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TSA's Sloppy Redacting Reveals All
A travel blog breaks the story of a poor job of redacting by the TSA: they posted a PDF of airport screening policies, with certain sections blacked out — not realizing that simply laying a black rectangle over the text is hardly sufficient. Cryptome has posted a copy with the redaction removed (ZIP).
ctrl-a is a bitch, huh?
Hey TSA dudes, do your bit for the environment and use ^H like we do on slashdot.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
but must admit that this strikes a blow to their reputation for competence and effectiveness.
ttp:cryptomeorgtsa-screeningzip
The cryptome URL has been redacted. Nothing to see here, move along.
Sincerely,
TSA
using System.Awesome;
Idiots. They should have changed the text color to white for the stuff they wanted to hide.
Better known as 318230.
dude, you zipped a pdf....
thats almost as bad as when my mom puts a jpg in a doc to email it.
Why is the fact that their redacting technique is as useful and effective as their screening techniques surprising to anyone?
TSA, bringing you the best in security theatre since 2001!
You just gave me a mental image of some TSA bureaucrat sitting at his computer putting black magic marker lines on the CRT screen as he reviews the PDF.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
1. Don't open cockpit door.
2. Light fasten seatbelt sign.
3. ????? (do a barrel roll, steep climb/dive/banking or parabolic arcs)
4. Don't fly into skyscraper, do collect badly injured terr'ists.
5. Profit.
Since when has global significance been a requirement for slashdot articles? Half the time significance isn't even a requirement.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
This is government. As far as stupidity is concerned, they go to 11.
Just this weekend I experienced a flash game embedded in a XLS enclosed in an Outlook .eml file. I hope it does not get worse than that, otherwise I am sure we'd be breaking some laws of topology.
Yo dawg, I heard you like security, so I put some lines in your lines so you can wait while you wait.
Or my personal favorite:
If designated by the FSD, inspect the credentials of LEOs, LEOs escorting prisoners, Federal Flight Deck Officers (FFDOs), Federal Air Marshals (FAMs), credentialed TSA employees flying with a working canine, and U.S. Government employees required to fly armed in order to clear them through the screening checkpoint.
The bolding is from the original, which is why the whole "credentialed TSA employees flying with a working canine" caught my eye.
A working canine?
The mind reels...
...Oxygen gets you high. In a catastrophic emergency, you're taking giant panicked breaths. Suddenly you become euphoric, docile. You accept your fate. It's all right here. Emergency water landing - 600 miles an hour. Blank faces, calm as Hindu cows.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
It's turtles all the way down!
Ok how about... a uuencoded[1], corrupt[2], powerpoint attachment inside an email that got pasted (as the raw text of an email) into a word doc, reformatted, and then mailed to me (as a base64'd attachment).
Got sent that ~12 years ago by a PHB who wanted help getting the powerpoint out of his mail. It wasn't that hard - I wrote a little uudecoder in perl that started dumping when it saw the magic bytes for OLE...that format has a LUT for 512-byte blocks of the doc at the start, if you have trailing junk its just ignored. I mailed this back to him, and hey presto, it worked. He then asked me how I did it. I wasnt about to explain this to someone who can't use the 'forward' button in their mailer so I just stripped the comments and spaces out of the perl and sent that back.
-Baz
[1] the microsoft flavour. this was back in the day when there were multiple uuencode alphabets.
[2] extra bytes at start and end.
Also, if they bomb the checkpoints what is the response going to be? More checkpoints further out? An infinite array of security checkpoints?
Don't be silly; if checkpoints don't work the next logical step is to build a wall. Once all the airports have been walled off, we will be secure (except on buses and trains and in cars or as pedestrians or on bicycles or skateboards).
Which, as the summary explains, is absolutely true.
I am officially gone from
You obviously don't use Acrobat reader!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
dude, you zipped a pdf....
that's how the TSA 'encrypted' it