CSI Trick of the day: How do you look “under” black Magic Marker’ed text?

{ride the lighting} - WILL SOMEONE PLEASE SAVE THESE PEOPLE FROM THEMSELVES? THE ABYSMAL STATE OF REDACTION IN THE U.S. MILITARY

“I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw a recent Army draft intelligence (definitely a misnomer) paper on potential terrorist uses of technology. Mind you, some of the subject matter absolutely bears study. …

…

But hey guys, if you want to be taken seriously on the subject of technology, you don’t use a MAGIC MARKER to redact someone’s e-mail address before converting it to PDF. Think I’m kidding? The draft report may be found at [GD: click through for the PDF link… I don’t want to leach her traffic…;] Look at the bottom of numbered page “1” and you’ll see an e-mail address clearly “redacted” by a magic marker. I was able to read it without even blowing it up …

…”

If you look at the PDF you can easily see “under” that “redacted” text.

My first thought is that this would be cool for a CSI, Law and Order, etc show. Where they have a piece of paper with something black marker’ed and then they use a scanner to look “under it”…

My second thought was, “These guys (our Gov) can’t seem to win.” They try to directly redact on a PDF and mess that up. They then try to be clever and redact it (badly) before it goes into the PDF and we see how well worked…

sigh…

Note #1: You cannot remove/replace humans in the work product review process. If humans are going to use the end result work product, then humans need to be in the review process.

Note #2: Reviewing of the work product only counts if you compare the original with the final output product. Reviewing in the middle of the process isn’t good enough. For example, reviewing the paper after the black marker was used, it probably looked pretty good. But was that work product, the redaction, reviewed in its final output form, in the PDF?

Start to finish, “In to Out,” QA is a song my peers know I sing all the time, and are probably as tired of hearing it as I am of singing it, but that doesn’t lessen its importance. In the age of multistep electronic processing, the only way you’re going to have any level of comfort is if you look at the original “In” and compare it to the final “out”. Sure, due to the volume, there’s no way everything can be checked, but that’s not an excuse to not do it at all…

 

Wow, sorry about that… I guess this topic struck a cord or something. ;)

I guess now would be a good time to restate that all my comments are 100% my own, that my employer cannot be held libel for anything I say or write. My opinions are my own and may not be shared by my employer, peers, family, friends, co-workers, people in the same city, state, country or planet.