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Comment by sohkamyung | Hacker News Reader

One possibly is because they want to make sure the redacted sections are really redacted. You can do a web search and discover that others have tried to redact sections of PDF documents, only to later discover that people can uncover the redacted sections via software tools.

Scanning a redacted document is the simplest way of making sure redacted sections stay redacted as there is no underlying information to reveal.

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Releasing the plain text is all that's needed. I fail to see how redacting by overwriting the relevant text is at all reversible - e.g. replace every redacted word with five X's. Replace multiple redactions with ten X's. That actually seems more secure than what's currently done, where you can guess at the words by their length.

Trust me, people have failed... and we've fucked it up in the past.

The easiest way is to use a PDF redactor, print it and rescan it.

> Releasing the plain text is all that's needed.

I doubt Mueller's team wrote the report in plain text. They probably used Microsoft Word and exported a PDF document.

When I'm president, all government agencies will be forced to use LaTeX. Then we can have both plaintext source, PDFs with actual text, and PDFs that don't leak redacted material.

LaTeX? That will effectively prevent most government agencies from writing reports.. oh, that was your goal, wasn't it? Well played.

And I suppose they'll be published in GovtHub, so that anyone can fork them and add their annotations. I'd vote for you, but I'm not a citizen.

Context is much better for documents: http://www.berenddeboer.net/tex/LaTeX2ConTeXt.pdf

You nailed it. Aside from that anyone who is serious about search is going to run it through an OCR and get the raw text anyway. Why bother doing more work?

Offering a plain text file with the odd “[redacted text]” alongside a formatted PDF is hardly onerous.

That said, there are numerous instances of governments releasing a .doc or similar and someone opening it and doing a few presses of ‘undo’.

There’s just no reason to. Someone will fuck it up, and it will not have been worth the effort anyway.

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