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 lo

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.