One way that electronic documents are different from paper documents is when it comes to redaction. Redacting of sensitive material has been going on for just about as long as there was sensitive material, and with paper it was easy: just black the offending text out with magic marker and you’re done.
But as the Transportation Safety Administration found out this week, redaction is not quite that simple in the e-world. When a publicly-posted TSA security procedures manual was found not to be quite as securely redacted as had been suspected, it caused a significant commotion.
This is far from the only time electronic redaction has failed, either. There have been a number of noteworthy cases, often involving legal issues.
The lesson to take from this? Electronic tools keep text searchable and copyable even if a big black square has been laid over it—and word processing documents keep a change history in embedded metadata.
"The major, major thing is do not use your word processing programs for redaction," said John Pescatore, an analyst with Gartner Inc. "Certainly don’t just use the black-out features," he said.
