Never has so much been written about so little. Or actually about nothing. For all that is in the Mueller report, at least as much has been written, discussed, analyzed, speculated and dismissed about not what is there, but what is not. Out of 448 pages, there are 946 unique redactions and 1,657 redacted lines. At 46 lines per page, that means that 36 pages or 8% of the total is black, black, black. And that has vaulted the word "redaction" to the top of the charts.
In the case of the Mueller report, the withheld information falls into 4 categories: secret grand jury information, classified data, information relating to other continuing investigations, and data on "peripheral" people. But in the words of the National Security Archive, redaction is "an art not a science." And just as one man's ceiling is another man's floor, one man's redaction is another's really juicy tidbit that might be embarrassing, but is hardly going to bring down the government.
Consider the Central Intelligence Agency. By executive order, they are required to automatically declassify nonexempt historically valuable records 25 years or older, and make them available to the public. To facilitate that they created the Central Record Search Tool, known by the acronym CREST. Since 2000, the CIA has maintained CREST as an electronic full-text searchable system, and in 2017 they put the whole thing online. At last count there were some 13 million documents available for the general public to peruse.
Of course, being an agency of secrets, they weren't wild about doing this. While Muller has just four classifications of stuff you can't see, the CIA has 126 tripwires that fall under the heading of "source and methods" and so can be redacted. Must be super sensitive stuff, you might think. Well, how about the brand of two cases of beer? A 1981 letter to an unidentified Ambassador from former CIA Director William Casey says "What a pleasant surprise to discover two cases of delicious (REDACTED) beer awaiting us when we returned home!" Code name, perhaps?
It is also well known that one's recipe for meatloaf is a state secret. And so it only makes sense that knowing where it is kept is also sensitive information. How else to explain a 1988 update on the construction of a cafeteria facility at CIA HQ. You would think that's the kind of routine, harmless information that could readily be shared. You would be wrong. "(REDACTED) Cafeteria opened with limited service on 13 Jan." Don't even think of asking about the "egg salad."
While selecting what should be redacted may be an art versus a science, the method to do so has certainly gotten more sophisticated over time. In the days of typewritten pages, heavy black markers were used, then the documents were photocopied. Unfortunately for the redactors, often just holding the page up to the light could sometimes reveal the underlying text. Others resorted to using a razor blade to physically remove the offending words or phrases, resulting in a document that resembled swiss cheese or the line of dignitaries atop Lenin's Tomb.
More recently electronic word processing has been both a boon and a curse. Just using a black highlighter or masking box doesn't destroy the underlying text, it just covers it. Unless the redactor merges the document and creates a new one, it can be no harder to reveal the original text than cutting and pasting.
As an example, Facebook has sworn up and down that they would never sell your data without your permission. Then came documents filed in a lawsuit in November between Facebook and a bikini-photo app called Six4Three. The documents were heavily redacted, but The Wall Street Journal took the blacked-out portions and pasted them into a new document, revealing the underlying text. Among other thing, they found that FB doth protest too much: they suggested a charge of up to $250,000 to share your beach vacation.
In George Orwell's "1984," Newspeaker Syme is chatting with Winston in the cafeteria at work. Proud of the progress they are making in reducing the language to its essence, Syme notes "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." Mueller et al. haven't gone that far, but it's a slippery slope. In words Orwell would surely appreciate, there is a sign posted in the FBI's unit charged with fulfilling Freedom of Information requests: "When In Doubt, Cut it Out."
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford loves (REDACTED.) His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
In the case of the Mueller report, the withheld information falls into 4 categories: secret grand jury information, classified data, information relating to other continuing investigations, and data on "peripheral" people. But in the words of the National Security Archive, redaction is "an art not a science." And just as one man's ceiling is another man's floor, one man's redaction is another's really juicy tidbit that might be embarrassing, but is hardly going to bring down the government.
Consider the Central Intelligence Agency. By executive order, they are required to automatically declassify nonexempt historically valuable records 25 years or older, and make them available to the public. To facilitate that they created the Central Record Search Tool, known by the acronym CREST. Since 2000, the CIA has maintained CREST as an electronic full-text searchable system, and in 2017 they put the whole thing online. At last count there were some 13 million documents available for the general public to peruse.
Of course, being an agency of secrets, they weren't wild about doing this. While Muller has just four classifications of stuff you can't see, the CIA has 126 tripwires that fall under the heading of "source and methods" and so can be redacted. Must be super sensitive stuff, you might think. Well, how about the brand of two cases of beer? A 1981 letter to an unidentified Ambassador from former CIA Director William Casey says "What a pleasant surprise to discover two cases of delicious (REDACTED) beer awaiting us when we returned home!" Code name, perhaps?
It is also well known that one's recipe for meatloaf is a state secret. And so it only makes sense that knowing where it is kept is also sensitive information. How else to explain a 1988 update on the construction of a cafeteria facility at CIA HQ. You would think that's the kind of routine, harmless information that could readily be shared. You would be wrong. "(REDACTED) Cafeteria opened with limited service on 13 Jan." Don't even think of asking about the "egg salad."
While selecting what should be redacted may be an art versus a science, the method to do so has certainly gotten more sophisticated over time. In the days of typewritten pages, heavy black markers were used, then the documents were photocopied. Unfortunately for the redactors, often just holding the page up to the light could sometimes reveal the underlying text. Others resorted to using a razor blade to physically remove the offending words or phrases, resulting in a document that resembled swiss cheese or the line of dignitaries atop Lenin's Tomb.
More recently electronic word processing has been both a boon and a curse. Just using a black highlighter or masking box doesn't destroy the underlying text, it just covers it. Unless the redactor merges the document and creates a new one, it can be no harder to reveal the original text than cutting and pasting.
As an example, Facebook has sworn up and down that they would never sell your data without your permission. Then came documents filed in a lawsuit in November between Facebook and a bikini-photo app called Six4Three. The documents were heavily redacted, but The Wall Street Journal took the blacked-out portions and pasted them into a new document, revealing the underlying text. Among other thing, they found that FB doth protest too much: they suggested a charge of up to $250,000 to share your beach vacation.
In George Orwell's "1984," Newspeaker Syme is chatting with Winston in the cafeteria at work. Proud of the progress they are making in reducing the language to its essence, Syme notes "It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words." Mueller et al. haven't gone that far, but it's a slippery slope. In words Orwell would surely appreciate, there is a sign posted in the FBI's unit charged with fulfilling Freedom of Information requests: "When In Doubt, Cut it Out."
-END-
Marc Wollin of Bedford loves (REDACTED.) His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.
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