Tippex on the Monitor

There used to be a scurrilous little joke about being able to tell the Irish computer users by the amount of Tippex on their computer screens. Time to substitute Irish with US Justice Department. (Thanks Atrios for the pointer to Kevin Drum)

A couple of weeks ago the Justice Department, after finally acceding to a Freedom of Information request, posted a study on "workforce diversity." However, it was heavily redacted: nearly half of the report was blacked out.

But in yet another example of utter cluelessness about how computers work, the report was posted on the web in PDF format.

If I can't see it, its not there. I'm surprised they didn't just close their eyes and declare it gone. Now we know where the US Patent Office gets its patent researchers and legal experts.

Update
This story from Nature has an even cleverer take on getting under the skin of censiored documents. Censored words unmasked

Armed with little more than an electronic dictionary and text-analysis software, Claire Whelan, a graduate student in computer science at Dublin City University in Ireland, has managed to decrypt words that had been blotted out from declassified documents to protect intelligence sources.

She and one of her PhD supervisors, David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, which manufactures banking and security cards, tackled two high-profile documents. One was a memo to US President George Bush that had been declassified in April for an inquiry into the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks. The other was a US Department of Defense memo about who helped Iraq to 'militarize' civilian Hughes helicopters.

Demasking blotted out words was easy, Naccache told Nature. "Optical recognition easily identified the font type - in this case Arial - and its size," he says. "Knowing this, you can estimate the size of the word behind the blot. Then you just take every word in the dictionary and calculate whether or not, in that font, it is the right size to fit in the space, plus or minus 3 pixels."

A computerized dictionary search yielded 1,530 candidates for a blotted out word in this sentence of the Bush memo: "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXXXX service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike." A grammatical analyser yielded just 346 of these that would make sense in English.

A cursory human scan of the 346 removed unlikely contenders such as acetose, leaving just seven possibilities: Ugandan, Ukrainian, Egyptian, uninvited, incursive, indebted and unofficial. Egyptian seems most likely, says Naccache. A similar analysis of the defence department's memo identified South Korea as the most likely anonymous supplier of helicopter knowledge to Iraq.

That damned information technology, there's too much power being distributed in places its never been seen before, next thing you know there'll be a level playing field and we'll all have to live by our merits. In the words of Dilbert, "It's Obvious You Won't Survive By Your Wits Alone"

Comments

[Fourbrick]

Any body know the best way to remove Tippex from new car bodywork?

Thanks.

Fourbrick

[Earl Mardle]

Yeah, take a gas axe and cut out the metal behind the Tippex. Once the metal is removed the tippex, deprived of all support, falls off.

[Fourbrick]

Thanks, Earl, tried it but the tippex still didn't fall off the piece I cut out. Anybody know how to put the piece back?