You&#x27;re preaching to the wrong person...I think the world would be a better place if everyone could grep&#x2F;sed&#x2F;awk their way through textfiles. That said, imagine the agency&#x27;s situation: They have thousands of documents to review before releasing. Many&#x2F;most of these emails are releasable as is. But some potentially contain classified information that cannot be known a priori...i.e. it&#x27;s not as simple as doing a grep for &quot;CLASSIFIED&quot; or &quot;OSAMA&quot;. In fact, one of the current controversies with the Clinton email is that they&#x27;re finding information that <i>should</i> have been treated as classified, but at the time of sending, was not...the conditions for classification aren&#x27;t often based off of keywords, but on the context and who the sender is.<p>Occam&#x27;s Razor falls on the side of the print-to-paper-then-scan-to-PDFs. When you print an email or Word document to paper, you have effectively destroyed all non-visible metadata. When you use a Sharpie to rub out a name, you can be sure that mark is going to propagate to the electronic scan. You have none of those assurances if you work electronically...and imagine being someone who _isn&#x27;t_ a programmer. Not too long ago the NSA was clusterfucked by a low-level employee who ran wget without anyone noticing. If you&#x27;re the non-programming bureaucrat in charge of this bespoke redaction process, software seems very arcane and insecure...paper sounds pretty nice in comparison.<p>But yeah, I do wonder about the amount of human labor and late nights that go into this. But apparently, a lot of our legal system has revolved around legions of paralegals and lawyers sifting through uncountable volumes of paper...and a lot of the people doing the current redaction probably came from that field of work.