Need to publish confidential documents? Microsoft Redaction tool may be for you!

So, you're tooling along, writing some document that will eventually be in the public domain (e.g. a contract, a lease, some Privacy Act document) and you need to "black out" parts of the document to protect the names of the innocent.

Back in the old days, you'd redact the document with a big black magic marker, and then photocopy them to make it difficult to decipher. Nowadays, you may be tempted to convert the background text to black (printing black on black). These solutions only work on printed copies - what about the electronic version?

Enter the Office 2003 Add-in: Word Redaction plug in.

The Microsoft Office Word 2003 Redaction Add-in makes it easy for you to mark sections of a document for redaction. You can then redact the document so that the sections you specified are blacked out. You can either print the redacted document or use it electronically. In the redacted version of the document, the redacted text is replaced with a black bar and cannot be converted back to text or retrieved.

Please note that:

In a redacted document, the black bar that replaces the redacted text takes up the same amount of space as the original text so that line spacing and line breaks are unaffected. As a result, readers may be able to determine the length of a redacted word based on the size of the blacked out area. To help protect your redacted document from attempts to recover information by using word length, avoid redacting single words. If you need to redact a single word, you can replace it with a longer or shorter word before you select it for redaction.

What this means - if you're redacting a Social Security Number, the length is fixed and a black bar that's exactly 11 characters wide will be inserted. However, if you're discussing two employees or companies, and one's named "Jim Doe" and the other one is "James Smith-Jones", the size of the bar may indicate who you're talking about. It's better to replace all instances of "Jim Doe" and "James Smith-Jones" with a single word ("REDACTED TEXT") and then redact that text, so that each black bar is exactly the same length.

Font gurus: I understand that SSN 111-11-1111 takes fewer pixels in proportionally-spaced fonts than SSN 888-88-8888, ergo the blacked-out bar would be shorter. Yes, it's probably feasible to meaure the exactly length in pixels of a word, figure out the font in the surrounding text, and then run some sort of dictionary attack against the black bar to see what matches would make sense in context. That's why I suggested changing all redacted text to a common phrase with a single length.

This blog is no longer updated.

Since I own the domain name for a couple more years, and the hosting was paid-in-advance, it's still here. But I've moved on to Hawaii, and no longer have the need to publish all the sorts of neat stuff that made up the contents of this website.

If you've linked to me, you are invited to unlink, as your readers will no longer be presented with new content. Thanks, Steve

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Dell Certified Storage Network Professional
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This blog is no longer updated.

Since I own the domain name for a couple more years, and the hosting was paid-in-advance, it's still here. But I've moved on to Hawaii, and no longer have the need to publish all the sorts of neat stuff that made up the contents of this website.

If you've linked to me, you are invited to unlink, as your readers will no longer be presented with new content. Thanks, Steve

Logos not available: Dell Certified Storage Network Professional Snort Certified Professional

Logos not available:
Dell Certified Storage Network Professional
Snort Certified Professional