black holes, information, stephen hawking

In a NY Times article on Stephen Hawking's concession that, in the long run, information is not destroyed by black holes, Dr. Hawking states

If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains the information about what you were like, but in an unrecognizable state.

I find myself stumbling over the use of the word "unrecognizable." If he means this in a strong sense - that the information cannot be considered at least potentially recognizable - then on what grounds can the "information" be considered actual information? It seems to me that just as currency must have some kind of potential exchange value in order to be worth anything (otherwise it would just be an ugly piece of paper or chunk of metal), so must information be theoretically "translatable" into meaningful terms in order to be considered information. Otherwise, wouldn't it be impossible to distinguish the so-called information from mere noise?

I'll therefore assume that he means it in a weak sense - that the information escaping from black holes is at least theoretically recognizable . . . say, by God, or someone with total knowledge of the entire history of the universe up to the present (the latter concept, of course, can lead to sticky paradoxes as well . . .)