October 16, 2024 • 12 mins
The process of redacting sensitive information is long and storied. But are there even any rules that apply to when and how it's done?
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Chuck's here as always, Dave's here, and Spirit Cherry's here
in Spirit. They're both alive. Don't worry, they're just not
here with us right now. And that makes this short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's because they're at Spirit Halloween.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's true. They both got extra side hustles, as they're called.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We just got a bunch of new Halloween stuff. Emily
really wants to ramp up our Halloween game.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Oh nice, we got one last year. We got a big, tall,
scary guy who's holding a baby upside down and they
both like the baby screams. Not a baby, let's say
a toddler.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Does it suck the breath out of the baby?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
No, it just holds her by her leg upside down
and she screams a lot. And the guy's like, and
it's pretty great. I mean, this is a huge step
up from what we normally do, which is a like
a paper mache pumpkin and a sign that says get away.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah. Yeah. The reason I ask about the breath as
there's a legendary figure that you can, like this giant
that you can put on your front porch where the
dude holds up a toddler and it has I guess
steam or smoke or something, and it looks like it's
sucking the breath out of this child.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And our friends of the show, John Hodgman and Jesse Thorn,
talked a lot about it on their Judge John Hodgman podcast, which,
by the way, is on tour. If you want to
go see those guys on tour. It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, they'll take your breath away for sure seeing them live.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, So just go go check out Judge John Hodgman Tour.
It's a fun show and you never know who might
show up. Might be me, might be Josh Man.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Hodgman knows you some money for that segue.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
That was amazing and spirit Halloweencot.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I'm still trying to figure out how you worked it.
And that was great.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
All right, Well, we've wasted two of our twelve minutes,
so let's talk about redaction.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, Chuck, redaction. We definitely touched on it in our
Foyer episode for sure, but just to kind of refresh everybody.
Redaction is where there's parts of documents or transcripts or
something like that that are so sensitive that they have
to be essentially removed. They're usually blacked out. Is the
traditional way that you know, you think of redaction, but
(02:12):
it turns out there's a lot of other types of
redaction and ways to do it, and tons of reasons.
It's not just because you asked the CIA for a
bunch of documents. There's a lot of different groups that
react on the regular.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, for sure, you mentioned FOYA, the Freedom of Information Act.
If you've ever laid your eyes on something as a
request from that Act, then you will probably see a
bunch of sharpie magic marker through names and places, maybe
entire pages redacted. But it's often thought of as a
government thing, but like you said, a lot of sometimes
(02:45):
like a court will order that to protect sensitive information.
In the medical field, obviously, there's the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act, the hip hop thing that you always
hear about it the doctor. It's you know, your medical privacy,
so they might order a redaction there. Your grades and
your schooling is private thanks to the Family Educational Rights
(03:08):
and Privacy Act, so your educational records could be redacted
if it was brought into court. That kind of thing
for sure.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
And then speaking of court, the legal world is huge unredaction.
They're riduculously.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
That one really got me, actually, that one.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
That in particular in the legal world, redaction is usually
associated with civil cases because there's a process of discovery
where it's like, give me all the documents you have
pertaining to this case, and I'll give you all the
documents I have, and if not, we'll get in big,
big trouble if we don't do that. Right, But in
those documents there's inevitably stuff that doesn't pertain to the case.
(03:49):
There's protected like say copyrighted or trademarked or patented information
like trade secrets can be in there. If there's a
company involved, there's people not related to the case who
may be emailed about something or we're just CC you
want to get rid of that.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
There's any client privilege, of course.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Exactly, there's a lot of reasons to redact in legal cases,
and there's a certain way to do it. And yet
regardless of all these reasons that people have to redact
in all these fields that are like required to redact
things like hippa requires the medical field to redact, there's
(04:29):
not actually like a prescribed way like and this is
how you do it. It's more like you need to
redact this and go figure out how to do that,
and then if you do it wrong, you're going to
get your pants suit off.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
That's right, And shall we take a break and talk
of about the myriad ways that you can do so, yeah,
all right, we'll be right back. All right. So you
(05:09):
mentioned that there are not any set rules in place
about how to redact something. It's up to the redactor
what you will usually see. And if you've ever seen
government documents on the news or whatever, you usually will
just see like a black magic marker drawn through names,
and not through a name, but like completely over a name,
(05:31):
or it's not always a name, just whatever you're redacting. Again,
it could be sentences or wold pages or paragraphs. And
then what you should do then is then make a
copy of that otherwise someone and this has happened plenty
of times. If you give that person the original, you
can just hold it up to the light many times
and see what's going on. If you photocopy it, you can't.
So that's a pretty good old school way to do.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So, yeah, you, me and I watched The Amber heard
Johnny Depp lost suit a couple of years.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Ago on the trial and TV.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, and that's where I learned that that's what you're
supposed to do from some lawyers who analyzed it like
just about every night, and they said, apparently the reason
they brought it up is because somebody was holding a
document and on the TV camera it was the original
just with it blacked out, and apparently the internet could
read what it was. I think it was somebody's email,
(06:27):
like maybe even Amber Heerd's email. Oh yeah, And that
night the lawyers are like, they that's not how you
do it. You do that with the originals and you
make a photocopy of the originals, is just not possible
to see what you've redacted at that point.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So but a dumb thing to do.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Oh yeah, dude, that's I mean, what do you do?
Like are you just like, well, you just gave me
your services for free? Like what you know? What's what
happens as a result of that? I'm curious?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, me too. Well we'll talk a little bit about
that at the end. I don't know what happened in
that case, but what can happen? So yeah, drawing black
magic marker is good old school way, but you know
a lot of stuff these days, most stuff, in fact,
is an electronic form. So people started using software tools
and you know, like things within a program to essentially
(07:16):
black magic marker over it. And that can be good.
But you know, one of the articles I use for
this talk to an attorney, a DC based national security
law attorney. He was like, I don't trust it. I
don't trust technology even if you do that, and maybe
somebody could design a program to undo that and override it.
(07:37):
So this guy like he didn't even like the black
magic marker because I think he's been burned by that before.
So he cuts everything out literally with scissors, and he said,
you know, it's kind of sloppy looking, but it make
sure that no one can see what was there or
if it's electronic, I might just completely delete the sentence
(07:57):
or word right and type and type in over that
in all bold letters deleted by the request of the CIA.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, and that guy's name is Mark Ze, the lawyer.
And there's really good reason to actually go in and
delete the words because there's been at least one case,
the trial of Paul Manifort, who was on trial for perjury.
I think lying to the FBI obstruction of justice a
few things related to that whole Mueller Report investigation of
(08:26):
Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election. And in that case,
one of the redacted documents that a journalist from The
Guardian named John Swain got, all they did was put
a black bar, like they used the square like draw
tool in Microsoft Word and filled it in with black
(08:49):
and sent it out and like John yeah, and John
Swain copied the whole thing and pasted it and that
stuff was not redacted in because it didn't coffee paste
the black box. So there's there's definitely the wrong way
to do it, and it does happen from people who
(09:09):
just aren't thinking or just don't have enough experience, But
it seems like it would be a really big big deal,
Like you'd be like, Okay, your job for the rest
of your career is redacting, and you get perfect at redacting,
and that's what you do. Not welcome to the firm,
start redacting stuff. Good luck?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
You know, yeah, for sure you can. You know, if
you're in a case and you see some things redacted,
but you're trying to still kind of figure it out
and like guess and speculate. First of all, that attorney's
you'd said, it's really not smart to do that, because
you can be off base and get things wrong, and
I've even done that in cases. But like, I was
(09:49):
trying to figure out how this could happen, and one
thing that I just sort of dreamed up was, you know,
let's say it's a case where you might know it's
one of like four three people that did something, and
one of them's name as Abraham Abramowitz. One of them's
name is is Joshua Clarkin Clarkin Gauge.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I was gonna say, don't drag me into it, but
I don't know this. Joshua Clark engaged.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
And then one guy's name is Tom Bill. And you
see this very short reaction. You could probably figure, oh,
I bet you anything, it's the guy with a really
short name because it's a short reaction. So we've narrowed
it down that way. So that's just one way that
I dreamed up that you can you can smart redact,
you know, maybe do like longer lines if it's a
(10:35):
really short name or something that you're trying to conceal.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Good good point. I prescribe you to spend more time
looking at names on headstones and cemeteries. Because that's apparently
where writers, good writers get their best ideas for names
that aren't like Josh Clarkin Gage or something like that,
or Chance Finkelstein or something you know, like and sorry
it all Finkelstein's out there, but that's sounds made up
(11:01):
as a name. And if you are a Chance Finkelstein,
right in, because that would be amazing to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Well, that's why I did silly things, because I didn't
want to accidentally say someone's real name.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Oh okay, oh I get it. What good idea?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I don't think Josh and Eric Clark Engage is a
real surname, is it.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I don't know, Probably not. It doesn't sound right. Maybe
Mick Clark Engage.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Back to redacting earlier, he said, like, what could happen
if you're like, I guess I don't have to pay
my lawyer. If they've screwed up on that level, maybe
that could happen. There could be legal penalties. There could
be like if you had to pay some big fine
in your attorney screwed up and you had to pay
that fine because of that bad reaction, then you could
certainly go after them. There would certainly be a loss
(11:48):
of trust. Which is another one of the things and
damage to reputation, Like, if that kind of thing gets out,
then you're not going to be someone that gets all
out of work. You're gonna be the bad redactor.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Right, So I think I think the moral of this
story is if your job is to redact things, do
it right. Yeah, Well, chuck silence means short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the Short Stuff. I'm Josh, and
Chuck's here as always, Dave's here, and Spirit Cherry's here
in Spirit. They're both alive. Don't worry, they're just not
here with us right now. And that makes this short stuff.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
That's because they're at Spirit Halloween.
Speaker 1 (00:19):
That's true. They both got extra side hustles, as they're called.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
We just got a bunch of new Halloween stuff. Emily
really wants to ramp up our Halloween game.
Speaker 1 (00:28):
Oh nice, we got one last year. We got a big, tall,
scary guy who's holding a baby upside down and they
both like the baby screams. Not a baby, let's say
a toddler.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Does it suck the breath out of the baby?
Speaker 1 (00:40):
No, it just holds her by her leg upside down
and she screams a lot. And the guy's like, and
it's pretty great. I mean, this is a huge step
up from what we normally do, which is a like
a paper mache pumpkin and a sign that says get away.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
Yeah. Yeah. The reason I ask about the breath as
there's a legendary figure that you can, like this giant
that you can put on your front porch where the
dude holds up a toddler and it has I guess
steam or smoke or something, and it looks like it's
sucking the breath out of this child.
Speaker 1 (01:16):
Wow.
Speaker 2 (01:16):
And our friends of the show, John Hodgman and Jesse Thorn,
talked a lot about it on their Judge John Hodgman podcast, which,
by the way, is on tour. If you want to
go see those guys on tour. It's a lot of fun.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Yeah, they'll take your breath away for sure seeing them live.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
Yeah, So just go go check out Judge John Hodgman Tour.
It's a fun show and you never know who might
show up. Might be me, might be Josh Man.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Hodgman knows you some money for that segue.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
That was amazing and spirit Halloweencot.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
I'm still trying to figure out how you worked it.
And that was great.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
All right, Well, we've wasted two of our twelve minutes,
so let's talk about redaction.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
Yeah, Chuck, redaction. We definitely touched on it in our
Foyer episode for sure, but just to kind of refresh everybody.
Redaction is where there's parts of documents or transcripts or
something like that that are so sensitive that they have
to be essentially removed. They're usually blacked out. Is the
traditional way that you know, you think of redaction, but
(02:12):
it turns out there's a lot of other types of
redaction and ways to do it, and tons of reasons.
It's not just because you asked the CIA for a
bunch of documents. There's a lot of different groups that
react on the regular.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, for sure, you mentioned FOYA, the Freedom of Information Act.
If you've ever laid your eyes on something as a
request from that Act, then you will probably see a
bunch of sharpie magic marker through names and places, maybe
entire pages redacted. But it's often thought of as a
government thing, but like you said, a lot of sometimes
(02:45):
like a court will order that to protect sensitive information.
In the medical field, obviously, there's the Health Insurance Portability
and Accountability Act, the hip hop thing that you always
hear about it the doctor. It's you know, your medical privacy,
so they might order a redaction there. Your grades and
your schooling is private thanks to the Family Educational Rights
(03:08):
and Privacy Act, so your educational records could be redacted
if it was brought into court. That kind of thing
for sure.
Speaker 1 (03:15):
And then speaking of court, the legal world is huge unredaction.
They're riduculously.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
That one really got me, actually, that one.
Speaker 1 (03:26):
That in particular in the legal world, redaction is usually
associated with civil cases because there's a process of discovery
where it's like, give me all the documents you have
pertaining to this case, and I'll give you all the
documents I have, and if not, we'll get in big,
big trouble if we don't do that. Right, But in
those documents there's inevitably stuff that doesn't pertain to the case.
(03:49):
There's protected like say copyrighted or trademarked or patented information
like trade secrets can be in there. If there's a
company involved, there's people not related to the case who
may be emailed about something or we're just CC you
want to get rid of that.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
There's any client privilege, of course.
Speaker 1 (04:07):
Exactly, there's a lot of reasons to redact in legal cases,
and there's a certain way to do it. And yet
regardless of all these reasons that people have to redact
in all these fields that are like required to redact
things like hippa requires the medical field to redact, there's
(04:29):
not actually like a prescribed way like and this is
how you do it. It's more like you need to
redact this and go figure out how to do that,
and then if you do it wrong, you're going to
get your pants suit off.
Speaker 2 (04:40):
That's right, And shall we take a break and talk
of about the myriad ways that you can do so, yeah,
all right, we'll be right back. All right. So you
(05:09):
mentioned that there are not any set rules in place
about how to redact something. It's up to the redactor
what you will usually see. And if you've ever seen
government documents on the news or whatever, you usually will
just see like a black magic marker drawn through names,
and not through a name, but like completely over a name,
(05:31):
or it's not always a name, just whatever you're redacting. Again,
it could be sentences or wold pages or paragraphs. And
then what you should do then is then make a
copy of that otherwise someone and this has happened plenty
of times. If you give that person the original, you
can just hold it up to the light many times
and see what's going on. If you photocopy it, you can't.
So that's a pretty good old school way to do.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
So, yeah, you, me and I watched The Amber heard
Johnny Depp lost suit a couple of years.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
Ago on the trial and TV.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, and that's where I learned that that's what you're
supposed to do from some lawyers who analyzed it like
just about every night, and they said, apparently the reason
they brought it up is because somebody was holding a
document and on the TV camera it was the original
just with it blacked out, and apparently the internet could
read what it was. I think it was somebody's email,
(06:27):
like maybe even Amber Heerd's email. Oh yeah, And that
night the lawyers are like, they that's not how you
do it. You do that with the originals and you
make a photocopy of the originals, is just not possible
to see what you've redacted at that point.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
So but a dumb thing to do.
Speaker 1 (06:43):
Oh yeah, dude, that's I mean, what do you do?
Like are you just like, well, you just gave me
your services for free? Like what you know? What's what
happens as a result of that? I'm curious?
Speaker 2 (06:54):
Yeah, me too. Well we'll talk a little bit about
that at the end. I don't know what happened in
that case, but what can happen? So yeah, drawing black
magic marker is good old school way, but you know
a lot of stuff these days, most stuff, in fact,
is an electronic form. So people started using software tools
and you know, like things within a program to essentially
(07:16):
black magic marker over it. And that can be good.
But you know, one of the articles I use for
this talk to an attorney, a DC based national security
law attorney. He was like, I don't trust it. I
don't trust technology even if you do that, and maybe
somebody could design a program to undo that and override it.
(07:37):
So this guy like he didn't even like the black
magic marker because I think he's been burned by that before.
So he cuts everything out literally with scissors, and he said,
you know, it's kind of sloppy looking, but it make
sure that no one can see what was there or
if it's electronic, I might just completely delete the sentence
(07:57):
or word right and type and type in over that
in all bold letters deleted by the request of the CIA.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Yeah, and that guy's name is Mark Ze, the lawyer.
And there's really good reason to actually go in and
delete the words because there's been at least one case,
the trial of Paul Manifort, who was on trial for perjury.
I think lying to the FBI obstruction of justice a
few things related to that whole Mueller Report investigation of
(08:26):
Russian interference in the twenty sixteen election. And in that case,
one of the redacted documents that a journalist from The
Guardian named John Swain got, all they did was put
a black bar, like they used the square like draw
tool in Microsoft Word and filled it in with black
(08:49):
and sent it out and like John yeah, and John
Swain copied the whole thing and pasted it and that
stuff was not redacted in because it didn't coffee paste
the black box. So there's there's definitely the wrong way
to do it, and it does happen from people who
(09:09):
just aren't thinking or just don't have enough experience, But
it seems like it would be a really big big deal,
Like you'd be like, Okay, your job for the rest
of your career is redacting, and you get perfect at redacting,
and that's what you do. Not welcome to the firm,
start redacting stuff. Good luck?
Speaker 2 (09:27):
You know, yeah, for sure you can. You know, if
you're in a case and you see some things redacted,
but you're trying to still kind of figure it out
and like guess and speculate. First of all, that attorney's
you'd said, it's really not smart to do that, because
you can be off base and get things wrong, and
I've even done that in cases. But like, I was
(09:49):
trying to figure out how this could happen, and one
thing that I just sort of dreamed up was, you know,
let's say it's a case where you might know it's
one of like four three people that did something, and
one of them's name as Abraham Abramowitz. One of them's
name is is Joshua Clarkin Clarkin Gauge.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
I was gonna say, don't drag me into it, but
I don't know this. Joshua Clark engaged.
Speaker 2 (10:15):
And then one guy's name is Tom Bill. And you
see this very short reaction. You could probably figure, oh,
I bet you anything, it's the guy with a really
short name because it's a short reaction. So we've narrowed
it down that way. So that's just one way that
I dreamed up that you can you can smart redact,
you know, maybe do like longer lines if it's a
(10:35):
really short name or something that you're trying to conceal.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
Good good point. I prescribe you to spend more time
looking at names on headstones and cemeteries. Because that's apparently
where writers, good writers get their best ideas for names
that aren't like Josh Clarkin Gage or something like that,
or Chance Finkelstein or something you know, like and sorry
it all Finkelstein's out there, but that's sounds made up
(11:01):
as a name. And if you are a Chance Finkelstein,
right in, because that would be amazing to hear from you.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
Well, that's why I did silly things, because I didn't
want to accidentally say someone's real name.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Oh okay, oh I get it. What good idea?
Speaker 2 (11:12):
I don't think Josh and Eric Clark Engage is a
real surname, is it.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
I don't know, Probably not. It doesn't sound right. Maybe
Mick Clark Engage.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
Back to redacting earlier, he said, like, what could happen
if you're like, I guess I don't have to pay
my lawyer. If they've screwed up on that level, maybe
that could happen. There could be legal penalties. There could
be like if you had to pay some big fine
in your attorney screwed up and you had to pay
that fine because of that bad reaction, then you could
certainly go after them. There would certainly be a loss
(11:48):
of trust. Which is another one of the things and
damage to reputation, Like, if that kind of thing gets out,
then you're not going to be someone that gets all
out of work. You're gonna be the bad redactor.
Speaker 1 (11:58):
Right, So I think I think the moral of this
story is if your job is to redact things, do
it right. Yeah, Well, chuck silence means short stuff is out.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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