It's been a tad amusing this week reading about and listening to some of the news coverage about the improperly redacted PDF document posted online by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The story first broke on a travel-oriented blog this past Sunday and gradually made its way to the traditional broadcast and print media.
The gist of the story is that somehow a 2008 version of the TSA's manual on Screening Management--Standard Operating Procedures found its way onto the Internet. The 90-plus-page document contains sensitive details about the TSA's screening of airline passengers, and thus apparently isn't one intended to become publicly available. Someone had made an attempt to redact some of the more critical information, and to most people who might have obtained and opened the PDF file, the blacked-out sections probably offered "good-enough" protection.
To hear some of the talking heads on cable and network news programs this week, the not-very-well-concealed text was discovered by some highly computer-savvy geeks who knew how to crack the secret code and ferret out the hidden details. A fully unredacted version of the document was soon made available for download.
In fact, any Acrobat user with a moderate level of skill and knowledge of the program's tools could easily have un-blacked the text and/or retrieved the improperly redacted information.
Sections of the document had black boxes laid over the text, making it appear to be hidden. But using the TouchUp Object tool (Tools > Advanced Editing) in Acrobat, one can easily select any of the boxes and drag it off the page, revealing the text underneath. Even simpler, one can perform a Select-All over any of the blackened areas, copy and then paste into a new document. All is revealed.
One recent article suggests the problem may be that the person who attempted to conceal the text was using an older version of Acrobat -- the redaction tool and functionality was added in Acrobat 8. If the document had been properly redacted with Acrobat's built-in tool -- improved in Acrobat 9 -- the text would have been unrecoverable.
But when government departments and agencies are careless about protecting sensitive, PDF-based information, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to reveal the blunder.