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FBI Wiretapping Audit Secrets Uncovered Via Ctrl+C
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."
This is a classic example of secrecy being used not for national security but to avoid embarrassment. There are likely thousands of these types of secrets that cost money to keep but that are for no reason at all. Ass clowns.
What confuses me is that, and I might be too generous in my assumption, I assume that there's an IT professional somewhere that looks over these released files prior to their release? I know that common sense is entirely too uncommon these days, but if I were to release a digital file (whether to an individual or the public) I'd make sure that someone from the IT department looked it over before release.
Otherwise it's like having a flu vaccine released by managers that went nowhere near an immunologist or virologist.
Still, I'm sure that, sometime soon, MS will remove the Ctrl+C combination. For national security, of course.
visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl+C keys
The FBI is trying to trick me into thinking they're all stupid so they can find out where I've got the 500 acre marijuana farm with its fiftten thousand tons of marijuana in the barn, 500 beautiful hookers and the casino downstairs, where you can buy white lightning and moonshine.
Meanwhile, Osama's still loose.
Attention FBI: Look, dumbasses, print the damned thing out, black out the parts that embarrass the President and your Director with a magic marker and scan it to a TIF file (that's a graphics format, guys. Pay attention!) and "print" THAT to PDF.
But you already know that, you're trying to find my pot gambling hooker farm!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
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 â" slightly more than $2.9 million dollars â" but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid.
It's more likely that the total number is large and people go "ok must be a lot" but at 2.5k usd per switch people would go "how fucking much!!!" - that's what they may want to avoid
Jaj
how abused and misapplied all those "in the interest of national security" procedures are when there is no oversight in place. When will the legislators ever learn, anything that can be abused or misused, will be abused and misused in the absence of oversight? It's not even "might" or "is very likely". It always happens. It's human nature to take advantage for personal gain without risk. They censor anything that they want to, for any agenda, because they can. And this just exposes that truth.
Now watch how they react to it. Do they straighten up their censorship policies? of course not. They'll simply make the abuse harder to discover.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.