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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

#42

Post by rfreytag »

naz wrote: post #22
sage_joch wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The absence of Saudi Arabia is pretty interesting.

Right, didn't half the 9/11 hijackers have Saudi passports? They wouldn't even get secondary.

None of the 9/11 hijackers' nationalities are represented (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, UAE), excepting Lebanon.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organizers_of_the_September_11,...

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

#45

Post by pmorici »

zacku235 wrote: post #33

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...

"bet that will lose some people their jobs"

I doubt it. the more likely outcome is they mandate all their employees attend document redaction training developed and administered at great tax payer cost by a government contracting company. It's also quite likely that they use the incident to justify spending millions to have a government contractor write document redaction software.

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

#46

Post by pmorici »

anigbrowl wrote: post #37
pasbesoin wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 int…

I can't speak for their other products but in my experience their enterprise search product is a useless piece of crap.

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

#47

Post by lt »

derefr wrote: post #23
weaksauce wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that but why would they not just replace the area with text that says [ redacted ] instead of the black box? Edit: you can pad the redacted box with spaces to keep the formatting consistent.

Perhaps they want to keep the formatting, and don't want pages to reflow after they've already been layed out? The Unicode character "█" works well for this purpose.

I remember a similar story from a few years ago where redacted names where discovered from the length of the redacted characters. Turned out it wasn't too difficult to brute force names and see which ones matched the exact size of the redaction.

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

#50

Post by eli »

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 heard once that NSA guidelines are to print out PDFs, redact portions with a marker and then rescan them into new files.
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