Readers Declassify US Report on Italian agent

This was on the Yahoo Message Board, it contains a link to the declassified document:

Readers 'declassify' US document
by: ze_french_resistance (58/M/looking in ze bush) 05/02/05 03:34 pm
Msg: 4446 of 4453

http://download.repubblica.it/doc/omissis.doc

Someone found a simple cut-and-paste job could restore the text
When news started circulating in Italy that a heavily censored Pentagon report into the death of secret agent Nicola Calipari had been decrypted, many thought it must be the work of some top-notch hacker.
In fact, it turned out that the classified document, containing top-secret details - such as the name of the soldier who fired the deadly rounds of ammunition - could be made readable with two simple clicks of your computer mouse.

A few hours after the Pentagon published the report on its website, a few Italian readers found they could make the blacked-out paragraphs reappear by cutting and pasting them from the site into a Word document.

Salvatore Schifani, a 30-year-old IT worker, spotted the document at about 0300 local time (0100 GMT) on Saturday night.

He said he had just come home from a night out and wanted to check the latest news before going to sleep.

"I played around on my computer by highlighting the text, I found out the words were still there under the blacked-out bits," he told web-based Repubblica radio.

"It really surprised me, because the best way of not making this information available would have been not to write it down in the first place, rather than putting it there and then trying to conceal it in such a silly way," he added.

A human mistake while processing the text using a common programme known as Acrobat has presumably led to this embarrassing gaffe.

A simple command would have been enough to turn the blacked-out bits into a permanent feature of the document, preventing anybody from reading the classified portions.

On Monday afternoon, the report could no longer be found on the Pentagon website.

Officials at the US Department of Defence, presumably flooded by press inquiries, did not return calls on the issue, the Associated Press news agency reported.

But Mr Schifani who was pretty relaxed about his discovery.

"I couldn't even be bothered to tell lots of people about it - I sent just a few emails to a couple of newsgroups. I wasn't after fame," he modestly told the radio.

"This whole thing makes me smile - but it also makes me wonder whether it might have been a voluntary mistake."

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Newsletter format

Friends:

Before the 2004 Election, your network was sending out very good newsletters in the form of emails. The news briefs were spicey, to-the-point, entertaining, and quite informative. I shared them with friends everywhere.

After the dismal election, they seemed to have disappeared. If this is not the case, would you put me on your email list to receive the well-written news briefs that have such an impact on readers?

If you have discontinued the news briefs in email form, please advise and explain the reason for quitting.

Thanks!

Loren Adams
Fayetteville, Arkansas

re: newsletter

Hi Loren,

Official explanation is here. The short answer, Dems.com Grand Poobah Bob Fertik made the executive decision to switch democrats.com from a news outlet to this new blog and forum format.

As to the newsletter, so far no means off automatically generating a newsletter, as opposed to manually cutting and pasting one together, has been devised. Hopefully at some point that technology will become available. Or perhaps a dedicated and trusted volunteer might step foward for such duty, there are still nearly twenty thousand subscribers on the mailing list...

CP :>)

Memory Hole has a copy, too

The Memory Hole has a "Word version of the complete, uncensored report" as well a link to the "PDF version of the report with removeable redaction", in case you want to play with the report yourself...

via www.memoryblog.org

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