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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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
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
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 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 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 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 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 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
production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com. And for more podcasts for my heart radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.