Effective redaction of electronic documents requires the removal of all relevant text and image data from the document file. Where text is redacted, in Portable Document (PDF) or word processor formats, by overlaying graphical elements (usually black rectangles) over text, the original text remains in the file and can be uncovered by simply deleting the overlaying graphics. In some file formats, unused portions of memory are saved that may still contain fragments of previous versions of the text. Word processing formats may save a revision history of the edited text that still contains the redacted text. Secure redacting is more complicated with computer files. The UK National Archives published a document, Redaction Toolkit, Guidelines for the Editing of Exempt Information from Documents Prior to Release, "to provide guidance on the editing of exempt material from information held by public bodies." Where computer-generated proportional fonts were used, even more information can leak out of the redacted section in the form of the exact position of nearby visible characters. The exact length of the removed text also remains recognizable, which may help in guessing plausible wordings for shorter redacted sections. For example, if the black pen or tape is not wide enough, careful examination of the resulting photocopy may still reveal partial information about the text, such as the difference between short and tall letters. This is a simple process with only minor security risks. Alternatively opaque "cover up tape" or "redaction tape", opaque, removable adhesive tape in various widths, may be applied before photocopying. Redacting confidential material from a paper document before its public release involves overwriting portions of text with a wide black pen, followed by photocopying the result-the obscured text may be recoverable from the original. For example, when a document is subpoenaed in a court case, information not specifically relevant to the case at hand is often redacted.Ī heavily redacted page from a 2004 lawsuit filed by the ACLU - American Civil Liberties Union v. Typically the result is a document that is suitable for publication or for dissemination to others rather than the intended audience of the original document. It is intended to allow the selective disclosure of information in a document while keeping other parts of the document secret. Redaction in its sanitization sense (as distinguished from its other editing sense) is the blacking out or deletion of text in a document or the result of doing so. Originally, the term sanitization was applied to printed documents it has since been extended to apply to computer files and the problem of data remanence. When the intent is privacy protection, it is often called data anonymization. When the intent is secrecy protection, such as in dealing with classified information, sanitization attempts to reduce the document's classification level, possibly yielding an unclassified document. Sanitization is the process of removing sensitive information from a document or other message (or sometimes encrypting it), so that the document may be distributed to a broader audience. Removing sensitive information from a document to allow distribution
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