The National Security Agency has issued new guidance to assist officials in redacting (censoring) documents in Microsoft Word format and producing unclassified Adobe Portable Document (PDF) files without inadvertently disclosing sensitive information.
“MS Word is used throughout the DoD and the Intelligence Community (IC) for preparing documents, reports, notes, and other formal and informal materials. PDF is often used as the format for downgraded or sanitized documents.”
“There are a number of pitfalls for the person attempting to sanitize a Word document for release.”
For example, “As numerous people have learned to their chagrin, merely converting an MS Word document to PDF does not remove all [sensitive] metadata automatically.”
“This paper describes the issue, and gives a step-by-step description of how to do it with confidence that inappropriate material will not be released.”
See “Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF,” National Security Agency, December 13, 2005:
Satellite imagery of RAF Lakenheath reveals new construction of a security perimeter around ten protective aircraft shelters in the designated nuclear area, the latest measure in a series of upgrades as the base prepares for the ability to store U.S. nuclear weapons.
It will take consistent leadership and action to navigate the complex dangers in the region and to avoid what many analysts considered to be an increasingly possible outcome, a nuclear conflict in East Asia.
Getting into a shutdown is the easy part, getting out is much harder. Both sides will be looking to pin responsibility on each other, and the court of public opinion will have a major role to play as to who has the most leverage for getting us out.
How the United States responds to China’s nuclear buildup will shape the global nuclear balance for the rest of the century.