The document itself details screening procedures at metal detectors, explosive residue testers, and other elements of airport security. It outlines procedures for escorting certain travelers around security checkpoints, including air marshals, diplomats, and CIA officers. An annex to the document gives several examples of official credentials for agencies including the CIA, Congress, and federal air marshals and notes on determining their authenticity.

Another redacted section of the document reveals that travelers are selected for screening if their passports are issued by any one of 12 specific countries.

The TSA document, dated June 30, 2008, is stamped “Sensitive Security Information,” a description of sensitive but not classified information. Releasing it to the public can result in “civil penalties or other action,” according to a warning stamped on each page of the document.

Agency officials promised swift action.

“The Transportation Security Administration has become aware that an outdated version of a standard operating procedures document was improperly posted by the agency to the Federal Business Opportunities website wherein redacted material was not properly protected,” the agency said in a statement.

“TSA takes this matter very seriously and took swift action when this was discovered. A full review is now underway. TSA has many layers of security to keep the traveling public safe and to constantly adapt to evolving threats. TSA has appropriate measures in place to effectively screen passengers at airport security checkpoints nationwide.”

Several bloggers who focus on national security issues first discovered this particular slip-up, but it is an all-too-common problem for government officials trying to keep information secret in the digital age, experts say. “It is a pervasive problem that needs to be addressed,” says Steven Aftergood, an expert in government secrecy with the Federation of American Scientists. “People ought to learn to get it right.”

To redact the TSA document for public release, officials apparently used a computer program to blacken particularly sensitive parts of the handbook, including which types of travelers are exempt from various kinds of random and required screening, the procedure for CIA officers escorting foreign dignitaries and others through checkpoints, the minimum gauge of wire used to calibrate X-ray machines, and the types of chemicals used for cleaning explosive residue scanners.

The document was then published online as a PDF, a common file format used widely by the government. To redact it, officials obscured text using the program, which successfully obscures the text as viewed on a computer monitor. But the information wasn’t deleted. Highlighting the text of the PDF page and then using the copy and paste functions on a computer easily revealed the hidden information.

It’s not the first time that digital redactions have gone awry. In June, the State Department’s security service accused a former CIA station chief in Algeria of rape. An online copy of the search warrant issued in the case was published as a PDF document, with a similar use of black to redact information. Selecting the text of the document, however, and copying and pasting the results revealed the detailed address information of where the CIA officer lived in Algeria.

Sometimes the redacted information is seemingly harmless. Aftergood pointed to another case in 2004, where the Justice Department filed a redacted legal document that censored a benign quote from the Supreme Court.

But the insufficient redaction problem has become so pervasive across the government that in 2005 the National Security Agency published a report called “Redacting With Confidence” on how to properly redact a Microsoft Word or PDF document.

“The key concept for understanding the issues that lead to the inadvertent exposure is that information hidden or covered in a computer document can almost always be recovered,” the report warned. “The way to avoid exposure is to ensure that sensitive information is not just visually hidden or made illegible, but is actually removed from the original document.”

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2009/12/07/tsa-to-conduct-full-review-after-leak-of-sensitive-information.html

Just nine weeks into the campaign, a group of fewer than 100 commandos came tantalizingly close to killing or capturing Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenant, Ayman al - Zawahiri , in the mountains of Tora Bora before bin Laden fled over the boarder into the tribal regions of Pakistan. The al Qaeda leader feared that his death was so imminent that he drafted a will, instructing his wives not to remarry and apologizing to his children for pursuing a life of jihad.

The failure to stop the al Qaeda leader amid those inhospitable peaks in eastern Afghanistan “allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide,” concludes a Senate Foreign Relations Committee report issued earlier this week. The report was made public just days before President Obama announced plans to send an additional 30,000 troops to “finish the job” in Afghanistan.

Long a controversial episode in the opening months of the war on terrorism, the events at Tora Bora have frequently surfaced as a cudgel for critics to challenge tactical decisions made by former President George W. Bush, retired Gen. Tommy Franks, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The report, a scathing indictment of the three men, was requested by the Foreign Relations Committee’s chairman, Sen. John Kerry, who frequently raised the issue of the Tora Bora battle during his own run for the White House against Bush in 2004.

“The failure to finish the job represents a lost opportunity that forever altered the course of the conflict in Afghanistan and the future of international terrorism, leaving the American people more vulnerable to terrorism, laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency, and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan,” the report concludes.

Additional U.S. forces-requested by commanders on the scene but rejected by the Pentagon-could have blocked routes that bin Laden and his entourage are believed to have used to escape the battlefield. “The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines,” the report says.

While largely ignoring the Tora Bora report, some Republicans pointed to other failed attempts to kill bin Laden, dating back to the Clinton administration. The Wall Street Journal opined that it was “remarkable” that Kerry’s report faulted decisions to send more troops to Tora Bora while the Massachusetts senator was himself pushing for limits on U.S. troop commitments under the Obama administration.

Though most of the information contained in the report has already surfaced in the public domain, it does aim to settle disputed aspects of the events. Franks and Vice President Dick Cheney have raised doubts as to whether bin Laden was present at Tora Bora. Franks refused to talk with the committee staff preparing the report, but an aide to the retired general wrote investigators in an E-mail: “We really don’t have time for this. Focused on the future, not the past.”

The report, based on publicly available information and interviews with military commanders, intelligence officials, and others present at the battle, claims that the available evidence “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora.” The Senate report relies also on a Special Operations Command history of the Tora Bora fight that “determined with reasonable certainty” that bin Laden was at the mountaintop enclave.

The Special Operations Command history was released in 2007, but while it is a public document, it has received little attention in the media. The summary of events from the military study, combined with the Senate report, provides fascinating detail about the specifics of the battle.

Special Forces troops in the area are described as orchestrating airstrikes against enemy positions while struggling to manage recalcitrant allied warlords on whose firepower and troops the U.S. effort would come to depend. U.S. commandos also turned to local Afghan villagers, who were given small GPS devices and asked to use them to record the exact location of al Qaeda fighters and arms caches. The locals then returned the devices with the stored data to U.S. forces in exchange for rewards. The GPS coordinates were given to warplanes to plot attacks.

On Dec. 9, 2001, the military dropped a 15,000-pound bomb-a device so huge it had to be pushed out of the back of a cargo plane-on the cave complex at Tora Bora. Such bombs were last used in Vietnam to clear helicopter landing zones in the jungle. The explosive vaporized men hidden deep in Tora Bora’s rocky caves. The airstrikes apparently had a devastating impact on the morale of the surviving al Qaeda fighters holed up in the caves but were ultimately unsuccessful at killing the world’s most wanted man.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2009/12/04/senate-report-revisits-osama-bin-ladens-great-escape_print.htm