Ride the Lightning

WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SAVE THESE PEOPLE FROM THEMSELVES? THE ABYSMAL STATE OF REDACTION IN THE U.S. MILITARY

November 26, 2008

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw a recent Army draft intelligence (definitely a misnomer) paper on potential terrorist uses of technology. Mind you, some of the subject matter absolutely bears study. It is certainly plausible that terrorists could use GPS devices on phones for travel plans, surveillance, and targeting, use mobile phone cameras as surveillance devices and use voice changing technology to make phone calls.

I’m even prepared, though there is no substantiating electronic evidence to date, to believe that Twitter also could be employed as a terrorist tool – the report imagines a “Red Team” scenario where terrorists send other terrorists “tweets” as real time updates of an attack.

But hey guys, if you want to be taken seriously on the subject of technology, you don’t use a MAGIC MARKER to redact someone’s e-mail address before converting it to PDF. Think I’m kidding? The draft report may be found at http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/mobile.pdf  Look at the bottom of numbered page “1” and you’ll see an e-mail address clearly “redacted” by a magic marker. I was able to read it without even blowing it up, but look at the address at 500% size and you can see it plain as day.

Doggone hard to take this report seriously when the tech savvy seems so catastrophically low!

As Tony Blair famously says of the monarchy in The Queen, “will somebody please save these people from themselves?”

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