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How not to redact documents

peter-walshPeter Walsh wrote 10/23/2024 at 03:24 • 4 min read • Like

An article Election Exclusive: British Advisors to Kamala Harris Hope to "Kill Musk's Twitter" by 

Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi has the following redacted image:

Gee, gosh and golly, it's an incorrectly redacted document! Let's have some fin. I mean, fun. I mean... you know what I mean!

Let's see if we can unmask the E-mails of the people involved.

Take a close look at the selected section from the image above. Look under the redaction block in the second (lowest) line. Notice the descenders?

The character immediately to the left of "child" is the @-sign, and the E-mail name ends with a descender. The person (unredacted) is listed as "Danielle Lilly".

Step 1, lets overlay the @-sign and see how much space is left. We need an @-sign in the same font, but there are several available in the image. Select->Copy->Paste Transparent

While placing the @-sign, notice that the descender of the character exactly matches the visible descender on the redacted block.

So far so good!

Notice the (unredacted) name is "Danielle Lilly", and the redacted E-mail has a descender ? Let's do the same operation with the text of the name in the document.  Select->Copy->Paste Transparent

Now E-mails are always listed lower case, so we can't paste the full "Lilly" name here, we'll have to duplicate one of the lowercase "l" letters instead. Be sure to keep the same spacing.

And finally, note that a lot of systems use first initial+last name. Let's add a lowercase "D"  (for Danielle) and see where that gets us.

The red line shows the beginning of the left margin, and note that this exactly lines up with the left margin of the "Email" header.

I think Danielle Lilly's E-mail address is "dlilly@childfund.org".

Let's try another. Looking a little further in the document:

Notice the redacted section doesn't quite cover the ascenders in the document. Notice also that the ascenders in the name are quite similar. Hmmm....

And there's just enough room for "jmillican" in the redacted box.

Also, note that the "j" has an ascender that goes up above the redaction box. Is that a problem?

Nope. It's there, faintly, in the original image:

Many of the redacted E-mails in the image can be deduced by looking at the ascenders and descenders of the incompletely redacted names.

I won't post the full redacted image, only note that many of the E-mails listed on the original image can be deduced from the incomplete redactions.

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