Comment by thegeomaster
12 years ago
It seems like there needs to be another approach to redacting text like this. This one doesn't really cut it, apparently. And slips such as 'her' and 'she' was what primarily gave her away here. So the people who published the file should have been way more careful with this.
Flash forward to modern times...
"It's okay, we're only collecting metadata."
Yes, which is to not redact text. As you have already found, it is an exceedingly complex problem to do it correctly. But more importantly, when it is done incorrectly, or redactions are made from political motivations (as we've seen excessive evidence of), they are practically impossible to challenge.
The difference of length between "he" and "she" would be enough to reveal that information.
They just draw a black box over the text in the PDFs now...
(No joke)
Yes, but now they remove the underlying text too. It was fun while it lasted.
Current best practice is actually to draw the black boxes, print it, then scan it back in. The result is crummy quality pdfs with no metadata or hidden text.
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