Grad student decodes redacted portions of Aug 9th PDB

[oldhat]

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.

...more...

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/5/13/23237/1403

[TacticalPeek]

1. Does this support a determinate or indeterminate universe?

No.

[steely]

2. Gee - what I wouldn't give to see the results.

Then we'd be able to determine for ourselves whether or not the disclaimer the so-called intelligence experts was warranted or not. Guess I'll have to look at it myself and "monger" some "rumors".

[TacticalPeek]

4. Ugandan sales of militarized acetose to South Korea?

"the most important conclusion of this work is that censoring text by blotting out words and re-scanning is not a secure practice"

[PfcHammer]

3. related LBN thread earlier in the week...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x544025

[IronLionZion]

5. Whatever

The Iranian (70's hostage crisis) method of gluing together shredded documents is more accurate.

:eyes:

[riverwalker]

6. how about awol's service records?

lot's of blotted out stuff there to decode too.

[nadinbrzezinski]

7. Mebbe we can convince her to do

that as a PhD project..

[Nihil]

8. Yeah, that's a puzzler ...

... why did they bother to blot out so much blank space?

Or was it the games of "Hangman" that the Duty Officers played while
waiting for Bush to turn up?

:-)