Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FBI Wiretapping Audit Secrets Uncovered Via Ctrl+C

Posted by kdawson on from the c'mon-guys-it's-not-even-obscure dept.

mytrip notes a story in Wired's Threat Level blog on the latest boneheaded government moves with redaction. (We've been discussing redaction follies here for years.) This time it's an FBI report (PDF) on implementing CALEA — you can select text from redacted areas, copy it, and paste into a text editor, as University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze discovered. From Wired: "Once again, supposedly sensitive information blacked out from a government report turns out to be visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl+C keys — and that information turns out to be not very sensitive after all... [Among] the tidbits considered too sensitive to be aired publicly: The FBI paid Verizon $2,500 apiece to upgrade 1,140 old telephone switches. Oddly the report didn't redact the total amount paid to the telecom — slightly more than $2.9 million dollars — but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid."

4 of 231 comments (clear)

  1. Too much UNIX for me by mikael_j · · Score: 5, Funny

    The headline and summary made took a minute for me to grasp, I just couldn't understand how you could get data out of something by halting execution.

    Then my brain woke up and I realized they were thinking of the Windows command Ctrl+C which copies the marked text..

    /Mikael

    --
    Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
    1. Re:Too much UNIX for me by hackstraw · · Score: 5, Funny

      Then my brain woke up and I realized they were thinking of the Windows command Ctrl+C which copies the marked text..

      Right. Me too. I don't use windows, so I think Ctrl+C == SIGINT.

      I saw a similar thing on another article here where they had Ctrl+Z in the article, and that took me a minute to figure out as well. I thought, WTF does suspending a task have to do with anything??? I then had to figure out that Ctrl+Z is the undo command in windows.

    2. Re:Too much UNIX for me by SharpFang · · Score: 5, Funny

      very simply...

      Welcome To FBI Info Booth.
      Please press:
      1 to open contact form
      2 to learn about the organization
      3 to get the latest news
      4 to access the current most wanted list
      5 to access other FBI resources
      Your choice: _ [ctrl+C]
      Terminated.
      root@booth975.fbi.gov# cat ./wiretaps.txt

      --
      45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
  2. Re:Let me guess... by Phyrexicaid · · Score: 5, Funny

    Come on, at least make your top secret docs standards compliant. :(</quote>
    I wanted it to be realistic :P

    --
    The meme is dead, long live the meme!