![]() ![]() The length of the redaction, then, would at least indicate when the redaction did not involve one person or the other. Consider, for instance, a document involving multiple parties where the names of conversation participants have been redacted. While most people are familiar with the distinctive black bars that indicate redacted content, even this leaves behind significant context clues that could provide hints of what was removed. More importantly, the outputted document is entirely new, so there is no deleted information to recover. ![]() This not only allows organizations to redact documents quickly, but it also ensures that the redacted information won’t be exposed later because it no longer even exists within the document. PrizmDoc Viewer’s redaction API can find and extract key text while also providing single or multiple reasons for the removal. In order to redact documents securely, applications need to have access to specialized redaction tools that are capable of actually removing content from the document itself before applying redaction indicators. Using Proper Redaction Prior to Flattening with PrizmDoc Viewer But even in this case, there’s a chance that a powerful OCR engine might be able to pick up the hidden elements. The only way to make these methods viable for true redactions would be to actually print the documents with the content hidden and then scan them back into digital form, where OCR could be used to reconstruct a new file. The text can be made visible again by using the copy/paste trick described above or by altering the background characteristics in another program. Changing the text color to white, for instance, might make it invisible to the human eye, but it does nothing to alter the content itself. Changing the Color of Text: Another common redaction error involves altering the color of the sensitive text to match the document background.As the Manafort and Facebook cases demonstrate, however, getting around these “redactions” is usually quite easy. They place annotations over the sensitive content, usually in the form of a black box, and then save a flattened version of the PDF thinking that no one will be able to separate the text from the annotation element. Covering Text with Boxes: This frequent mistake occurs when people try to treat a digital document like a physical piece of paper.There are typically two ways that improper redactions occur: In both cases, journalists were able to copy redacted text from PDF files and paste it into a text editor to reveal the obscured content. Two of the most infamous recent examples include information released during the investigation of political campaign chairman Paul Manafort in 2019 and court documents related to Facebook’s use of personal data in 2017. Recovering improperly redacted content is actually quite trivial in many cases. That’s because obscured elements are still present in the document they’re just not visible when the file is viewed and printed. Unfortunately, simply flattening a PDF is usually not sufficient to securely redact a document. It also removes elements like dropdown selections within form fields and can burn in other annotations or markups, making them a permanently visible element of the document. Organizations frequently used this process to “lock in” form content to prevent anyone from altering the information after a user completes the forms. The flattening process removes all interactive elements from form fields and combines all of the document’s elements into a single layer. One layer might feature text, another image, and yet another a fillable form. What Is a Flattened PDF?Ī modern PDF file consists of multiple layers, each of which can contain separate elements. Unfortunately, they still tend to make mistakes when it comes to flattened PDFs that could leave redacted context exposed and vulnerable. With the transition to digital documents, organizations finally have access to true redaction capabilities. The development of high-powered photo enhancement has rendered this approach all but useless, as even inexpensive image processing technology can distinguish blacked-out text. Since redactions were done by hand, it was easy for mistakes to be made, which could range from using insufficiently dark ink to leaving portions of text exposed. In the days before digital documents, redaction involved a simple, if crude, process of covering text with a black marker. By removing sensitive information from a digital file before sharing it publicly, it’s possible to protect private data or classified materials from being exposed. Redacting documents is critically important for legal departments and government agencies.
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