CDR: Word.

[George at Orwellian.Org]

Of course all of us knew this. The article is
good for explaining to non-technical friends.

http://interactive.wsj.com/articles/SB972002214791170991.htm

October 20, 2000

Electronic Form of 'Invisible Ink'
Inside Files May Reveal Secrets

By MICHAEL J. MCCARTHY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- For weeks this summer, Mike Ciresi's campaign staff 
was baffled by a strange series of e-mail messages slamming the U.S. 
Senate candidate.

Sent to Minnesota Democratic Party officials, the messages were signed 
by a Katie Stevens. But after a failed attempt to track her down, Mr. 
Ciresi's staff began to suspect foul play.

The first e-mail, which arrived in May, impugned the candidate's ethics 
and those of his Minneapolis law firm. It was accompanied by six pages 
of court cases, citations and footnotes. The attachments convinced 
Mr. Ciresi's staff that the e-mail was part of a well-funded "opposition 
research" effort. But two months and three negative e-mails later, 
his staff still had nothing to go on. Then in July, one tenacious Ciresi 
aide, playing a hunch, made a few mouse clicks and uncovered an 
intriguing clue: hidden text that seemed to link the e-mail to the 
campaign of the Republican incumbent.

Tracking the Metadata

It turns out there's more than meets the eye in the average 
word-processing document. A typical Microsoft Word file, for example, 
can include the author's name, the name of his or her company, the 
names of each person who has worked on the document and, depending 
on the options selected, deleted text and other revisions, all hidden 
from view, as if written in invisible ink. That's because Word, the 
dominant word-processing software, contains a lot of what Microsoft 
Corp. calls "metadata," information that doesn't appear on a user's 
screen simply because commands in the file tell computer monitors and 
printers to ignore it.

But a savvy reader can peek at much of this behind-the-scenes fiddling 
by using widely available text-reader programs, such as Notepad, or 
by simply selecting the right word-processing options. Sometimes, 
depending on a computer's settings, Word revisions that weren't at 
all visible to the writer are obvious to the recipient. And when those 
documents get zapped through cyberspace as e-mail attachments, the 
inside information they contain can set the sender up for embarrassment 
or worse.

'Highlight Changes'

One such e-mail snafu in Seattle sent both parties scrambling for fixes. 
In late 1998, Payne Consulting Group received an e-mail that included 
an attached contract prepared for it by its law firm, Davis Wright 
Tremaine. By clicking on the "highlight changes" option, Payne and 
the law firm say, Payne could clearly see revisions that revealed the 
contract had originally been drafted for another Davis Wright client.

The law firm quickly devised security procedures for removing hidden 
text from its files. Payne, meanwhile, developed a free program called 
Metadata Assistant to purge any unseen, unwanted information from 
documents. The program can be downloaded from the firm's Web site, 
www.payneconsulting (www.payneconsulting.com). One reason Payne doesn't 
charge for it: "We can't guarantee everything is stripped out," says 
Robert Affleck, vice president of development.

"The big concern is that people are sending around things they don't 
know they're sending around," says Steve McDonald, associate legal 
counsel at Ohio State University, who teaches a class in cyberspace 
law.

Microsoft has "gotten few customer complaints" about the problem, says 
Lisa Gurry, a product manager for Microsoft Office. But she adds that 
those will be addressed in late spring in the next version of Microsoft 
Office, which will include a "privacy option" to allow a Word document's 
author to "remove all personal information with the click of one button 
and be warned if you're saving tracked changes and comments." For now, 
Microsoft offers a nine-page article through its Web site on "How to 
Minimize Metadata in Microsoft Word Documents."

It was this kind of data that gave Ciresi campaign aides the first 
break in their investigation of the e-mails plaguing their candidate. 
The first in the series, titled "Who Is Michael Ciresi?", arrived May 
19. It described the clients of law firm Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi 
as "a rogues' gallery of polluters, price fixers, tortfeasors, 
predators, civil-rights violators and frauds." A second searing e-mail 
arrived just before Minnesota Democrats convened in early June to 
endorse a candidate in the state's senatorial race. A third followed. 
Then, a fourth.

"I was getting so frustrated trying to figure out where these came 
from," recalls Mark Hinds, the campaign's deputy field director.

But as he sat thinking at his desk in the Democratic Party's offices 
here in early July, a light bulb clicked on. Mr. Hinds suddenly recalled 
how at a previous job he used to sort Word documents by using keywords 
and names in the program's "properties" box. With that in mind, he 
clicked on the Word attachment to the fourth and latest e-mail, OIL 
SPILL LOBBYISTS.doc. The properties box, which he found by using Word's 
file menu, instantly showed that the document was created July 8 and 
was "Last Saved by: Chris Gunhus." His thoughts immediately turned 
to Christine Gunhus, the political director and former chief of staff 
for Sen. Rod Grams, the Republican Mr. Ciresi had been hoping to unseat.

"Come here, you gotta see this," Mr. Hinds says he called out to fellow 
campaign workers, who gathered around his computer. They started 
searching through the previous e-mails. The first one said "Last Saved 
by: Kinko's Customer" and listed "gunhus" as the author. They found 
other names and more dates and times that the documents had been created 
and stored.

The Ciresi campaign alerted local authorities to its discoveries, which 
were first reported by the Minneapolis Star Tribune. The campaign 
alleged that the masquerade wasn't just a political dirty trick but 
a possible misdemeanor. A Minnesota law, which was designed to 
discourage anonymous attacks on politicians, requires those involved 
in election campaigns to disclose that fact in any political literature 
they prepare or distribute. The law exempts individuals who spend less 
than $300 on their activities and observe certain other limits.

By late August, the Anoka County attorney's office had amassed enough 
evidence to persuade a judge to let it seize two computers and nine 
computer disks from Ms. Gunhus's Ham Lake, Minn., home.

Asked if Ms. Gunhus was involved in writing or editing any of the 
e-mails under investigation, Doug Kelley, her attorney, wouldn't 
comment. "In the long run," he says, "she will be found not to have 
violated any laws." Ms. Gunhus declined to be interviewed.

Sen. Grams's campaign denies that it produced or authorized the e-mails. 
But after discovering the names tucked deep inside the e-mail messages, 
Bob Decheine, the Ciresi campaign manager, believes otherwise. "We 
think we have found a smoking gun," he says.

County investigators, however, proceeded carefully, after learning 
that anyone could easily have framed Ms. Gunhus by entering her name 
in the properties box. "I could put in that 'William Shakespeare' is 
the author," says Bryan Lindberg, the assistant attorney leading the 
inquiry.

But then, Mr. Lindberg says, his team uncovered a more substantive 
link. Subpoenaed phone and Internet-access records linked the "Katie 
Stevens" Hotmail account used to send the attack e-mails to a Kinko's 
document-processing center and a phone line listed as belonging to 
Ms. Gunhus's home, according to an affidavit filed by the county 
attorney's office as part of its search-warrant request. "The telephone 
number back to the Gunhus residence in Ham Lake gave us the probable 
cause to look at her computers," Mr. Lindberg says.

Mr. Ciresi lost his state's Democratic primary last month. The 
investigation into the e-mail messages continues.