2026 Public Records Briefing!
Ohio Public Records Briefing - Edition #104
Welcome 2026!
Are you feeling hopeful about 2026? We took a video of our New Year’s Day. We hope to have it expunged soon. Do you have a bunch of New Year’s resolutions?! Well, we hope becoming a public records law expert is one of them. Because this is how we’re feeling about another year of the Public Records Briefing.
Practical Redaction Tips from Real Life
Recently, people all around the country have been discussing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. In one of its most recent releases, the U.S. Department of Justice (Mark used to work there but it was long ago, and he’s never been to Epstein Island, so don’t blame him) redacted some text on the pages it released. However, savvy social media uses discovered that the redaction weren’t done properly. In fact, users could copy the entire PDF page and then paste all of the text (including the supposedly redacted text) into a new document!
There’s a lesson here for public records administrators – like you!
With Adobe PDFs, you need to take great care when redacting a document. The easiest and most secure way to do this is to utilize the redaction feature within Adobe Acrobat. When you redact text through Acrobat, the text and all of the underlying information is destroyed in a secure way that prevents anyone from learning what was redacted. The downside to this is it requires an Adobe Acrobat subscription that can be pretty expensive if you’re buying it for many users.
It is possible to redact securely without using the paid version of Adobe Acrobat. However, it’s riskier and requires someone to know what they’re doing. The key mistake in many failed redactions — like those seen in some Epstein-related documents — is simply covering text with a black box or shape. This only hides the information visually; the underlying text remains in the PDF’s structure and can often be revealed by copying and pasting, searching, or using basic tools.