If a name of an military officer is redacted for security reasons, how can I replace his name with an adjective and the word 'officer' without too much hubbub?
Say the original sentence is "The meeting was led by Lieutenant Smith and his men." Can I say, "The meeting was led by an unnamed/redacted officer and his men"? If not, how should I say it?
Different organizations and governments will use different methods.
For instance, here's what the Federal Court of Australia says in its "Guide to Redacting Documents in Electronic Form":
Text or numbers that need redacting should be replaced with the word redacted in square brackets [Redacted]. For example, “the funds were transferred to the applicant’s nominated bank account BSB [Redacted] Account number [Redacted]”. To maintain the formatting or structure of the document the word and square brackets ‘[Redacted]’ can be repeated, for example, ‘[Redacted] [Redacted] [Redacted]’.
Based purely on this Australian guideline, your sentence would become:
The meeting was led by [Redacted] [Redacted] and his men.
On the other hand, I've seen news stations present redacted documents to viewers in which the words or phrases are simply blacked out or otherwise hidden.
I imagine you would need to refer to the "redaction guide" of whatever agency you work for to determine what its own guidelines are.
In speech (I wasn't sure if when you said how should I say it, you were talking about speaking about something redacted), unless you are actually reading a redacted document, I imagine that you refer to the person or situation in exactly the same way as if information about them or it isn't known in the first place.
In other words:
"The meeting was led by somebody and his men."
That doesn't name the person or his rank.
I don't think there would be any reason to say unnamed or redacted as an adjective every time you would otherwise say something. (Nor would you do that if paraphrasing something in writing.)
Perhaps you could start off, or finish, by mentioning something along the lines of:
This [is/was] all the information I [can/could] provide you, due to certain information being redacted.
You can use a letter instead of the last name, such as in this passage:
These passports must be countersigned, and, strangely enough, my friend's required the sign-manual of Lieutenant X., whose office was in the lower part of the city, while mine must be signed by Lieutenant Y., who made his head-quarters some distance farther up town.
A Rebel's Recollections
Using letters like this allows the reader to keep track of who is being referred to even when you have multiple such unnamed individuals (in this example multiple unknown lieutenants). Lettering usually is x, y, z or a, b, c... using letters as needed. It’s also perfectly ok to use when it’s just one unnamed person.
To make it clear these aren’t real initials you can use a clause that says something like “whose name(s) we cannot release for security reasons”
