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.
I think that was still a year or so before news stories started coming out about government "redacted" documents that were not actually redacted.
A lot of the NSA-related documents released after redaction were certainly run through the "redact,print,scan" routine, and I know the Navy does the same as a best practice now.
Maybe that hasn't made it out to the defense industrial base by now, but I'd be surprised if 9 years worth of being beat about the head regarding redaction mistakes wouldn't have fixed things even there.
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.
Well you'd think but I worked for an org back in 2005 that decided to completely optimise that step away.
They were an aerospace/defense company building IFF units no less...
I think that was still a year or so before news stories started coming out about government "redacted" documents that were not actually redacted.
A lot of the NSA-related documents released after redaction were certainly run through the "redact,print,scan" routine, and I know the Navy does the same as a best practice now.
Maybe that hasn't made it out to the defense industrial base by now, but I'd be surprised if 9 years worth of being beat about the head regarding redaction mistakes wouldn't have fixed things even there.
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