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Seeing redacted docs like this always makes me wonder - for brief blacked-out passages, couldn't you make measurements of the remaining letters/words on the lin
by wgrover 14y ago
Seeing redacted docs like this always makes me wonder - for brief blacked-out passages, couldn't you make measurements of the remaining letters/words on the line, their sizes and spacing, and algorithmically generate a few likely candidates for the blacked-out text?
You could at least estimate the length in characters of the blacked-out text. For a monospaced font this character count is trivial; for a proportionately-spaced font it'd be a little harder but you have lots of other non-censored characters to learn from.
- alex-g 14y agoSee here for example: http://cryptome.org/cia-decrypt.htm http://cryptome.org/cia-decrypt.htm There was a released-but-redacted CIA memo saying, "An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an XXXXXXXX service at the same time..." From analysis of the size and shape of the blob, the missing text could only be "Egyptian". In fact, a monospace font turns out to be harder for this; with a proportional font, as here, there is more variability in total word length due to the different letter widths, and so a greater ability to reduce the number of possible matches.