blog.cuyler.com

An article appeared recently in the Connecticut Law Tribune outlining how some redactions in PDF documents posted to PACER actually weren’t redacted all that well, and a simple select-all, copy, paste into your favorite word processor revealed what was hidden behind those redactions.

As you can imagine, there was some egg on some faces.

(This ties in, a tad, with my previous post about managing personally identifying information from your Word documents.)

The article goes on to point out a fact I think bears repeating: the new version of Acrobat (Version 8) does redaction right and actually removes the text hidden behind the redactions.

Even if you’re not using redactions, to make sure you’re not passing along any hidden data in your PDF files, you’ll want to do the following:

Open your PDF in Acrobat, click on Document > Examine Document and Check all boxes and click “Remove All Checked Items” and that should strip out any of the stuff this guy is worried about.  (The dialog box is shown; click on it for a version you can actually read.)

Also, the redactions in Acrobat 8 are PERMANENT which means once they’re applied, there’s no getting at the underlying info. No cut-and-paste into Word is going to get it back.  This is why Acrobat prompts you to use a NEW filename for your redacted copy… once you redact, there’s no going back.  SAVE YOUR ORIGINAL.

Also, once you redact, Acrobat — for good measure — will prompt you do the “Examine Document” scrubbing, since if you’re redacting, you probably want the other stuff out too.

CAVEAT: Examine Document also deletes any Bates numbers; so you’ll want to scrub and THEN Bates number.