Another Way to Uncover Classified Information

Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University, has shown that you can uncover “blacked-out” words in classified documents by doing a grammatical analysis of all possible words that can fit in the space of the black-outs.

Kind of neat work, although I’m surprised that nobody has shown this before–it’s been lore in the trade for years. Perhaps this is another example of how computer theoreticians and security types, turning their attention to matters outside their sphere, are finding the rest of the world quite lacking.