8 ms·
The Kidnapping of the Lunik (1967)
- adolph 6y agoSee also Scott Manley’s video: https://youtu.be/zoE4m8RqOWs https://youtu.be/zoE4m8RqOWs
- dexen 6y agoThank you! I was trying to remember where I saw it first, and this excellent video is it.
- codetrotter 6y agoOff topic but it’d be funny if the censored text was literally just put in span elements with “background: black” styling. Anyways, cool story and I like the phrasing of “borrowing the Lunik over night”. Also, I think this document was probably digitized using OCR and then cleaned up by hand afterwards, considering the mistake of the word “film” having instead become “fihn”. That’s the type of error OCR would typically make, not a human: > They filled one roll of fihn with close-ups of markings [...]
- wartron 6y agoThis has happened with PDFs where they just scaled a black square image over the redacted text.
- pjkundert 6y agoThis literally just happened in Canada a few days ago: a hugely significant data leak of TOP SECRET documents shipped with gray boxes under the most interesting parts of the document: https://www.rebelnews.com/the_china_files https://www.rebelnews.com/the_china_files
- bavent 6y agoI'm sure it did, but Rebel News? That site is a cancer, not a news source.
- dmix 6y agoEh, It's the original source. I tried Googling around and couldn't find a better source. Probably why I haven't heard about it. Rebel News reporting is a no-go zone for the Canadian media. The Globe and Mail reporting on it was far more mild and less revealing, considering China has two Canadians locked up for years while they invited PLA to train with our troops. Nor did include the original source material: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-global-affairs-objected-to-canadian-military-decision-to-cancel/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-global-affa... Makes you wonder if we'd ever have found out about this otherwise.
- frenchy 6y agoThe original source is actually kind of interesting. It's too bad this sort of thing isn't covered more regularly in the mainstream news. That said, it's rather mis-characterized by Rebel News, I was only able to read the title of the Globe and Mail piece, but it seemed like a more accurate representation of the source document.
- bbarnett 6y agoOne thing which hit me when reading it, was the cache of email addresses, all to receive this 'Canadian Eyes Only' and 'Secret'. For anyone, it creates a chain of people who are ... required? Important enough? Need to know? Said info... There's like a few security implications here, such as, whom to apply pressure to. Some GoC department employees, on even LinkedIn for example, are restricted from indicating who precisely they work for. For this very reason. Even non-compliance-with-pressure tactics are a concern, for it helps to know whom precisely to attempt hacks against. Some might say "Meh, they probably already know this and that", but things like this are precisely how they already know this and that.
- pjkundert 6y ago
- rjbwork 6y agoThe actual link for anyone not wanting to visit such a site. https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=http://d3n8a8pro7vhmx.cloudfront.net/therebel/pages/49718/attachments/original/1607533395/FINAL_WATERMARKED_REDACTED_Final_document_compressed.pdf?1607533395 https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?url=http://d3n8a8pr...
- Syzygies 6y ago<p><i><span class="redacted">XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXX XX</span> a Soviet upper-stage space vehicle.</i></p>
- codetrotter 6y agoNo I meant like if the actual text was still there in the HTML.
- 55555 6y agoI wonder if they've actually only replaced letters with X's. It seems like a poor decision to leave spaces in place, as people can attempt to guess the words based on their length. It's probably randomized, but why bother doing that instead of just "XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"? Odd.
- graderjs 6y agoI wonder if GPT3 could be used to infer reacted text prompted by the surrounding article..? But for something like this which is sort of a semi-serious report I kind of have the feeling maybe they're just doing some of these as spurious redactions for the laughs.
- Phemist 6y ago> I wonder if GPT3 could be used to infer reacted text prompted by the surrounding article..? Generally, I would assume that the part of the text with the most entropy (redacted nouns and their adjectives) would be especially hard for a system like GPT3 to generate. There might be some clues in the surrounding texts, but perhaps someone would need to train it specifically on similar (un-redacted) documents? Also, the other way around, marking parts as viable-for-redaction and then having GPT3 generate text to fill in those gaps would be a really insidious way of redacting content. I'm guessing a GAN-type network could even generate the visuals that are appropriate to the document that has been redacted..
- tnel77 6y agoCopy and pasting the first blacked out section results in: XXXX XXXXX XXXXX XXX XX a Soviet upper-stage space vehicle.
- cpursley 6y agoOhh, I'd love to have an account of this in Russian for my Russian speaking friends. Any recommendations?
- adrian_b 6y agoIf you would know well Russian (at least to read it, which for any language is much easier than writing/speaking), passing the text through Google translate and then correcting the mistakes that would probably exist in each sentence would not take long, maybe 15 minutes or so. Otherwise, a good translation by hand would take much longer.
- cpursley 6y agoI speak enough (a2 level) to Google but not enough to understand and recommend a story with technical details.
- bombastry 6y agoFor anyone who enjoyed this article: there is another excellent CIA report about Czechoslovkian counterintelligence intercepting Hungarian mail in the 1930s[1]. That article was posted on HN about a year ago[2]. [1]https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol2no4/html/v02i4a11p_0001.htm https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig... [2]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384393 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21384393
- howlgarnish 6y ago(1967)
- dredmorbius 6y agoBased on?
- howlgarnish 6y agohttp://www.faqs.org/cia/docs/68/0000609203/THE-KIDNAPPING-OF-THE-LUNIK.html http://www.faqs.org/cia/docs/68/0000609203/THE-KIDNAPPING-OF...
- dredmorbius 6y agoScott Manley's account has the events taking place in 1959 IIRC. Not sure when they'd have been written up, but 8 years is a longish stretch. Clearer CIA- hosted PDF confirms 1967 here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25384808 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25384808 Thanks.
- jmnicolas 6y agoOff topic, but I found funny that uBlock origins showed me "only" 9 trackers blocked on the CIA's website but several hundred more on any regular news site.
- walrus01 6y agowell, the CIA doesn't think it needs to earn revenue from its website.
- anonu 6y agoTrackers aren't only about ad revenue
- curiousgal 6y agoYou only get 9 trackers because the other websites have several hundreds. They all end up feeding the same source lol
- oa335 6y ago“When it was clear that there were no Soviets around, the truck was stopped at the last possible turn-off, a canvas was thrown over the crate, and a new driver took over. The original driver was escorted to a hotel room and kept there for the night” They elide over the more potentially incriminating parts... how did they convince the driver to work with them?
- _kbh_ 6y agoThe PDF this is (seemingly) generated from is public and mostly unredacted. What they decided to redact is strange to be honest, you can find it here. https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/THE%20KIDNAPING%20OF%20THE%20LUNI%5B15732838%5D.pdf https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/THE%20KIDNAPING...
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