Stars and Stripes covers the Sgrena report debacle and the worldwide blogger feeding frenzy over the weekend, highlighting unresolved questions about which hapless U.S. military officials may have been responsible for posting the PDF version of the file without completely removing the classified portions in hidden text viewable via copy-and-paste:

U.S. commanders in Iraq posted a version of the U.S. investigation into the Italian checkpoint shooting from which it was possible to recover classified information by simple manipulation of the electronic file.

The report, issued by Multinational Forces-Iraq, or MNF-I, over the weekend, was heavily redacted, with classified sections obscured by black boxes.

The report was posted in a “PDF” format, used by the U.S. government to generate documents of various kinds.

While downloading the information, however, the global “blogging” community quickly discovered that the classified information could easily be recovered.

MNF-I officials said Monday that the report’s full release was an accident, but could not pinpoint how it occurred.

“The procedures that we used [to safeguard the classified information] were inadequate,” Air Force Col. C. Donald Alston, MNF-I’s chief of strategic communications, said Monday. “We consider this a very serious matter.”

MNF-I officials took the report down from their own site over the weekend.

Uh, a little late for that now, doncha think?

Stars and Stripes quotes ZDNet blogger David Berlind: “It will be interesting to see how this security debacle unfolds, where the finger gets pointed, and how it changes the way PDF files get handled in the future [by organizations of all types].”

I suggest starting with Lt. Col. Richard Thelin.

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