From Doublespeak to Censoring: Editing tips from the NSA

This is SO funny...

Hiding confidential information with black marks works on printed copy, but not with electronic documents, the National Security Agency has warned government officials.

The 13-page paper is called: Redacting with confidence: How to safely publish sanitized reports converted from Word to PDF. pdf

Meanwhile, the NSA paper itself contains a bit of metadata. According to its cover the paper was created on Dec. 13, 2005. The properties of the Adobe PDF file, however, state the document was created on Jan. 10, 2006.

Editing tips from the NSA

So what's "redacting"? ..."to prepare for publication or presentation by correcting, revising, or adapting."

Yeah, when redacting a sensitive document, do not repeat the same mistake as those guys.

download.repubblica.it...

Open this PDF file and you select the blacked out text with Select Tool or press CTRL+A to grab all, then copy (CTRL+C) and paste (CTRL+V) into any text editor such as Notepad or Microsoft Word and you can magically read the censored text. Pwned!

Just a simple example how not to redact a publication, because the document is marked unclassified anyway, no big deal. Seems the person who black marked that text just wanted to play James Bond or something. Nothing much secret about that file.