Interesting Fact for JFK Researchers who sleuth the Net

[Robert Howard]

I normally would not post information of this nature on the forum, but there is an old saying that "all's fair in love and war." Readers are instructed to form their own conclusions.

"STUDENT TURNS UP UNREDACTED CALIPARI REPORT ONLINE - A Greek medical student at the University of Bologna in Italy, surfing the web on 1 May, found he could restore redacted portions of a 40-page U.S. report on the death of Italian senior SISMI officer Nicola Calipari with a couple of clicks of his computer mouse, the BBC reported on 2 May.

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4504855.stm

The student passed the details to Italian newspapers, which put the full text on their websites.

On 30 April, the U.S. released a redacted cyber edition of the report in pdf format. Removed from the report were the names and ranks of soldiers involved in firing on the car in which Calipari was traveling and rules of engagement for checkpoints such as that at which the shooting occurred. According to the BBC Rome correspondent, other redacted material included details about communication failures.

Such a report would normally be released in a hardcopy but was made available online this time to facilitate access to it by U.S. media in Baghdad whose freedom of movement is restricted by the dangerous conditions there.

A German systems architect, Volker Weber, reported in a blog how the report could be 'un-redacted,' using nothing more than CTRL-C, CTRL-V (cut and paste), ZD Net said on 1 May.

blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=1329

Weber says when he tried to copy and paste a few pages from Acrobat into Windows Notepad, everything that was blacked out in the PDF version of the document was clearly visible.

"There have been many reports in the press of how people have published Microsoft Word documents with their history easily revealed through Word’s track changes feature," he notes. "But you rarely hear about problems like this when it comes to PDF files. It will be interesting to see how this security debacle unfolds, where the finger gets pointed, and how it changes the way PDF files get handled in the future (by organizations of all types)." (DKR)