Avoid Super-Embarrassing Redaction Failures

A Public Service Announcement, especially for the lawyers among our readers.

[I first posted a version of this post in 2020, but I've seen the problem enough since to think it was worth mentioning again.]

I have often run across documents written by lawyers that looked redacted—but all the supposedly secret information in them could be extracted with literally three keystrokes (ctrl-A, ctrl-C, ctrl-V). One was a court filing that was filed pursuant to a court order authorizing the redaction; but the material so carefully marked secret proved not to be secret at all.

Another carefully tried to hide the real name of a litigant whom the lawyer was trying to keep pseudonymous; but the name was one copy-and-paste away from being visible. What's more, when the documents were posted online in searchable spaces, search engines indexed the supposedly hidden material, so searching for the real name would find the document in which the lawyer had been trying to redact the name.

For at least one of the documents, I know what improper redaction mechanism was used: The lawyer used Google Docs to highlight passages using black highlighter, and then saved the document as a PDF. That looked blacked out on the screen; but the underlying text still remained in the PDF document—as far as the software was concerned, the text wasn't removed but was just set in a different color. (Something similar would happen with Microsoft Word.)

By clicking ctrl-A in PDF, I selected the whole document. (You can also just select the passage that contains the redactions.) By clicking ctrl-C, I copied the selected text to the clipboard. And then by clicking ctrl-V in another app, I pasted it with all the formatting, including the highlighting, removed. (In some situations, it takes a ctrl-shift-V.) The text was then completely visible. Commenter anorlunda on an earlier post explained the problem well:

Users are trained WYSIWYG. What you see is what you get. That's brilliant marketing, but when you make black text on a black background, what you see is nothing, but what you get is something else. So redaction contradicts our training.

To the best of my knowledge, Adobe Acrobat Pro redaction actually deletes the underlying text, if you mark the text for redaction and then apply the redactions. I'm sure there is other software available to do this, including free software. Just make sure that whatever you do, the redaction is actually complete.

Of course, the most reliable redaction mechanism (because it tends to be less likely to involve user error in the use of even excellent redaction software) is still printing, blacking out the material completely, and then scanning it back into a new file. [UPDATE: Two commenters caution that even this might not work, because the highlighter may be a different shade of black than the text; I'm unaware of any instances where the text was recovered from a photocopy of a page where the text was fully blocked out by a black-looking highlighter, but I can't vouch for that never happening.] But this option won't work for court filings in the many courts that require full-text-searchable PDFs generated directly from the computer, rather than from a scanner.