Blown To Bits

Facebook’s Lawyers Screw Up Digital Redaction

Thursday, February 12th, 2009 by Harry Lewis
As buy generic methotrexate cost oral such, anyone at increased risk of developing high blood pressure approved triamterene pharmacy should monitor their blood pressure regularly. People with eye conditions, generic glyburide such as AMD, who perform the Amsler grid exam daily buy norvasc without prescription may be able to detect any abnormalities at an early erythromycin stage and arrange for a thorough eye exam. In some cheap asacol no prescription cases, people may also undergo biliary dilatation, which is a viagra cheapest price procedure that expands part of the bile duct with a lasix sale balloon to open the blockage. Sotyktu may be prescribed for purchase cheap ventolin online canada plaque psoriasis that responds to other systemic treatments or phototherapy. buy generic clonidine Anyone who experiences symptoms of TB or TBM should contact their.

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.