Comment by cmarschner

There are hundreds of thousands of documents being reviewed by probably a thousand or more FBI agents. There is zero chance they are all loyalists.

Indeed, incompetence is basically guaranteed if the organization selects for allegiance rather than competence. But I prefer to think that at least part of this was malicious compliance, because that suggests that at least some people at the FBI still have their soul.

Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered.

There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.

I'm sure not all those hundreds have been involved with every document.

I'm kinda surprised (and disappointed) nobody has done a Snowden on it though.

Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.

> Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence

Hundreds of people might be involved, but the only key factor required for a single point of failure to propagate to the deliverable is lack of verification.

And God knows how the Trump administration is packed with inexperiente incompetents assigned to positions where they are way way over their head, and routinely commit the most basic mistakes.

It wouldn't be malicious though. Well, it's malicious towards the Trump administration, but not towards the people. Quite the opposite.

The other side of that same coin is to never admit to malice if your actions can be adequately excused by stupidity.

Well, also the lawyer would have to really badly fuck up for it to become public news that they had actually used the information.

> you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...

There are almost 2000 disbarments annually in the US.

The california bar recieves 1 compliant for every 10 law licenses in the state every year.

There's a wikipedia page on notable disbarments.

Legal malpractice suites are on the rise.

If you are going to assert that legal malpractice is not legitimate concern, I think the burden of evidence is on you.

My recollection is that it varies quite a bit between jurisdictions. The ABA's model rules require you to notify the other party when they accidentally send you something but leave unspecified what else, if anything, you might have to do.

I’m unclear why this is downvoted given the below. While it would theoretically be jurisdiction-specific, if the ABA model rules don’t provide some specific guidance, it’s clear that the lawyers would be ethically obligated to use whatever info they obtained if it helped their client and as otherwise consistent with their ethical obligations in the jurisdictions that follow those. I’m admitted in New York, and I don’t recall any kind of bar on the usage of this type of info there. Seems like in a lot of jurisdictions they’d have a duty to notify, but that may not even be the case in all.

Case study: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...

> Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text

Sure. But anyone can visually examine this. That means everyone with situational context can directly examine the quality of the redaction.

Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works. Or you have to separate the folks with context from the folks with techical competence. (There is the third option of training everyone in the DoJ how to examine the inner workings of a PDF. That seems wasteful.)

I suppose the best process would be this, and then after rescanning putting a black bar over each redacted text with image editing.

Yes I remember that incident. It was big over here.

However I'm 100% sure that that was not a real spy incident. But rather just a 'message' to be sent from the Russian govt. The same way they have infiltrated our airspace with TU-95 bombers nearly every month for decades. Just a message "Hey we are still watching you".

When you see how ridiculously incompetent they were, not just their phone history but also the gear they had with them. It amounts to nothing more than a scriptkiddy's pineapple. There's no way they would have been able to do any serious infiltration into any kind of even remotely competent organisation.

Also the visible fumbling about in a carpark with overly complex antennas instead of something more hidden (e.g. an apartment across the street, a cabling tent or something). IMO the objective here was to get caught and stir a fuss.

Reminds of the time Russian security services showed copies of the Sims as evidence of an Ukranian Nazi plot.

> with taxi receipts

Please tell me they were saving them for expensing.

Or the passports discovered intact after a particularly heinous terrorist attack.

>In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country

I disagree. It felt that way for the first few months, but the wheels are coming off. Trump is too old and unpopular to steal a 3rd term. Therefore everyone around him has to worry about what will happen in 3 years, and plan for post-Trump rather than forever-Trump.

His last administration was filled with traditional Republicans.

I may have disagreed with them on virtually every policy point, but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well.

We would have never agreed on the right policy, but we definitely agreed that his policy was not the right one.

> they have competent people doing the strategy this time

They had a great playbook in Project 2025. I'm not convinced Trump ever had the smartest people executing it.

> Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit.

Are you talking about the same Bill Barr? "Eager to win accolades from liberals" is a hilariously Trump-after-he-fired-someone thing to say.

Have you read his Wikipedia page? Do you know who he actually is?

> You mean the guy who covered up for Epstein's 'suicide' and expected us morons to believe it?

Let's assume that's true. How does it clash with him being "contemptible...but smart AF"?

>exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence

Being aware of one's limitations is the strongest hallmark of intelligence I've come across...

> This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with.

No, this is an example of someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful outcomes.

"Smart" people like to believe that knowing enough minutiae is enough to result in a successful outcome.

Actual smart people know that the process is more important than the minutiae, and proceed accordingly.

Not at all. It's a procedure that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. Sometimes that's what you want.

> you can't simply search&replace with machine precision

Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.

> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length

This is the only weakness of Barr's method.

> it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision

Anyong relying on automated tools to redact is doing so performatively. At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context to sit down and read through the documents and strike out anything that reveals–directly or indirectly, spelled correctly or incorrectly–too much.

> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions

Increasing the size of the redaction box to include enough of the surrounding text to make that very difficult.