How To Outwit The Government

Hey, so here's a fun trick.

The tech geniuses at Slashdot point out that with certain PDF articles, you can cut text that has been blacked out and just paste it in a Word document, easily seeing what was blacked out.

How does this affect the sports world? Well, in the BALCO case, the government redacted several sections from his court filing in the leak case. They don't want you to see certain sections about emails between the Game Of Shadows authors and Victor Conte. But all you gotta do is use this trick, explained to us by a reader:

On the Adobe Reader toolbar, going left to right, you've got Save, Print, Email, Search, and a hand for the hand tool, and this is highlighted because it's the default for Reader. Immediately to the right of the hand is the text select tool. Click that, and now you can select the redaacted portions as if it was regular text (because it is still regular text). Now right click the portions you highlighted to copy and then paste into Notepad, Word, or whatever.

It works, too. Kind of fun.

And before you ask: It doesn't work with the Grimsley document.

More PDF Blackout Follies [Slashdot] BALCO Quash Subpeona [San Francisco Chronicle]