3 ms·

The report seems to be a PDF.. that was then printed, badly scanned, and saved as a PDF again. Didn't know it was still 1995!

• dragonbonheur 10y ago
  The US government is now permanently stuck in 1984. /s !/s
• yuhong 10y ago
  This reminds me of redaction.
• mjevans 10y ago
  It's understandable as a reasonable process for redaction. If you flatten it to a pure black and white image you get something you can print (the government loves that), but not something you can easily search (good for whoever's doing the publishing), and the security step is the flattening of the mask over the data with complete overlap and uniformity. Edit: Of course actually printing it at any point in that process IS insane/beyond paranoid.
  • dest 10y ago
    Printing, despite being old-fashioned, is friendly with air-gapped networks. It is also very low cost compared with the cost of those investigations. So, not so insane in my opinion.
• kinofcain 10y ago
  Back in the '90s some government agency released a redacted report where someone had gone in and drawn black boxes in the PDF file, but the full text was of course still in the underlying data and people were able to get at it relatively easily. EDIT: apparently this has happened repeatedly, according to a quick google search. No doubt some sort of knee jerk process was put in place to ensure that any digital release of redacted documents must be scans of a physically redacted source. Sort of like an analog memory hole.