Need to publish data but not ALL of the data
Tuesday, May 27th, 2008Frequently you’re asked to prepare documentation for an internal report that may discuss embarrassing or proprietary issues. For instance, you were instrumental in locating a problem with lost revenue due to a programming error and now it’s time to explain to the Vice Presidents how this ever happened and how you’re going to prevent it from happening again.
Every once in a while you may do such a good job of this presentation that you’ll be asked to present it at a conference. Or, depending on the Machiavellian nature of internal politics, you may have a peer request that you send them your powerpoint so that they can present it to other executives and act like the work to produce this document is actually their own.
In those cases, it’s useful to know how to sanitize a document of it’s tantalizing private data. Now if you don’t know much about Microsoft Office you may think you can just delete some of that data and it will be gone. But alas, poor Yoric, Microsoft is going to try to save your butt and may retain your changes just in case you decide later on that you want to undo those changes. Well you know who’s great at keeping their secrets? The NSA.
Yup, that’s right, the NSA put out a guide on how to avoid all this. And those persistent scientists over at FAS have a copy of it they obtained, probably via the Freedom of Information Protection Act. So, without further ado, here is Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF