NSA and the Dangers of Documents

摘要

A U.S. soldier accidentally kills an Italian secret service agent in Iraq. The Pentagon posts a report online in Portable Document Format (PDF), discussing the tragic incident. Clever readers on the Internet, however, are able to access blacked-out, confidential information in the PDF simply by cutting and pasting sections of the censored text into a Word file. Information-security problems caused by metadata, like the Pentagon fiasco from last spring, are becoming a pressing issue for the government and many corporations, are concerned that may transform the way information is shared online.