Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Redacted!

Episode Date: October 16, 2024

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? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, Beau. Hey, Matt. Are you ready to tell the readers about the extra special episode we have coming up? I think we have to let them in on our little surprise. Yeah, if you haven't already figured it out, the queen of Christmas herself, can't believe this, Mariah Carey, will be joining us this week. Wow. Readers, publishers, caties, and finalists, tune in to maybe the most

unforgettable episode of Lost Culture Eastus yet. Listen to Lost Culture Eastus on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Tune in to maybe the most unforgettable episode of Las Culturas this yet. Listen to Las Culturas on Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to The Short Stuff. I'm Josh and Chuck's here as always. Dave's here in spirit, Jerry'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. That's cause they're at Spirit Halloween. That's true, they both got extra side hustles as they're called. We just got a bunch of new Halloween stuff. Emily really wants to ramp up our Halloween game. 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. Does it suck the breath out of the baby? No, it just holds her by her leg upside down, and she screams a lot, and the guy's like, wah-hah-hah-hah, and it's pretty great. I mean, this is a huge step up from what we normally do,

which is like a paper mache pumpkin and a sign that says get away. Yeah. Yeah. The reason I ask about the breath is 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. And our friends at the show, John Hodgman and Jesse Thorne, 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. Yeah, they'll take your breath away for sure seeing them live. Yeah, so just go check out Judge John Hodgman Tour. It's a fun show, and you never know who might show up. It might be me. It might be Josh. Man, Hodgman owes you some money for that segue. That was amazing.

And spirit Halloween, for God's sake. I'm still trying to figure out how you worked that in. That was great. All right, well, we've wasted two of our 12 minutes, so let's talk about Redaction. Yeah, and Chuck, Redaction, we definitely touched two of our 12 minutes, so let's talk about redaction. Yeah. And Chuck, redaction, we definitely touched on it in our FOIA 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 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 redact on the regular. Yeah, for sure. You mentioned FOIA, 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 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 HIPAA thing that you always hear about at 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 and Privacy Act. So, your educational records could be redacted if it was brought into court, that kind of thing.

For sure. And then speaking of court, the legal world is huge on redaction. They're redaculously into it. That one really got me, actually. That one, 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. There's protected, like say copyrighted or trademarked or patented information, like trade secrets can be in there if there's a company involved.

Uh, there's people not related to the case who may be emailed about something or were just CC'd. You want to get rid of that. Yeah, attorney-client privilege, of course. 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 and all these fields that are required to redact things, like HIPAA requires the medical field to redact, there's

not actually 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 gonna get your pants sued off. That's right. And shall we take a break and talk about the myriad ways

that you can do so? Yeah. All right, we'll be right back. ["Black Lit"] Hey, I'm Jackbeast Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. I'm Jackbeast Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary

enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Once again, we find ourselves in an unprecedented election. And with all that's happening in the lead up to the big day, a weekly podcast just won't cut it. Get a better grasp of where we stand as a nation every weekday on the MPR Politics podcast. All right. So you 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 what you've, 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 or it's not always a name just whatever you're redacting again it could be sentences or whole 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 so. Yeah, you mean I watched the Amber Heard Johnny Depp lawsuit a couple of years ago? On the trial on TV? 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 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 camera was the original just with it blacked out and Apparently the internet could read what it was. I think it was somebody's email like maybe even Amber Heard's email Yeah, and that night the lawyers were like they that's not how you do it You yeah do that with the originals and you make a photocopy of the original It's just not possible to see what you've redacted at that point. So, come. What a dumb thing to do.

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 happens as a result of that? I'm curious. 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 markers, good old school way, but, you know, a lot of stuff these days, most stuff, in fact, is in electronic form. So, people started using software tools and, you know, like things within a program to essentially black magic marker over it. And that can be good, but, you know, one of the articles I used for this talked 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, maybe somebody could design a program to undo that and override it.

So this guy, like, he doesn'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 but it makes sure that no one can see what was there or if it's electronic I might just completely delete the sentence or word right and type in over that and all bold letters Deleted by the request of the CIA. Yeah, and that guy's name is Mark Zahid, 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 Manafort, 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 Russian interference in the 2016 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 and sent it out.

And like John- With edit privileges. Yeah. And John Swain copied the whole thing and pasted it and that stuff was not redacted anymore because it didn't copy paste the black box. So there's definitely the wrong way to do it and it does happen from people who 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, you know? Yeah, for sure. You can, you know, if you're in a case and you see something's redacted, but you're trying to still kind of figure it out, and like guess and speculate.

First of all, that attorney, Zaid, 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 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 is Abraham Abramowitz. One of them's name is Joshua Clarkengage. I was gonna say don't drag me into it, but I don't know this Joshua Clarkengage. And then one guy's name is Tom Bill. And you see this very short redaction. You could probably figure, oh, I bet you anything, it's the guy with a really short name.

Because it's a short redaction. So we've narrowed it down that way. So that's just one way that I dreamed up. That you can smart redact, you know, maybe do like longer lines if it's a really short name or something that you're trying to conceal. 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 Clarkengage or something like that or Chance Finkelstein or something, you know? Like, and sorry to all the Chance Finkelsteins out there, but that sounds made up as a name. And if you are a Chance Finkelstein, write in, because that would be amazing to hear from you.

Well, that's why I did silly things, because I didn't want to accidentally say someone's real name. Oh, okay. Oh, I get it. Well, good idea. I don't think Josh Engage, or Clark Engage is a real surname, is it? I don't know. Probably not.

It doesn't sound right. Maybe Mick Clark engaged. Back to redacting. Earlier you said, like, what could happen if you're like, I guess I don't have to pay my lawyer if they 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 and your attorney screwed up and you had to pay that fine because of that bad redaction Then you could certainly go after them There would certainly be a loss 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 gonna be someone that gets a lot of work You're gonna be the bad redactor, right? So I think the moral of this story is if your job is to redact things, do it right. Yeah, well Chuck's silence means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, myHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.