Unediting the Editing of Federal Report

NYT ^ | Oct 31,03

[inPhase]

He said he was able to call up the document in its Adobe Acrobat format and, using software that allows editing of PDF documents, then highlighted the blacked out editing bars and deleted them. The original, unedited text then appeared.

[inPhase]

The justice dept had a study done on diversification in hiring and edited it before release, No big deal. But that the edited out could be retrieved...on pdf editing ...

[Loyolas Mattman]

I wonder if you can do this with the UFO reports. I'd love to know what's in Hanger 18 and Area 51.

[inPhase]

actally, kinda sorry I posted it, run with it.

pdf editing has been out there for at least 3 years, from the Dutch at least. Different versions though handled diff on diff op systems. Not as univ as one might think.

But still, amazing, hope they are not lying.

But I think area 51 is was simply a black test site, and thus heavily protected.

[Cicero]

I just have an Acrobat Reader, so I'm not familiar with the full program. I would guess, from my experience with other word processors, that you can go into Options and change the settings so it won't save this stuff. But of course a lot of people just sit down to their desk and use whatever the techies give them.

It's pretty stupid to release a document with the revisions saved.

[inPhase]

You must get the whole thing or at least the distiller which is a pretty universal writer. Covert in and out of Post Script to defeat font elitism. I mean convert but hopedully not covert too.

Have to think about this and ask a few experts...

[AZLiberty]

Acrobat permits you to "lock" a document so that it can't be edited without a password. You can also disallow Copy/Paste and Print.

[Swordmaker]

Acrobat permits you to "lock" a document so that it can't be edited without a password. You can also disallow Copy/Paste and Print.

That is true... but unless the file is also encrypted the text data is STILL THERE, just hidden under DISPLAY formatting, and could conceivably be extracted and read by a mere text editor. The Portable Document Format is merely a page description language similar to (and derivative of) Postscript.

Whoever prepared the redacted document for release is ignorant of these facts and assumed "blacking" out the text with software is the same as overwriting the offending text with a marking pen... lotsa laughs!

Incidentally, new infrared and ultraviolet techniques developed for detecting art forgeries make even the reading of inked out pages easy. That is why the best way to issue redacted text is to mark out a photocopy of the original... then photocopy the marked out photocopy and only release the third generation copy.