American IntelligenceAh, the dangerous world of online document publishing.

The unwitting culprits this time are the Pentagon, whose report into the death of the Italian secret agent Andrea Carpani Nicola Calipari has just been published, and through the injudicious use of the Acrobat format, has revealed far more than they wanted to about the personnel involved, and various strategic details that are almost certainly of interest to those who are inclined to attempting to blow up Americans.

The report outlines the events surrounding the death of Carpani, who had just liberated Italian journalist Giuliana Sgrena from her Iraqi kidnappers, but who was subsequently shot dead by American soldiers as their car approached a checkpoint on the way to Baghdad airport.

A lot of the report has been 'blacked out' with a digital black marker. Unfortunately for the Pentagon, whoever actually published the document forgot to turn on some of the more simple document protection measures available with Adobe Acrobat, thus making it possible to render the hidden text visible via a simple cut and paste into something like Word or Notepad. Names, places and times - all revealed at the flick of a key-stroke.

More details, and some debate over the rights and wrongs of actually publishing the 'confidential' details, can be found on German blogger Vowe's website.

(The security oversight, incidentally, was initially discovered by an Italian blogger - his original post, in Italian, isn't showing up correctly on his archive page, but, at the time of writing, was still available on his homepage. If you can read Italian, of course).

[via boing boing]
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