> But when the Kentucky AG’s office was preparing to post their brief against TikTok, whoever was in charge of doing the redaction simply covered the relevant text with black rectangles. Even though you can’t see the text while reading the PDF, you can just use your cursor to select each black section, copy it, and then paste it into another file to read the hidden text. It is great fun to do this — try it yourself! Or just read our version of the brief in which we have done this for you.
I feel like there needs to be more education about redaction and obfuscation tools, namely this black box tool and blurring. It is usually possible to reverse blurring. Not redacting information properly is just embarrassing.
Just saying "draw a black box" is not sufficient, you need to know the implementation details. If the software saves in a layer-based format, that's no good. If there is alpha channel then it's no good. If there is pre-existing compression artifacts that can leak information. You basically need to know that it does the dumbest thing possible when editing the image. I guess mspaint is probably the best option.
I feel like there needs to be more education about redaction and obfuscation tools, namely this black box tool and blurring. It is usually possible to reverse blurring. Not redacting information properly is just embarrassing.