Black out and smudge, but don't blur

I'm at the airport right now, after having gone through an extensive, supposedly random TSA security screening and came across this article at dheera.net. In summary, the article states blurring sensitive text in photos is a bad idea. The reason being, through trial and error anybody can derive the information that was blurred. I've had that same idea in my head for awhile now; it's interesting to see that the method works.

To mitigate this risk, black out text in an image or use the "smudge" tool in Photoshop. In a document, don't just set the text background to black... black text on black background is still text. A simple copy/paste into vi or notepad will show the text.

Posted by Marcin on Sunday, January 7, 2007 in Security.