The National Security Agency has issued new guidance to assist officials in redacting (censoring) documents in Microsoft Word format and producing unclassified Adobe Portable Document (PDF) files without inadvertently disclosing sensitive information.
“MS Word is used throughout the DoD and the Intelligence Community (IC) for preparing documents, reports, notes, and other formal and informal materials. PDF is often used as the format for downgraded or sanitized documents.”
“There are a number of pitfalls for the person attempting to sanitize a Word document for release.”
For example, “As numerous people have learned to their chagrin, merely converting an MS Word document to PDF does not remove all [sensitive] metadata automatically.”
“This paper describes the issue, and gives a step-by-step description of how to do it with confidence that inappropriate material will not be released.”
See “Redacting with Confidence: How to Safely Publish Sanitized Reports Converted From Word to PDF,” National Security Agency, December 13, 2005:
We won’t solve the cost-of-living crisis without improving the capacity of state public utility commissions to protect customers, find and implement new solutions to meet rising demand, and realign broken utility incentives.
Public service commissions should require utilities to quantify avoided healthcare costs, reduction in pollution exposure, and improvements in population health alongside traditional metrics.
California just took an important step toward making electric trucks more affordable and easier for businesses to buy.
In 2023 alone, more than 2,300 people died in the United States directly from extreme heat. Expanding access to residential air conditioning could reduce heat-attributable deaths and adult emergency department.