Blown To Bits

Facebook’s Lawyers Screw Up Digital Redaction

Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by Harry Lewis
There buy cialis overnight delivery are multiple reasons why a person with endometriosis might experience cafergot online stores pain on the right side only. If you have other buy quinine online questions about Xeljanz and certain antidepressants, talk with your doctor order cheapest advair low cost dosage or pharmacist. Sometimes, a doctor may also ask for other buy zithromax overnight delivery samples, such as a bone marrow biopsy and a cerebrospinal viagra overnight fluid analysis, also known as a spinal tap. When a gentamicin eye drops for sale person decides to contribute to an FSA, they may want norvasc alternative to spend additional time planning how much they will need. purchase prozac online Autism explainedAutism is a developmental condition that affects how you robaxin for order communicate, learn, behave, and interact with the world. Defining a retin-a us patient's stage helps the physician and the patient identify disease get cheap remeron best price tablet risk and the therapies indicated for that particular stage." According order discount viagra online effects to the BAUS, a person may experience swelling or bruising find discount lasix for several days following a penectomy. This global initiative is an.

On pages 73-77 of Blown to Bits, we go through three cases in which editors electronically redacted documents to remove sensitive information, not realizing that the way they were doing the redaction changed only the way the document appeared on the screen. The internal representation of the document still included the redacted text, which a simple cut and paste operation disclosed.

Not the most fascinating part of the book, I’ll bet. In fact, I’ll bet some of you skipped over it fairly quickly.

These were serious mistakes with big consequences. I hadn’t heard any recent reports of similar failures.

But the underlying problem hasn’t gone away. The electronic “document” metaphor is too convincing. It’s easy for a editor to infer that what is happening on the screen is what is really happening to the computer file.

A few days ago, it was disclosed that the value put on Facebook at the time the settlement with ConnectU was a lot less than it might have been, had the value been based on Microsoft’s subsequent purchase of a percentage of Facebook. How do we know? The imputed value (and ConnectU’s settlement) were inadvertently revealed by Facebook’s lawyers. Revealed how? Here is the account offered by SiliconValley.com:

Large portions of that hearing are redacted in a transcript of the June hearing, but The Associated Press was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document.

How embarrassing. Moral: read Chapter 3. And remember it!

Added 2/13:¬†Here is the actual PDF. Go to page 22. At the bottom is some whited out text preceded by the word “REDACTED”. Select the white space on the screen (you can do this with any PDF reader) and copy it, then paste it into your usual wordprocessor. Like magic, the $65 million dollar figure appears!

Comments are closed.