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Comment by deno | Hacker News Reader

One of the major shortcomings of this simple redaction method, and not mentioned in the article, is actually from a security point of view.

This is less of an issue with Mueller report but was quite noticeable with Snowden leaks. If your redactions are of short words or group of words, you can sometimes make pretty good guesses as to what was redacted. There are all kind of methods you can employ, statistical etc., to aid with this.

A proper redaction tool could avoid this by varying the length of the redactions. PDFs even have layout hints now, so it’s not that complicated technically.

The copy-and-scan security method can be replicated by a flattening pass, that does the same, without losing any of the accessibility benefits.

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The problem with that approach is that varying the length of the redacted text would effectively alter the document and forever muddy the waters as to what the original text could be. This would likely result in endless speculation that what might be released at a later date is not, in fact, the original text. It also makes it much more difficult to assess whether or not fighting to get one or more parts of redacted text released is worthwhile. (i.e. what appears to be a name or phrase in one area might not be deemed important vs a page and a half in another or vice versa)

So let's say Congress takes this to court and gets an order requiring the A.G. to disclose the contents of one or more sections/types of redactions. There would likely be little confidence that any future unredacted text they receive was the original text rather than yet another modified version of it (i.e. maybe one or more words would be added/removed etc.) By disclosing the exact length of the text, as imperfect a solution as that is, it makes it likely that any future alterations can be more easily detected.

I remember that someone posted about this on reddit, I can't find it right now, but if you look at the redactions, there is a part that is a list of names, the ones that have been convicted are not redacted, but the last one is, and the redaction look like: XXXXXXXXXXXX XX which makes it pretty obvious that the name is donald trump jr =)

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