Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff, production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren Boglebon here. Recently, the American public got its
Speaker 1: first look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's two volume report
Speaker 1: on the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election,
Speaker 1: and some may have been startled to see how much
Speaker 1: of the four forty eight page document, about seven point
Speaker 1: to five of the text, according to the news website
Speaker 1: Fox And been blacked out by US Attorney General William Barr.
Speaker 1: Each blacked out word or passage was labeled with a
Speaker 1: color code and notation indicating the legal justification for withholding
Speaker 1: that material. These included potential harm to an ongoing legal matter,
Speaker 1: the need to conceal investigative techniques, personal privacy, and grand
Speaker 1: jury testimony, which generally must be kept secret under Rule
Speaker 1: six of the Federal Rules of Procedure. In less a
Speaker 1: judge issues a waiver, the House Judiciary Committee still subpoena
Speaker 1: the uncensored report and Bar's explanations didn't quell the widespread
Speaker 1: curiosity about what it was that Barr decided that we
Speaker 1: shouldn't see. We spoke with Michael Ravnitzky, an attorney who's
Speaker 1: an expert in the release of government documents through the
Speaker 1: Freedom of Information Act. He said, there's something psychological about it.
Speaker 1: If you see a document with blocked out sections, your
Speaker 1: eyes go to it and you wonder what's under their
Speaker 1: welcomed the arcane, secretive subculture of redaction, which is the
Speaker 1: practice of removing or concealing portions of documents before a publication.
Speaker 1: It's a phenomenon that most ordinary Americans probably are unfamiliar with,
Speaker 1: as evidenced by the four thousand percent spike in the
Speaker 1: number of searches for redact and redacted on the Meriam
Speaker 1: Webster dictionary website on the day that bar sent a
Speaker 1: letter to Congress revealing that he would release a redacted
Speaker 1: version of Mueller's report. But attorneys, journalists, and historical researchers
Speaker 1: are accustomed to blacked out spaces on documents as a
Speaker 1: consequence of dealing with sensitive subjects. Redacting has long been
Speaker 1: part of government imposed secrecy. When former CIA employee Victor
Speaker 1: Marcetti and his co author John D. Marx sought to
Speaker 1: publish a book on the CIA in the early nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: government censors who had authority to review the book under
Speaker 1: Marchetti's employment contract redacted a hundred and sixty eight pages
Speaker 1: from the text. The book was published with blank spaces
Speaker 1: showing the location of the redacted passages. Decades later, documents
Speaker 1: obtained using the Freedom of Information Act are still sometimes
Speaker 1: riddled with blank squares over faces and photographs, and black
Speaker 1: bars over words and sentences, and sometimes entire pages. But
Speaker 1: it's not just the government. In the legal world, attorneys
Speaker 1: routinely redact portions of documents that are to be turned
Speaker 1: over during the discovery process in civil lawsuits. Those deletions
Speaker 1: occur in order to protect attorney client privilege, attorney's work
Speaker 1: product for clients, commercially sensitive information, and information not relevant
Speaker 1: to the litigation. Other redactions are required by the courts
Speaker 1: themselves to protect personal information, such as social security numbers,
Speaker 1: from misuse. One of the odd things about redaction is
Speaker 1: that while there are rules about what should be redacted,
Speaker 1: there aren't really a lot of hard and fast rules
Speaker 1: about how to block out that material. For years, attorneys
Speaker 1: and government officials often simply used black markers to conceal
Speaker 1: sensitive portions of documents, which were then photocopied so that
Speaker 1: someone couldn't hold the paper up to thee and read
Speaker 1: the censored words. In the mid two thousands, as more
Speaker 1: and more documents began to be distributed in electronic form,
Speaker 1: both the government and private sector law firms started shifting
Speaker 1: to redacting the digital files themselves using software tools. These days,
Speaker 1: attorneys involved in big corporate lawsuits often use e discovery platforms,
Speaker 1: which allow them to manage massive amounts of documents and
Speaker 1: which contain tools for redacting portions, though you can also
Speaker 1: safely redact information using programs like Adobe Acrobat Pro assuming
Speaker 1: that you're working with PDFs, But regardless of what technology
Speaker 1: is used, it's necessary to go through documents individually and
Speaker 1: figure out what to mask, which is a time intensive process.
Speaker 1: In the case of the MULA report, bar and his
Speaker 1: staff apparently scanned a printed copy of the report, redacted it,
Speaker 1: and then printed and scanned it again to create a
Speaker 1: new digital copy. That excess of caution resulted in a
Speaker 1: low quality image that wasn't searchable. Since then, the Department
Speaker 1: of Justice has published a searchable version as well. But
Speaker 1: digital redaction isn't always fool proof. One sophisticated, high tech
Speaker 1: method for reading redact word in the document involves analyzing
Speaker 1: their lengths and comparing them to other words with the
Speaker 1: same length on the page. And Guardian reporter John Swain
Speaker 1: found that he could view redacted text in a court
Speaker 1: document in the Paul Manifort case by copying and pasting
Speaker 1: it into a Microsoft Word document. Matthew Ingram of the
Speaker 1: Columbia Journalism Review explained, quote this likely happened because someone
Speaker 1: either drew over the unwanted text with the black highlighter
Speaker 1: tool and Microsoft Word, or used Adobe Acrobat's redaction tools
Speaker 1: but forgot to merge them with the original document. We
Speaker 1: also spoke with Mark Sade, a Washington, d c. Based
Speaker 1: attorney who specializes in national security law and frequently deals
Speaker 1: with redactions. He said, I don't trust technology. Even if
Speaker 1: there's a safety mechanism, someone will invent something that overrides it. Thus,
Speaker 1: Zaid generally shoes electronic redaction. His preferred method is to
Speaker 1: quote literally cut it out with scissors and then photocopy
Speaker 1: the page. It's a really sloppy looking redaction, but no
Speaker 1: one will ever see what I cut out. In other instances,
Speaker 1: if he's obstructed by the government to redact information from
Speaker 1: a document, he deletes the text and types the number
Speaker 1: of word and deleted by the request of the CIA
Speaker 1: in its place, but manual redactions on actual paper can
Speaker 1: go awry to Zad recalls once receiving some redacted documents
Speaker 1: in a case and discovering that he could hold them
Speaker 1: up and read the words through the black ink. Whoever
Speaker 1: sent them had provided the original pages rather than making
Speaker 1: a photo copy. Zaide says that even when information in
Speaker 1: court papers is redacted, it's sometimes possible to figure out
Speaker 1: what's in the blacked out sections. The client may be
Speaker 1: able to identify a witness or piece together what was
Speaker 1: said in a discussion in which he or she participated,
Speaker 1: for example, but generally, Zaide explained that it's not wise
Speaker 1: to speculate, as even educated guesses can be wrong. He
Speaker 1: gave the example of a Freedom of Information Act litigation
Speaker 1: connected with the DP Cooper skyjacking case. He said, we
Speaker 1: thought a document pertained to a particular person who was dead,
Speaker 1: but when Zaide gave the government a copy of the
Speaker 1: man's obituary in an effort to get the full document released,
Speaker 1: they told Zaide he assumed wrong and the document was
Speaker 1: about someone else. Today's episode was written by Patrick J.
Speaker 1: Kaiger and produced by Tyler clang. Brain Stuff is a
Speaker 1: production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on
Speaker 1: this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet,
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