posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 2:05 PM
by
Lou Michels
They Should Have Used White-Out
In what can only be characterized as a Lemony Snickett circumstance ("a series of unfortunate events"), supposedly redacted documents turned out to be not, in a particularly ugly sexual harassment / discrimination case filed by one of GE's former internal lawyers. The case started as a class action seeking damages of $500 million and named the CEO, the General Counsel and numerous other senior GE executives as individual defendants.
Many of the allegations are apparently egregious enough that the parties agreed to file them under seal, putting only redacted, "blacked out" versions of the pleadings on the publicly available federal court electronic filing system.
Unfortunately, the plaintiff's documents were redacted in a manner that didn't quite protect the information. Specifically, pages and pages of blacked-out documents were easily readable by the simple expedient of copying blacked-out portions into a Word document and altering the color of the highlighting.
Neither the plaintiff's firm nor the company's lawyers picked up on the problem until someone pointed it out. But it underscores, again, the extremely permanent nature of electronic data and the requirement that people dealing with it understand that "what you see isn't always what you get." Just because something is not visible on a screen does not mean that the text is inaccessible. Some websites employ a "white on white" process that uses a white font to enter text on a white page. The text is still present, but is effectively invisible at first glance. Actually, it's invisible on second glance, too. But a simple change in font or highlighting color makes the text visible to anyone.
Companies passing documents around that they believe are properly secured with redaction should be aware of this issue and make sure that the people responsible for covering up or removing the information are doing it in a secure way.