[mlissner]

Really depends on the length and predictability of the redaction, but yes. If it's short and contextually it's only likely to be either "yes" or "no", you've got it. If it's longer and could contain an unknown person's name along with some other words, well, that's harder.

[jmward01]

I feel like this creates a hash value and the real question is how unique of a value does it represent and how easy it is to narrow it down given throwing a dictionary at it. Similarly, unknown names could likely be teased out like a one-time pad. If they appear in multiple sentences then their randomness quickly repeats and becomes something that potentially could be isolated from the rest of the words around them. This would probably be a fun problem for a cryptography class to work on.

[skykooler]

If so, then finding the redacted string would be similar to trying to brute-force a hash (though presumably slower, since text layout algorithms are probably more complex than a single hash invocation).