Army cocks up PDF censorship

TOP secret training procedures and names of US soldiers in Iraq, which the secret services thought it had censored, have been made public in a technology cock-up. We wrote this a few days ago, but maybe you missed it, so here we go again.

According to Associated Press, the US military command in Baghdad produced a Portable Document Format report which cleared American soldiers of killing of an Italian agent in Baghdad as he shielded a journalist hostage escaping from head-hunting insurgents. The report was then posted on the Internet for all to see.

The military thought they had blacked-out the names of soldiers at Iraqi checkpoints, the name of their units, details of their training programmes, checkpoint procedures and general security in the Baghdad area, including the number of attacks since November. However it turns out that the censors only put black rectangles over the PDF text and did not delete anything. Acrobat can't actually do that sort of thing and the change was only superficial.

All tech savvy readers had to do was "select text", cut and paste it into any word processor and they had their own complete secret document. The Italian press, who does not tend to like its civilian heroes on their way home from rescue missions to be machine gunned by its NATO allies published the lot.

Opps, said a Pentagon spokesman, or words to that effect.More here. {Didn't we write this a few days ago, Nick, here? Ed.]