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maelorin at 04:11am on 27/06/2006 under blaming the tools, censorship, disclosure, document format, embarassment, pdf, press, technical error, text, user error, wysiwyg
maelorin at 04:11am on 27/06/2006 under blaming the tools, censorship, disclosure, document format, embarassment, pdf, press, technical error, text, user error, wysiwygThe New York Times reported last Thursday (22nd June 2006) on a flawed attempt to prevent disclosure of "sensitive material" in a court case. Prosecutors presented documents in PDF format to court with sections "blacked" out. Those sections, when copied into a text editor, say MS Word, disclosed the supposedly suppressed text ... oops.
The report includes a picture that demonstrates how easy the disclosure process was.
This was such a simple thing to avoid - one extra step in the process could have ensured that this was never going to happen.
Once more, the tool is blamed for blatant user error. Though I suspect the oversight can be sheeted home to a lack of education and awareness of how the tools actually work. I can empathise with the poor intern or junior who got stuck doing the cut and paste and./or file conversion - been there, done that. But hitting "Print to PDF" was not enough here - the "blacked-out" text really ought to have been replaced not just covered up.
WYSIWYG has made people lazy (lazier?) when it comes to creating documents. What You See Isn't All of What Is Actually There. Just because it looks fine on the screen and on the print out, and just because the PDF version doesn't include all the stupid MS metadata, doesn't mean the original data - the data that was actually important to cover up - was adequately masked.
Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, and nothing else. Covering text with black background/foreground really only makes it unreadable - it doesn't replace the text. You have to explicitly replace the text.
The report includes a picture that demonstrates how easy the disclosure process was.
This was such a simple thing to avoid - one extra step in the process could have ensured that this was never going to happen.
Once more, the tool is blamed for blatant user error. Though I suspect the oversight can be sheeted home to a lack of education and awareness of how the tools actually work. I can empathise with the poor intern or junior who got stuck doing the cut and paste and./or file conversion - been there, done that. But hitting "Print to PDF" was not enough here - the "blacked-out" text really ought to have been replaced not just covered up.
WYSIWYG has made people lazy (lazier?) when it comes to creating documents. What You See Isn't All of What Is Actually There. Just because it looks fine on the screen and on the print out, and just because the PDF version doesn't include all the stupid MS metadata, doesn't mean the original data - the data that was actually important to cover up - was adequately masked.
Computers do exactly what you tell them to do, and nothing else. Covering text with black background/foreground really only makes it unreadable - it doesn't replace the text. You have to explicitly replace the text.
cold
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Not specifically commenting on the story itself, but your talk of WYSIWYG reminded me of Archchancellor Ridcully's faculty policy - WYGIWYGAINGW.
What You Get Is What You're Given And It's No Good Whining.
tpratchett!
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http://www.floridabar.org/DIVCOM/JN/JNNews01.nsf/76d28aa8f2ee03e185256aa9005d8d9a/17a0e606d152dbfd8525715b005cdfd5?OpenDocument
However, I see I fumbled it a bit. It's just an proposed opinion, and another page on the Flarbar website (go to the link for "Proposed Advisory Opinions") says that it's been revised, that further comments are asked for, etc. But it doesn't specify what the revision was, only the date (23 June).
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