Although the technique is no good for tackling larger sections of text, it does show that officials need to be more careful with their sensitive documents. Naccache argues that the most important conclusion of this work "is that censoring text by blotting out words and re-scanning is not a secure practice". . . .
An Irish graduate student has uncovered words blacked-out of declassified US military documents using nothing more than a dictionary and text analysis software.

Claire Whelan, a computer science student at Dublin City University was given the problems by her PhD supervisor as a diversion. David Naccache, a cryptographer with Gemplus, challenged her to discover the words missing from two documents: one was a memo to George Bush, and another concerned military modifications to civilian helicopters.

The process is quite straightforward, and according to Naccache, Whelan's success proves that merely blotting words out of declassified documents will not keep the contents secret.

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