Why and How Are Documents Redacted?

Court and other government documents are often presented with redactions -- that is, with some text blacked out or otherwise made unreadable. Learn how this is done -- and why -- in today's episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff, production of iHeart Radio, Hey brain
Stuff Lauren Boglebon here. Recently, the American public got its
first look at Special Counsel Robert Mueller's two volume report
on the investigation into Russian interference in the presidential election,
and some may have been startled to see how much
of the four forty eight page document, about seven point

(00:23):
to five of the text, according to the news website
Fox And been blacked out by US Attorney General William Barr.
Each blacked out word or passage was labeled with a
color code and notation indicating the legal justification for withholding
that material. These included potential harm to an ongoing legal matter,
the need to conceal investigative techniques, personal privacy, and grand

(00:43):
jury testimony, which generally must be kept secret under Rule
six of the Federal Rules of Procedure. In less a
judge issues a waiver, the House Judiciary Committee still subpoena
the uncensored report and Bar's explanations didn't quell the widespread
curiosity about what it was that Barr decided that we
shouldn't see. We spoke with Michael Ravnitzky, an attorney who's
an expert in the release of government documents through the

(01:05):
Freedom of Information Act. He said, there's something psychological about it.
If you see a document with blocked out sections, your
eyes go to it and you wonder what's under their
welcomed the arcane, secretive subculture of redaction, which is the
practice of removing or concealing portions of documents before a publication.
It's a phenomenon that most ordinary Americans probably are unfamiliar with,

(01:26):
as evidenced by the four thousand percent spike in the
number of searches for redact and redacted on the Meriam
Webster dictionary website on the day that bar sent a
letter to Congress revealing that he would release a redacted
version of Mueller's report. But attorneys, journalists, and historical researchers
are accustomed to blacked out spaces on documents as a
consequence of dealing with sensitive subjects. Redacting has long been

(01:47):
part of government imposed secrecy. When former CIA employee Victor
Marcetti and his co author John D. Marx sought to
publish a book on the CIA in the early nineteen seventies,
government censors who had authority to review the book under
Marchetti's employment contract redacted a hundred and sixty eight pages
from the text. The book was published with blank spaces
showing the location of the redacted passages. Decades later, documents

(02:08):
obtained using the Freedom of Information Act are still sometimes
riddled with blank squares over faces and photographs, and black
bars over words and sentences, and sometimes entire pages. But
it's not just the government. In the legal world, attorneys
routinely redact portions of documents that are to be turned
over during the discovery process in civil lawsuits. Those deletions
occur in order to protect attorney client privilege, attorney's work

(02:31):
product for clients, commercially sensitive information, and information not relevant
to the litigation. Other redactions are required by the courts
themselves to protect personal information, such as social security numbers,
from misuse. One of the odd things about redaction is
that while there are rules about what should be redacted,
there aren't really a lot of hard and fast rules
about how to block out that material. For years, attorneys

(02:52):
and government officials often simply used black markers to conceal
sensitive portions of documents, which were then photocopied so that
someone couldn't hold the paper up to thee and read
the censored words. In the mid two thousands, as more
and more documents began to be distributed in electronic form,
both the government and private sector law firms started shifting
to redacting the digital files themselves using software tools. These days,

(03:13):
attorneys involved in big corporate lawsuits often use e discovery platforms,
which allow them to manage massive amounts of documents and
which contain tools for redacting portions, though you can also
safely redact information using programs like Adobe Acrobat Pro assuming
that you're working with PDFs, But regardless of what technology
is used, it's necessary to go through documents individually and

(03:34):
figure out what to mask, which is a time intensive process.
In the case of the MULA report, bar and his
staff apparently scanned a printed copy of the report, redacted it,
and then printed and scanned it again to create a
new digital copy. That excess of caution resulted in a
low quality image that wasn't searchable. Since then, the Department
of Justice has published a searchable version as well. But

(03:54):
digital redaction isn't always fool proof. One sophisticated, high tech
method for reading redact word in the document involves analyzing
their lengths and comparing them to other words with the
same length on the page. And Guardian reporter John Swain
found that he could view redacted text in a court
document in the Paul Manifort case by copying and pasting
it into a Microsoft Word document. Matthew Ingram of the

(04:15):
Columbia Journalism Review explained, quote this likely happened because someone
either drew over the unwanted text with the black highlighter
tool and Microsoft Word, or used Adobe Acrobat's redaction tools
but forgot to merge them with the original document. We
also spoke with Mark Sade, a Washington, d c. Based
attorney who specializes in national security law and frequently deals
with redactions. He said, I don't trust technology. Even if

(04:37):
there's a safety mechanism, someone will invent something that overrides it. Thus,
Zaid generally shoes electronic redaction. His preferred method is to
quote literally cut it out with scissors and then photocopy
the page. It's a really sloppy looking redaction, but no
one will ever see what I cut out. In other instances,
if he's obstructed by the government to redact information from
a document, he deletes the text and types the number

(04:59):
of word and deleted by the request of the CIA
in its place, but manual redactions on actual paper can
go awry to Zad recalls once receiving some redacted documents
in a case and discovering that he could hold them
up and read the words through the black ink. Whoever
sent them had provided the original pages rather than making
a photo copy. Zaide says that even when information in

(05:20):
court papers is redacted, it's sometimes possible to figure out
what's in the blacked out sections. The client may be
able to identify a witness or piece together what was
said in a discussion in which he or she participated,
for example, but generally, Zaide explained that it's not wise
to speculate, as even educated guesses can be wrong. He
gave the example of a Freedom of Information Act litigation
connected with the DP Cooper skyjacking case. He said, we

(05:43):
thought a document pertained to a particular person who was dead,
but when Zaide gave the government a copy of the
man's obituary in an effort to get the full document released,
they told Zaide he assumed wrong and the document was
about someone else. Today's episode was written by Patrick J.
Kaiger and produced by Tyler clang. Brain Stuff is a

(06:04):
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on
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