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Sanitizers also employ opaque tape and razor knives, cutting out the sensitive content from a copy of the page. But it can be sloppy, and the sheen of a photocopy sometimes reveals the letters beneath the ink. The black marker pen is the sanitizer’s most basic tool. For an act so often associated with the anonymous, passionless churning of the government machine, redaction betrays a striking individualism in the choices about what to leave visible and what to obscure, and in the shapes of the black bars themselves. Most government agencies that handle classified information have dedicated sanitizers.

(Think of the cables released by WikiLeaks in 2010, some of which didn’t reveal sensitive information but were merely unflattering.) Government officials frequently perpetuate this culture by invoking national security, but Marc Trachtenberg, a Cold War historian at U.C.L.A., told me that “the function of declassification is much broader than keeping information from the enemy.” Often documents remain classified simply to save face. A 2012 report by the Public Interest Declassification Board, a government-funded advisory group, found that a “culture of caution” among executive-branch agencies had lead to chronic over-classification and, in turn, has “compromised” the entire classification system. government has a tendency toward over-classification.