Have you ever wondered how the information you request is redacted? Well, with the NSA’s intra-agency guide to redaction, you too can obfuscate with the best of them! Amusingly titled “Redacting with Confidence”, the 15-page guide is an insight into both the redaction process and the mentality of the Agency. The first thing to note is the technology used. This NSA guide touches only on the main tools of Agency employees: Microsoft Word and Adobe Reader. What, no OpenOffice?

Interestingly, the Agency mentions several times to replace images and text, not cover them with other things. If they were printing them out, they’d Sharpie over the words and pictures, but the internet equivalent of Sharpying over things can be undone by the savvy.

Another online-document-only issue for many agencies is metadata. As you may recall, a New York federal judge ruled that metadata must be released to FOI requests, but the NSA may have had the memo go to their spam folder; there are whole sections on removing metadata. In fact, the only thing given more attention than metadata removal is appearance (formatting, spacing, etc.) giving the impression that the NSA wants pretty-looking reports revealing nothing.

An interesting series of requests might be to find if other government agencies have similar handbooks to this; how does the FBI retract? Homeland Security?