AT&T Improperly Redacts Document … Big Oops

By Michael Santo
Contributing Writer, RealTechNews

A redacted document is one that has been sanitized to remove sensitive material. In the “old days” you might photocopy a document, black out the info with ink, then re-photocopy the marked-up document (since it might be possible to read the original text via holding it up to the light … a decidely low-tech method). In this case AT&T released a PDF with text blacked out in the PDF … but unfortunately for AT&T, they forgot that all you have to do is select and copy the black-out sections, and paste it into, say Notepad … and there you go (and yes, I tried it, successfully).

The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action lawsuit in January, alleges that the room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program. Source: News.com

We Say: Before anyone gets up in arms about my posting this, it’s got nothing to do with politics (some were upset about my earlier story on Bush and his iPod, which was a jab at the RIAA if anyone). I find this certainly humorous, and definitely ironic, since in January the NSA released a document on how to do redactions securely. As technology advances, you have to be more careful, and this shows it.

Also, let’s not forget that the EFF blundered itself earlier in the case, when it accidentally placed sealed documents on the court’s public Web site.