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TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

wanderingaramean.com

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Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#31

Post by anigbrowl »

oiuytgfhn wrote: post #27
endtime wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a little surprised about Cuba. They're not our favorite government, but I don't see them as a security risk.

Are you serious!!!! America has been living under the shadow of imminent Cuban aggression for 50years. There have been Cuban attempts to invade America and numerous assassination attempts on the US president by Cuban agents. And their chemical weapons kill 1000s of Americans after being secretly delivered from Canada.

Apparently your sense of humor is too subtle for some other HNers!

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#32

Post by anigbrowl »

sorbus wrote: post #26

Using the link in the article, it appears that it's already been taken down (link leads to a 404 page). However, from the comments in the article, it's been mirrored at http://cryptome.org (at the top of the list, in fact, filename is tsa-screening.zip, in case that makes it easier to find it).

Looking at the dates on the document, it was last revised in May 2008, so it seems like the horse left the stable some 18 months ago as far as actual bad guys and spies (who presumably seek out this information more actively than your or I) are concerned.

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#33

Post by zacku235 »

I downloaded it earlier but it seems to have been taken down now. Very interesting. I bet that will lose some people their jobs - but I think it definitely highlights an underlying issue within the government bureaucracy that shows why people getting paid 30k with degrees from the University of Phoenix shouldn't be entrusted with national security... I wonder how many security people that passed through...

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#34

Post by bia »

cduan wrote: post #4

It's helpful to understand a little bit of how a PDF file works. A PDF file stores a sequence of instructions for what do draw on a page. The instructions are commands, such as "write this text here" or "draw a circle there." When you draw black redaction boxes, you are just appending an instruction to the end of the list ("draw a box here"), but most of the time the previous instructions are all still there. Really,…

If you open the file in Adobe Acrobat Pro, there's a tool called "TouchUp Object" that lets you literally just click and delete the boxes.

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#36

Post by pasbesoin »

anigbrowl wrote: post #7
cduan wrote: post #4

It's helpful to understand a little bit of how a PDF file works. A PDF file stores a sequence of instructions for what do draw on a page. The instructions are commands, such as "write this text here" or "draw a circle there." When you draw black redaction boxes, you are just appending an instruction to the end of the list ("draw a box here"), but most of the time the previous instructions are all still there. Really,…

Mrs Browl works at a e-discovery company where documents are often redacted depending on which bits are admissible in court; I gather they use TIFF files for exactly the reasons you describe. I suppose the (extremely limited) redaction features in Acrobat stem from the belief that the document is ultimately destined for printing rather than computer reading.

I have no personal experience and at best perhaps a vague recollection of having read or heard something, but would document images be or in the past have been used also to make discovery as inefficient as permitted for the opposition? Images require a person to analyze, or pre-processing before electronic search and analysis can be performed against them.

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#37

Post by anigbrowl »

pasbesoin wrote: post #36
anigbrowl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mrs Browl works at a e-discovery company where documents are often redacted depending on which bits are admissible in court; I gather they use TIFF files for exactly the reasons you describe. I suppose the (extremely limited) redaction features in Acrobat stem from the belief that the document is ultimately destined for printing rather than computer reading.

I have no personal experience and at best perhaps a vague recollection of having read or heard something, but would document images be or in the past have been used also to make discovery as inefficient as permitted for the opposition? Images require a person to analyze, or pre-processing before electronic search and analysis can be performed against them.

OCR is very good nowadays, so that's not so big a problem - and for big lawsuits (eg patent fights) there are literally hundreds of lawyers hired to comb through the vast array of documents deciding whether they're responsive or not.

The pre-processing is largely automated but there's certainly a portion (maybe 5%?) of documents that need to be hand-classified in the database before they get to the lawyers. It an interesting field - lots of money to be made, intense competition for it, relatively simple technology requirements but a legal industry which has been resistant to technology for quite a long time. Autonomy seems to be the leading software company in this space.

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#39

Post by tedunangst »

pasbesoin wrote: post #36
anigbrowl wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mrs Browl works at a e-discovery company where documents are often redacted depending on which bits are admissible in court; I gather they use TIFF files for exactly the reasons you describe. I suppose the (extremely limited) redaction features in Acrobat stem from the belief that the document is ultimately destined for printing rather than computer reading.

I have no personal experience and at best perhaps a vague recollection of having read or heard something, but would document images be or in the past have been used also to make discovery as inefficient as permitted for the opposition? Images require a person to analyze, or pre-processing before electronic search and analysis can be performed against them.

When you're billing the client $300 an hour to do a job they can't easily take elsewhere, you don't have a lot of incentive to improve efficiency.

Re: TSA redaction fail: hidden text easily readable via copy & paste

#40

Post by Beanblabber »

anigbrowl wrote: post #31
oiuytgfhn wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you serious!!!! America has been living under the shadow of imminent Cuban aggression for 50years. There have been Cuban attempts to invade America and numerous assassination attempts on the US president by Cuban agents. And their chemical weapons kill 1000s of Americans after being secretly delivered from Canada.

Apparently your sense of humor is too subtle for some other HNers!

Or perhaps a bit too blunt.
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