A Hard Lesson to Learn
Joseph Lorenzo Hall writes
A HARD LESSON TO LEARN: don't use Microsoft Word's "Highlight tool" with the color set to black to redact documents--one can still copy and paste "highlighted" text!
The really interesting part about this DoJ case is reading the un-redacted document and seeing what was "blacked out" under FOIA exemptions (un-redacted document is here: http://www.thememoryhole.org/feds/doj-attorney-diversity-unredacted.pdf ).
I wonder how many other electronic FOIA-released documents are out there where a simple copy and paste will reveal redactions?
Pertinent paragraph:
"It turns out the [DoJ's] report began its life as a Microsoft Word document, and whoever was in charge of sanitizing it for public release did so by using Word's highlight tool, with the highlight color set to black, according to an analysis by Tim Sullivan, CEO of activePDF, a maker of server-side PDF tools. The simple and convenient technique would have been perfectly effective had the end product been a printed document, but it was all but useless for an electronic one."
posted Thu 30 Oct 2003 in /issues/security | link
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