Internet Forensics

U.K. Government Dossier on Iraq

Even when care is taken to remove the comments and modified text, other data may remain hidden in the dark corners of a Word document, which can still reveal more than its authors would prefer.

This was the case with a dossier prepared by the office of U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair in February 2003, detailing the impact of Iraq’s intelligence and security services on the United Nations weapons inspections that were taking place at the time. The document was used to support the argument that inspections were not working and that military action against Iraq was justified. Such an important document was bound to attract close scrutiny.

Glen Rangwala, a faculty member at Cambridge University, thought the text looked familiar. After some cross-checking in the library, he discovered that large sections of the text had been lifted from an article published in September 2002, by Ibrahim al-Marashi, a graduate student in the United States. Text had clearly been cut and pasted from the original work, as evidenced by the grammatical errors of the author being carried through to the dossier. Some sentences had been modified, but in all of these the new version was more strongly worded. Additional text had been taken from two other authors. None of the copied text was attributed to the original author. Rangwala’s original analysis (http://www.casi.org.uk/discuss/2003/msg00457.html) makes for very interesting reading.

The report of such blatant plagiarism caught ...