is normal to have a great deal of uncertainty.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
but they still want us to somehow vote for candidates that promise extend government meddling in areas such as retirement and health care.
Hm. Not as flexible with these mental gymnastics as I used to be. Request additional kool-aid here. Extend government medling in health care?
This from the country that spends the most per-capita on healthcare in the entire world, yet still has 20% uninsured?
Maybe if you spent your taxes on healthcare instead of on no-bid contracts to haliburton? No? That's not an option?
You can't take the sky from me...
That reminds me once, of a resume I got in word format.
"Track Changes" revealed that he was either lying to me, or to the other employer he'd recently sent it to.
Either way, it spared me from having to schedule him an interview...
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
My grumble is that, note, CPA only cared about attacks on Coalition troops, not about attacks on Iraqis, which were steadily increasing the whole time. I mean, generally speaking, the point of an occupation isn't just to have lots of annoying foreign troops arround, but to KEEP THE OCCUPIED PEOPLE SECURE.
And this shows in the document. Lots of speculation and thought about ATTACKS ON THE COALITION. You can't even begin to guess what the security situation for Iraqis on the street is from this document.
A company I worked with had decided to switch from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice to save money instead of upgrading to the new version of MS Office. A week later everyone was running MS Office again. Apparently one of the executives sent out a Word document that had some embarrassing comments he made "deleted", but they were still there because of "Track Changes". When you opened up the document in OpenOffice, you could see them easily. I was just a peon, or I would have tried to explain that if he had been using OpenOffice himself it wouldn't have happened, and that someone knowledgeable could have viewed them in MS Office anyway. Instead they decided to spend tens of thousands on new licenses to go back to MS Office...
A lot of us don't think the supposedly democratic congress is doing enough, so those numbers don't mean what you imply they mean.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Sorry to have caused any infuriation. I don't easily get upset over posts on /. Please don't consider my following comments as an attack or meant to upset you:
:-) I bet we would agree that having the Supreme Court rule correctly about when human life begins would be a good thing. We just may not agree about what that correct answer is. Unfortunately, it's not an easy area to find agreement, and it's probably more productive to collaborate on reducing unwanted pregnancies, which is probably common ground.
- "Concerns over global warming are frequently overblown" - To me, the scary part about global warming is the massive and highly successful campaign by Bush and friends to convince us that it's a) not happening, and b) we're not causing it. For example, his efforts to corrupt and/or bury the results of his own scientific inquiry scare the heck out of me. Humans making the Earth warmer is just one of the truly scary hurdles in front of us. The Middle East building nukes is another one, as is controlling the world's population before we strip it of all it's resources. From that point of view, I agree, it is sometimes overblown. If that's you're position, it's reasonable. If you think we're not causing it, you should become better informed.
- Almost nobody at this point that I run across thinks that things are rosy over in Iraq. Anyone who thinks we've handled Iraq well should become better informed. If you hold out hope that the world will be a better place than if we'd not invaded Iraq, then I'd say your an optimist, though not unreasonable. If you feel we should stay and try to complete the mission, even if Iraq is a mess, then you agree with many other reasonable people, just not most.
- All the government has to do to keep the Internet neutral is nothing. Even better would be a law enforcing no change. If it meddles with what has been working for over 10 years, the value of the Internet could drastically fall. In particular, we need to insure that ISPs do not discriminate against packets based on their origin. That's all. They can still do traffic shaping, charge more for higher levels of service, etc. But, if they want to block all the Democrat web sites, and only allow through the Republican ones, that's a problem. That's exactly what will happen if Murdoch gets control, and packet origin discrimination is allowed. I find that a compelling argument for keeping the status quo, which has been working so well.
- Are you also upset that the Supreme Court ended segregation? It's the court's job to fill in context when laws are unclear. In Rowe v Wade, they tackled the toughest issue: defining when human life begins. It's a slippery area to rule in, and highly contentious, since many of us believe God gives us a soul at conception, while others of us believe that we gain our humanity as our brain develops and we become conscious of our environment. Jews traditionally believed that God gives us a soul at the quickening. I believe life begins when my kids go to college
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fa milyid=144e54ed-d43e-42ca-bc7b-5446d34e5360&displa ylang=en
"The Remove Hidden Data Tool"
One of the girls upstairs in the PR department ran into the same problem today. It took all of three minutes on Google to find the solution to the problem.
This would not have happened if presidential staffers were using Linux.
Linux=security
Microsoft=(inadvertent)transparency
I'm just here for the sigs
People who complain about this remind me of whiny sports fans who blame the refs every time they lose a game. First off, let's be perfectly clear on one thing--most law is case law, i.e. law that is made by the precedent of judicial rulings. This allows the law to grow organically from case analysis rather than simply being handed down from Congress every so often. This is a vital feature of the system of common law we inherited from Great Britain, so if you have a problem with it, take it up with them.
It also protects us from the tyranny of the majority. The civil rights rulings of the 1960's are a perfect example of this--the "will of the people", the laws Congress did pass, all this stuff you people claim to protect, were in this case part of a horrifically evil system that oppressed people for no reason other than their racial origin. It was the Supreme Court, upholding the principles of the Constitution, which stopped this.
I'm not saying the Court never makes bad rulings--they clearly do, particularly in cases like Kelo. But majority rule makes bad decisions far more often, and it's vital that there be some way to put majority rule in check in situations where it is clearly acting unjustly. And that will necessarily involve overturning what Congress and the President do from time to time.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
It really is a pity Bush, Cheney et al did not pay attention during the Vietnam war
Oh they paid attention all right, they did everything they could to ensure they didn't get sent to serve there.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658