Opinion: The Bush administration's blunder is a lesson to all of us: Clean up your PDFs before posting to the Web.As an old rock writer who just can't get the jones out of his veins, I took on an assignment to review The Who's new DVD,
Tommy and Quadrophenia Live last week. In the review, I said:
"[With Tommy], one could be angry at Pete Townshend for showing lesser lights such as Styx and Pink Floyd the roadmap for making their own crummy concept albums we ended up getting force-fed through album-rock radio. In the end, however, Pete Townshend isn't accountable for people who abuse the genre any more than I'm responsible for poorly thought-out rock reviews someone else types at my computer."
The same thing could be said of Acrobat. Don't blame it—or PDF—when document jockeys at the White House leave detrimental "making of the document" breadcrumbs in a PDF posted on the Web. Crumbs that reporters from the New York Times can feast on.
The latest: Like Richard Nixon running amok with his tape recorder, the Acrobat users at the Oval Office weren't quite in tune with the ramifications of their technology: Before posting a 38-page Iraq policy document to the Web—from which the President's speechwriters derived the headline-grabbing "Plan for Victory" speech Nov. 30 at the U.S. Naval Academy—the White House left "feaver_p" as "Author" in the document metadata. Read the story to see what developed after that, if you're really curious.
Technically, no one's blaming Acrobat or PDF for this particular slip-up that's making George "I lead by my internal moral compass, damn the polls" Bush look like he's letting Duke University political scientist Peter Feaver—a polls authority deputized by the National Security Council—help guide his Iraq policy.
But when these things happen, the underground rumbles: PDF's not secure. People can hack into PDFs, some say. No form of electronic document is safe, especially PDF, others intone somberly. Which sort of implies that paper's somehow safer, and that sensitive documents on paper are completely safe from reporters—be they from the New York Times, The National Enquirer, or The Smoking Gun—trying to dig them up.
"I spend way too many hours fighting with people who still believe a PDF is what it was 10 years ago and not what it is today," said Leonard Rosenthol of PDF Sages. "As Dov [Isaacs, Adobe principal scientist] likes to refer to it, there are many bubba meises—Yiddish for old wives' tales—out there."
What really happened was not that PDF let the White House down; instead, PDF users in the White House just forgot the simple task of wiping the metadata from the file.
There are many potentially embarrassing or unnecessary things one could put in a PDF that could later result in your own "feaver_p" incident. Here are some of the biggies:
Document Metadata
Rosenthol says that metadata is just the first place to look for hidden details about your file—and it's a good thing to strip it out if that's important to you. One company he works with, Apago, makes software that will automatically strip metadata from PDFs. Some companies that use the software, he notes, follow a different path, setting document options to assign every PDF standard data that displays the author as the name of the company.
Image Metadata
Another interesting place to look for hidden clues about the making of a PDF can be metadata in images, he continues. Some digital cameras actually imprint GPS coordinates (longitude and latitude) of where a picture was taken, in addition to the usual date-and-time stamp. Acrobat can conveniently add this to your PDF without your noticing. People who don't want to divulge that information—such as those whose job it is to keep Vice President Dick Cheney's location undisclosed—should make sure it's out of their downloadable PDF. Rosenthol says doing that is a manual operation as of today, so if you have a long document with many images that need work, set aside some time.
Clean Up After a Review
Guess what? If you send a PDF through your company for review and comment before publishing, those changes will remain in the document until you deal with them. Review the Acrobat help documentation to understand how to manage those babies, so that you don't accidentally let your customers know what your pricing scheme could have been if Fred in Materials Management hadn't decided to raise prices 25 percent after gas shot up to $4 per gallon.
Redaction
Another place where the government's run into PDF trouble is with redaction. It's understandable to think that if a black bar has been drawn over sensitive information onscreen in a PDF, the text it covers won't ever be seen again. But that's wrong—a fact that became apparent in a PDF of a Pentagon report last spring about the killing of Italian journalist Nicola Calipari at a U.S. checkpoint in Iraq; redaction was botched in that PDF, revealing military secrets. Lesson: When content needs to be redacted, use a bona fide PDF redaction tool (Appligent makes several) to get the job done.
"The mental model of many redacters who don't understand this is, 'I'll draw a big black box over it!' but that doesn't remove what's underneath it," Rosenthol says. "What you really want to do is the equivalent of cutting a hole [in the document], removing what's there, and possibly taping in something in its place."
Do all these things, and you can say your business is smarter about its PDF use than the White House. Anyone you tell who hasn't yet seen the "feaver_p" story might be impressed.
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