Busted by the Borg
The ever interesting Inquirer has the scoop on a great "gotcha" story, showing how Tony Blair's office just got busted by a little known feature in Microsoft Word.
The UK Government's infamous Iraq WMD dossier, heavily plagiarized from academic papers, was originally posted to the 10 Downing Street website as a Word file (don't bother looking for it now - they've taken down the original link and replaced the file with a PDF).
As you'll probably recall - when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM's office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.
Well thanks to some smart forensic work by Richard Smith of computerbytesman.com, we now know the identity of at least four of the contributors to this particular fiasco. Their user names were captured by Word as their edits to the document were tracked.
You see - Word handily stores all the deltas between iterations of a document in a set of unencrypted headers. If you know how this stuff works, you can piece together not just what was changed, but who changed it.
And as Richard's excellent digging reveals - far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together. Check out the full report over at Richard's site.
Consider your right honourable selves well and truly busted.
The UK Government's infamous Iraq WMD dossier, heavily plagiarized from academic papers, was originally posted to the 10 Downing Street website as a Word file (don't bother looking for it now - they've taken down the original link and replaced the file with a PDF).
As you'll probably recall - when it was revealed that the dossier was a work of creative cut & paste, the response of the PM's office was to feign ignorance of the source, bluster, obfuscate, blame the spooks, and generally wash their hands of the whole thing.
Well thanks to some smart forensic work by Richard Smith of computerbytesman.com, we now know the identity of at least four of the contributors to this particular fiasco. Their user names were captured by Word as their edits to the document were tracked.
You see - Word handily stores all the deltas between iterations of a document in a set of unencrypted headers. If you know how this stuff works, you can piece together not just what was changed, but who changed it.
And as Richard's excellent digging reveals - far from being the spooks, it was people very, very close to the PM who pulled this thing together. Check out the full report over at Richard's site.
Consider your right honourable selves well and truly busted.
