Sunday, December 11, 2005, 12/11/2005 11:31:00 AM

Watch that Metadata! You too, White House

As we reported here a few weeks ago, many Fortune 100 companies have hidden metadata in the documents posted on their websites. Such metadata could be embarrassing, if not a downright security breach.

Now it turns out the White House has been burned on metadata. Specifically, the White House "Plan for Victory," allegedly an unclassified version of the Pentagon plan that's been in place since 2003, turned out, upon examination of the metadata in the pdf file, to have been authored by Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor who has been working for the administration only since this June.

As conceded by Christopher F. Gelpi, Dr. Feaver's colleague at Duke, "this is not really a strategy document from the Pentagon about fighting the insurgency." Instead, he said, the "document is clearly targeted at American public opinion."

Don Fluckinger at pdfZone has an interesting take here: http://www.pdfzone.com/article2/0,1895,1897227,00.asp

Companies – and governments – need to clean up that metadata.


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