Back in the '90s some government agency released a redacted report where someone had gone in and drawn black boxes in the PDF file, but the full text was of course still in the underlying data and people were able to get at it relatively easily.

EDIT: apparently this has happened repeatedly, according to a quick google search.

No doubt some sort of knee jerk process was put in place to ensure that any digital release of redacted documents must be scans of a physically redacted source.

Sort of like an analog memory hole.

It's understandable as a reasonable process for redaction. If you flatten it to a pure black and white image you get something you can print (the government loves that), but not something you can easily search (good for whoever's doing the publishing), and the security step is the flattening of the mask over the data with complete overlap and uniformity.

Edit: Of course actually printing it at any point in that process IS insane/beyond paranoid.

The US government is now permanently stuck in 1984. /s !/s

This reminds me of redaction.