alt Hacker News> but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file.
This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position
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> This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with.
No, this is an example of someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful outcomes.
"Smart" people like to believe that knowing enough minutiae is enough to result in a successful outcome.
Actual smart people know that the process is more important than the minutiae, and proceed accordingly.
Not at all. It's a procedure that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. Sometimes that's what you want.
> you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length
This is the only weakness of Barr's method.
> it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Anyong relying on automated tools to redact is doing so performatively. At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context to sit down and read through the documents and strike out anything that reveals–directly or indirectly, spelled correctly or incorrectly–too much.
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions
Increasing the size of the redaction box to include enough of the surrounding text to make that very difficult.
>exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence
Being aware of one's limitations is the strongest hallmark of intelligence I've come across...