| 19 February 2006 Metadata I think I missed my contribution to National Public Radio during the pledge drive last week. I had a panic attack in my bed when the BBC show that normally wakens me on Sunday with the Football Association news was abruptly displaced by a chipper male voice announcing Universal Time in fifteen-second intervals from the Master Atomic Clock. “Universal Time from the Master Clock at the US Naval Observatory is....” there would be minute change in the voice and then “Twelve hours thirty-five minutes and thirty seconds.” Beep. I could only stand it for five or ten minutes. I padded out to the kitchen and made the coffee. I peered out into the darkness from the balcony. The houseplants quivered in the sudden rush of cold air when I opened the door. It is going to be Spring someday. I know it. It is just not going to be today. The New York Times wanted me to be concerned about the disaster on the Mohawk Reservation, and the gaping “Black Holes” in the border northern and southern borders. Ten Marines were dead, I wasn't sure where. They are deployed so many places besides Iraq these days. The bird flu is reported in Germany and France. An Itlain Government minister had to quit after wearing the cartoons of Mohammed on a t-shirt. Nothing was making sense, and I had problems of my own. I am working on a major document and there is an invasion in process, right here on my own computer. I'm not talking about the hackers or the spammers, though goodness knows they are problem enough. To deal with them, I bought a new mini-Mac computer. Macs are not as ubiquitous as the cursed Microsoft PCs, and not as often targeted for attack. So on the one hand, I am less vulnerable, I found myself having to go out and buy a software package for the Mac that makes it look like a Windows machine. Otherwise all my documents become hopelessly scrambled. It's lunacy, but that is the way it is. Microsoft-brand software is the most widely deployed in the world. Its presence makes it easy to send documents in a common format between work and home. And it has also caused a series of business, political and national security embarrassments of late because of the features that have been added to make it more efficient and business-like. MS Word contains a stack of software commands which creates metadata, a cloud of invisible tags that surround a document in a web of information at the moment of its conception. The metadata can do all sorts of good stuff, and the keystroke police love it. I know that the most powerful human urge is not to reproduce, but to edit other people's copy. Accordingly, I view the metadata with extreme distrust. Besides bile and vitriol, here is what an MS Word document contains, invisible to the author: Your name and initials; your company name; your individual computer's ID, your network and the disc to which the document was saved; file summary; object linking and embedded objects; names of previous authors; revisions and versions; template and hidden text; comments, macro program features, hyperlinks and routing information. That is a lot of information to pass along with an e-mail enclosure. Back in the bad old days, we used fax machines to send anonymous background papers to people in the government. The only thing to look out for was the tell-tale number the receiving machine would print across the top of the page. If someone could trace the number you could be ratted out. Wily veterans had safe machines with numbers that had no evident connection to anything or anyone. Now, if you are not careful, an electronic document can give away the farm. The entire farm. Think about it in a business context. When revisions to a document are not accepted, or are rejected before the document is sent outside the company, it could disclose proprietary information, or worse, pricing data. Metadata comments in the margins can be as embarrassing as a Jack Abramoff e-mail note about a client. Because it is invisible, users can easily forget that the metadata exists. Even fragments that have been firmly squashed with the “delete” key may still be there, if the document was operating with the “Fast Save” feature turned on, which updates the memory every few minutes. Everyone has lost a morning's work when a power spike hit the machine, right before saving it the regular way. “Damn, I wish I had saved that. I was so close….” Various Office releases have “Fast Save” turned on, or off. You can probably figure it out on the home machine, but at work, it is up to the system administrator. It is like the “history” tab on your web browser. Did you really clear it? Is there something in there you wouldn't want the kids or the wife to share with you? Imagine for a moment that it isn't business we are talking about, but national security. A regular security audit at one of the local Intelligence Agencies revealed highly classified information embedded in the metadata of products released at lower classifications. Someone thought that because the documents had been converted to Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) format, the audit trail had been eliminated. It wasn't. Reporters checking the metadata for President Bush's "National Strategy for Victory in Iraq" quickly found the identity of the real author, and the comments on his draft by his seniors. A coalition military report from Baghdad on the fatal shooting of Italian special agent Nicola Calipari contained sensitive information about checkpoint security procedure, all of it invisible to the people who released it. Back when I was young and dinosaurs ruled the plant, we were provided a high-speed secure communications system called “Streamliner.” We used it to send computer-generated messages of varying classification to our customers across the Pacific. We discovered the system had a minor hiccup one afternoon when we discovered that the Admiral's personal briefing, the one with all the bells and whistles, had been appended to the end of the low-level updates we provided to the allies. Oops. Apparently the power had flickered, which it did every time it rained. We panicked for a while, and then figured out a way to work around the problem. I'm sure we will figure out a way to work around the Microsoft problem, since it is only software. It certainly is weird, though, to walk around surrounded by a penumbra of metadata and don't even know it. If only we could see the cloud. Who would have thought the future was going to be this complicated? Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra |