Posted on 05/29/2008 1:17:33 PM PDT by SES1066
To say lawyers and technology mix like oil and water might be an overstatement. Still, from time to time we come across a tale in which a smallish technological problem leads to big headaches for lawyers. It always makes is wonder if life in the law weren’t a little less thorny back before the days of email and electronic discovery, back-up tapes and terabytes of data.
...one could download several documents through PACER’s federal court filing system, copy the black bars that cover the text on the screen and paste them into a Word document. And, like magic, there would appear “information about the inner-workings of GE’s white, male-dominated management...
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
No joke. I was afraid of this very problem years ago, to the point where I printed, then xeroxed, then delivered computer-redacted documents by hand. I thought I was being paranoid.
What the heck did they do to redact the text? Did they just use some strike through font? That’s about the only thing I can think of that would get these results, and if that’s the case stupid them.
You start with the original, pristine document in electronic form. Per the court's guidance, parts of this document are to be blacked out, "redacted" so no one else can use this information for their own use. The user uses the proper 'Word' format command, prints the document and it all looks good. Then at another point a copy of this original electronic document is sent on.
What is not realized is that the ORIGINAL TEXT is still there, just hidden. Strip the formatting, and like Gypsy Rose Lee, you see all! I foresee lawyers mad at Microsoft for not having foreseen this problem. I foresee that, if not already available, a followup command to make the text that was only display formatted black, into permanently non-readable 'X's or something. Of course, then someone will do it to the sole original document and away to the races they will go ...
I love technology, it is so much fun when the fools play!
I once downloaded a PowerPoint presentation from a professor at an esteemed medical school. He had used a screen shot from a patient’s electronic medical record to illustrate a point and had redacted any information that would identify the patient. His redaction mechanism, however, was to overlay the original screen shot with black rectangles. Delete the rectangles and the patient’s name, age, and other identifiers were there for the world to see.
It should have worked to delete the redacted text, insert [redacted text] where the deletion was, and then save the document as a new file name.
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