[kungito]

They failed to redact data. That's it. People just read the files afterwards, only formatting was wierd.

[silveira]

If you unlock a lock, that's still a lock.

Also, in light of everything that is happening, is incredible that the top comment on this thread is about some minor semantic definitions.

[flufluflufluffy]

Yeah but there was no lock; somebody put a box around the doorknob without anything holding it there, and somebody removed the box and opened the door.

[pessimizer]

There's nothing else to say about this. Also, your comment is nested even deeper within the same semantic squabbling, so it's odd that you think that it's a waste of time in light of more important things that you are also not talking about.

[shkkmo]

And it is still a lock if it was just hanging there and not actually locked as in this case.

[lo_zamoyski]

They're likely viewing the electronic documents by analogy to photocopies with blacked out sections where there is nothing to distinguish the text from the redacting marks and nothing you can project out. They don't know the structure of the file format and how information in it is encoded or rendered, or even that there is a distinction between encoding and rendering.

(A better analogy might be the original physical document with redaction marks. If the text is printed using a laser printer or a type writer, and the marker used for redaction uses some other kind of ink - let's say one that doesn't dissolve the text's ink or toner in any way - then you can in principle distinguish between the two and thus recover visibility of the text.)

[calgoo]

To complicated, the people doing the redacting pasted digital stickers ontop of the text, people are just removing the stickers.

[afavour]

I think that doesn’t do the scenario justice. They tried to redact and did so in a way that looks visibly redacted (in screenshots many have seen) but can be uncovered.

If you say “they failed to redact data” to a layperson looking at a visibly redacted document they’re going to be confused.