“The forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps,” observed H. G. Wells, “and crush the truth a little in taking hold of it.” Clumsier still is a method commonly used to redact information from electronically stored information — one that so crushes truth, it’s alarming anyone defends it, let alone promotes it as a “standard.”
I speak of redacting electronic documents by converting them to .tiff images, blacking out privileged and confidential content, then clumsily attempting to recreate electronic searchability by optical character recognition (OCR). When applied to spreadsheets and databases, it simply doesn’t work. Why, then, are we content to spin invisible cloth rather than acknowledge the emperor’s privates are on parade?
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