&gt; How is it not easier to programmatically find&#x2F;replace specific names&#x2F;emails and replace with (redacted).<p>Because this isn&#x27;t possible. How are you going to account for any possible misspellings, accidental spacing or other unknown unknowns? You can&#x27;t. To properly disseminate things the documents have to run through actual people. Sure, people fuck up things too but they can be much more precise when it comes to processing real, human language than any computer right now.<p>This is the process the government takes. Convert to PDF, redact, release.<p>&gt; I can&#x27;t see any other reason for delivering documents as printed&#x2F;scanned PDF than to make it more difficult to analyse considering they were originally not paper or PDF. Occams Razor applies here.<p>You are misusing the meaning of occam&#x27;s razor. This is actually the easiest, most correct way to disseminate possibly sensitive information from the government that they have available. It sucks. If you can write something better then do it; you can make a ton of money and save the government a whole lot of time. But it better be really, really accurate.