Metadata Mistake Made By Spy Agency

Several times, I have quoted the case of Williams v Sprint to illustrate that the courts want archived email with the metadata intact.  (Not all email archiving products do this.) As an example to explain, I state that metadata includes message headers, routing information and more.

Metadata also includes hidden information in attachments, such as revisions and the raw data used to make graphics.  Therefore, a PowerPoint presentation in an email would contain a lot more information that would appear in the naked eye.

The e-Discovery Team blog has an interesting story about how the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (”DNI”), the highest intelligence agency in the United States, got tripped up by top secret information in metadata.  Here is an excerpt from the blog entry: 

On May 14, 2007, a Senior Procurement Executive of DNI gave an unclassified presentation to a group of outside contractors in Colorado entitled “Procuring the Future.” Her PowerPoint included a slide with two graphics depicting the trend of award dollars to contractors from 1995 to 2006.  Because these figures are highly classified, a scale of the total number of award dollars was omitted from the Y-axis of the bar chart. ...

Apparently the DNI employee had used this same PowerPoint slide before to make classified presentations to persons with top secret clearance. ...  The big mistake was made after the conference when someone in the agency posted the PowerPoint file on the Defense Intelligence Agency website in native format.  There anyone could (and did) download the PowerPoint file onto their own computers. (Spies are like litigation counsel, they have opposing spies that watch their every move and look for mistakes.) Once the file was downloaded and opened in PowerPoint, the embedded numbers underlying the expenditure graphic were quickly uncovered.  One of America’s top secrets was lost due to careless handling of metadata.

People who email documents should scrub their emails before they are sent.  There is nothing wrong with cleaning documents BEFORE they are sent -- as a matter of fact, it is very appropriate.  Remove the highly confidential data and even your drafts before an email is sent.  The recipient of the data should never see information that you do not want them to see.  I personally use a product called Metadata Assistant.  But, there are others out there, such as iScrub.