Short Stuff: Redacted!
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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 because 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. Yeah.

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, and it's pretty great. I mean, this is a huge step up from what we normally do, which is like a papier-mâché 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. Might be me. 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 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 ask 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 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 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. 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. 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. 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 like required to redact things, like HIPAA requires the medical field to redact, there's 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 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. We'll be right back.

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 if you've ever seen government documents on 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.

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

way to do so. Yeah. Yumi and I watched the Amber Heard Johnny Depp lawsuit a couple of years ago.

Oh, 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 could read what it was. I think it was somebody's email, like maybe even Amber Heard's email.

Oh, wow. Yeah. And that night the lawyers were like, they that's not how you do it. You do that with the originals and you make a photocopy of the originals. It's just not possible to see what you've redacted at that point. So 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. You know what? 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. Yeah.

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 an 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 one of the articles I used for this talked to an attorney, a D.C.-based national security law attorney, who 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. Yeah.

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 Zaid, 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

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. 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 anymore.

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 attorneys I had 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

And one of them's name is Abraham Abramowitz. One of them's name is Joshua Clarkin Gage. I was going to say, don't drag me into it, but I don't know this Joshua Clarkin Gage. 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 the 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 Clark Engage or something like that, or Chance Finkelstein or something, you know? And sorry to all the Chance Finkelsteins out there, but that sounds made up as a name. And if you are 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 Clark Engage is a real name.

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'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 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 going to be someone that gets a lot of work. You're going to 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 Silence means short stuff is out. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.