The Uncensored Censored Adobe Acrobat Document

Here's a fascinating item from the Washington Monthly about a U.S. military report on a March incident in Iraq in which an Italian intelligence agent was killed and an Italian journalist was injured. (Link via Mark Evanier.)

The report was full of redactions--instances in which sensitive stuff was blacked out. What makes it an item for this Weblog is that the report was issued as an Adobe PDF file, and if you use Acrobat's Save as Text feature, you get the unredacted report, with the censored material left in. The full text, it seems, was sitting there in the background, even though you couldn't see it in the PDF document itself.

I bring all this up not for any political implications--my initial response was, "Geez, I could imagine that happening to me"--but because it's yet another reminder that one of the hazards of the digital age is that you've got to be very, very careful about getting rid of information you don't want to be available.

Microsoft Word is also rife with danger here, since its revision mode can leave you thinking you've deleted text when it's really still there, but just not visible at the moment. And if a leaky electronic document gets distributed on the Web, chances are that someone will notice, as seems to have happened in this case.

Wonder what might have transpired if we'd all been using computers in the early 1970s? Those Nixon tape transcripts with all the "expletives deleted" might have released as not-very-well-censored electronic documents. And the infamous infamous eighteen-minute gap might have been easily restored, if it had been on a digital recording. Or maybe not--but it's fun to speculate on what might have been.