From The New York Times
One of Mr. Kick’s recent digs involved an internal report from June 2002 that harshly criticized the Justice Department’s efforts toward diversity in employee hiring, promotion and retention. A version of the report was posted at the department’s Web site last month with about half of the material in the 186-page study blacked out.
But Mr. Kick discovered that the deletions were easy to restore electronically. Opening the document in Adobe Acrobat, a reader and editor for Portable Document Format, or PDF, Mr. Kick used the software’s “Touch Up Object” tool to select the black bars covering the text. He then hit the delete button. The black bars disappeared, leaving just the text.
“It was that simple,” Mr. Kick said. “I was kind of surprised, but we are talking about a government bureaucracy, so I wasn’t that surprised.” The uncensored report, posted at The Memory Hole on Oct. 21, has been downloaded more than 340,000 times.