Wednesday, May 04, 2005

Classified Defense Information Exposed

A report on the shooting death of an Italian security agent includes classified data that can be easily deciphered. The report was issued on Adobe Portable Document Format on April 30. The classified data can be copied and pasted into Microsoft Notepad to reveal the blocked text of classified material.

Intelligence officials must be more careful when using computer programs to store and dispense classified information. Lives can and are at stake in the entire war on terror.

Fortunately this report did not contain information that could have put lives at risk, however the need for more security in the document realm is evident. Authorities need to assess the entire intelligence document storage area so improvements may be made to prevent this from happening again.

This particular story informs us that communication breakdowns are the main cause for the incident. We can easily deduce that other communication problems are happening at Iraqi checkpoints.

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