Alexander’s Blog

According to the U.S. State Department, United States will begin issuing electronic passports starting December 2005 to enhance border security and prevent forgery. The electronic passports will essentially have the same information that we currently have inside our passports, embedded in a computer chip in the passport back cover. The read-only digitally signed chip is called a radio-frequency ID or RFID chip. The information on the chip will include name, gender, date of birth, place of birth, dates of passport issuance and expiration, passport number and a photograph.

The State Department and the technical specification for the chip say that the data can be read only within four inches, but critics contend the signal can be detected from as far away as 60 feet. The new passport will cost $97, or $12 more than the traditional version.

According to the State Department, the new U.S. e-passport design will reflect the varied landscapes of our country and each page will include a quote reflecting the hope and success that is the United States of America. Here’s a sample image of what the new e-passport will look like.

Here are some additional articles on this topic.

1. The U.S. Electronic Passport

2. Electronic passports set to thwart forgers

3. Electronic Passports May Make Traveling Americans Targets, Critics Say

4. E-Passports Will Include New Safeguards

Search engine giant Google is in the news once again. Unfortunately, it’s not the kind of news that it would like to add to its search engine. As you may recall, Google has been criticized a lot lately by the webmasters who blame Google blacklists their Web sites unfairly and deprives them from legitimate business when it comes to Google ads, by security researchers who blame Google for contributing to spyware practices that undermine trust on the Web (see Do Google Ads Help Fund Spyware?), by bloggers on how Goolge seem to fix page ranks (see Is Google’s Page Rank a Fixed Game?), and now MSNBC is reporting that Google Inc. is refusing to speak with reporters at CNET’s online news site after it ran a story that used Google’s chief executive to illustrate how easily the company’s search engine finds personal information.

Google told News.com, the online tech news service of CNET Networks Inc., last week that it would not speak to any of its reporters for a year, according to News.com’s editor. Google was angered by a story last month that focused on potential threats the search engine leader’s product poses to personal privacy, said Jai Singh, the News.com editor-in-chief.

To demonstrate the point, writer Elinor Mills googled CEO Eric E. Schmidt. In her story, Mills included a link to Schmidt’s home address, his net worth of $1.5 billion and noted that he has attended the Burning Man art festival and is an amateur pilot. Mills said she spent 30 minutes on Google to obtain the information. Mills wrote in her story that “hackers, zealous government investigators, or even a Google insider who falls short of the company’s ethics standards could abuse that information.”

A Google spokesman declined to speak with The Associated Press about the story. You can read the entire MSNBC story here.

Redaction is the editing of a document to remove confidential information. Using this free add-on for Word, you can mark sections of your documents for redaction. You can then create another redacted version of the document that will hide the marked text. Confidential legal documents, insurance contracts and other confidential government documents are often redacted before they are made public.

Earlier this year, the U.S. military used the black highlighter feature in Microsoft Word to cover the sensitive material and then converted the document to PDF format. The general public was able to easily uncover the black highlighted text to reveal sensitive text. With this new redaction tool, all of us, including our military will be able to better protect sensitive documents.

What Can and Cannot Be Redacted?
The Redaction tool supports the redaction of text in:

- The body of your document
- Tables
- Headers
- Footers
- Endnotes
- Footnotes
- Fields
- Table of Contents
- Table of Authorities
- Index
- Table of Figures

The Redaction tool does not support redaction of:

- Graphics
- Comments
- Content in textboxes or frames

Creating a Redacted Document
To use this tool, select a word, sentence, or a paragraph that needs to be redacted. On the Redaction toolbar, click Mark. You’ll notice that the selection is shaded Gray-25%. Click Redact Document on the Readcation toolbar and you’ll see the following message.

Click Yes and the redacted selection will be shown as blacked out text in a new redacted document. Now you can save this new document for others. Your original document will still be available to you with the selected text grayed out so you know which text needs to be protected.

Troubleshooting Tips
While using the tool you want to make sure that if you have a large amount of data pasted in the Office Clipboard, clear it before using this tool or else it may have an affect on the performance of this tool. As a best practice, you want to make sure that the Gray-25% text shading is not used in a redacted document, or else you may end up redacting text accidentally. If you don’t see the Redaction toolbar, simply click Toolbars on the View menu, and then click Redaction. To install this tool, make sure that Word is not open, especially as an e-mail editor. You may see the following error.

If you use Microsoft Word as your e-mail editor, Word will stay in memory even after you close the actual program. Try closing Word, make sure that Outlook is also closed (if you are using Word as your e-mail editor) and if all else fails, go to the Task Manager and kill the WINWORD.EXE process.

Downloading Redaction Tool
This add-on for Word 2003 works on Windows 2000 SP3, Windows XP SP1, and Windows Server 2003. By the way, Microsoft doesn’t support this tool because it’s not part of Microsoft Office, so use it at your own risk. The tool is built on Microsoft .NET Framework so you might want to make sure that your computer has the latest security updates for the .NET Framework. Click here to download the tool.