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TSA's Sloppy Redacting Reveals All
A travel blog breaks the story of a poor job of redacting by the TSA: they posted a PDF of airport screening policies, with certain sections blacked out — not realizing that simply laying a black rectangle over the text is hardly sufficient. Cryptome has posted a copy with the redaction removed (ZIP).
Frankly, I wish attention-whores wouldn't undo the blackout for them and post online, they're doing security work for the TSA, in helping them to better hide/censor pieces of documents from the public that are generally not worth censoring.
Whatever was struck out was done so for a reason, and this recovery of censored text is very poor form (read: unethical, possibly illegal) behavior.
The blacking out may be generally not bulletproof, however, it's sufficient for the casual viewer.
Yeah. If they didn't post the un-blacked out version, some people still see it. Expert computer users who are unlikely to be abusing whatever info might be there.
But apparently not the case, as at least one person who can see through their artificial text blackout -- was so abusive as to post it to the public; a highly abusive act.
When TSA sees this, it means they won't make the same mistake again, which ultimtely results in less useful information released to the public.
You think blacking it out with a marker and then photocopying it hides the original text from detailed forensic document analysis techniques?
Maybe... it depends on how dark the marker is, and how similar the shade of the pen ink is to the marker ink.
Branches such as the TSA aren't privvy to truly classified info.
Surely the military, FBI, or NSA, would never manage a mistake like this.