people have figured out that the redacted documents released were not done with any redaction tool but merely highlighted boxes. many people are now combing through everything to see what can actually be viewed after all.
people have figured out that the redacted documents released were not done with any redaction tool but merely highlighted boxes. many people are now combing through everything to see what can actually be viewed after all.
Not surprising. This has been a thing for quite some time, going back into the 2000s and 2010s.
You have a PDF file and you want to redact it. So you draw a black box over what you want to redact. Problem is, PDF works in layers. So you haven’t actually blacked out the text, you have just drawn a black box over the text, which is still in the file. This makes it trivially easy for anyone with a PDF editor to simply delete the black box, or with a PDF viewer to just save the file as text and the black box will not be saved with it.
PDF software generally includes an actual redaction tool, which not only draws a black box but removes anything under it. However you have to know this tool exists and how to use it.
This interests me from illegal standpoint though. There are regulations governing what sort of things can and cannot be redacted. If things are being redacted for for political reasons, IE to avoid making Trump look bad, that is now quite easy to prove.