Reader Comment – 12-16-09 – Redacting

It is always interesting to see the wide variety of backgrounds found in the readers of this blog. Early this morning Anonymous left a brief yet informative comment on yesterday’s blog about redacting. Anonymous wrote: “See the NSA redaction tutorial link at the bottom of http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2009/12/leak_anxiety.html”. This link takes you to a December 10th posting in the Secrecy News Blog from the Federation of American Scientists. The blog is worth reading, but here is the link to the actual NSA document from that post. While I haven’t had to do any redacting in years, I knew that someone, and would have bet that it was NSA, would have developed an effective method for redacting .PDF documents. The instructions here appear (after a brief review) to provide more than adequate, step-by-step instructions to follow. So, the question then becomes, did TSA adopt those instructions as their standard? I now have a semi-rhetorical question for readers from other government agencies. Does, DHS ISCD, for instance, have established standards for redacting information in .PDF documents?