AT&T leaks NSA suit information
Lawyers for AT&T accidentally released sensitive information while defending a lawsuit that accuses the company of facilitating a government wiretapping program, CNET News.com has learned.
But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple Computer's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11.
The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class-action lawsuit in January, alleges that the room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program.
Note that AT&T isn't actually admiting that there is a secret room with with "Surveillance Configuration" equipment in it. Only that if such a room did exist it would be perfectly OK.
What I find funny is how often companies get burned on this. I could understand the first few, as non-computer types can not be expected to understand such things. But after a few law firms got hit with this, you would think they all would have worked out a standard procedure for cleaning documents before release.
Jay