Security Redacted Documents Are Not as Secure as You Think

[J65nko]

From https://www.wired.com/story/redact-pdf-online-privacy/ :

For years, if you wanted to protect sensitive text in a document, you could grab a pair of scissors or a scalpel and cut out the information. If this didn’t work, a chunky black marker pen would do the job. Now that most documents are digitized, securely redacting their contents has become harder. The majority of redactions—by government officials and courts—involve placing black boxes over text in PDFs.

When this redaction is done incorrectly, people’s safety and national security can be put at risk.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

The method described in the article relies on the character spacing to identify letters but presumably this would also work with a traditional hard copy because covering or cutting the text would leave the formatting intact.