Comment by beasthacker
2 months ago
The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose.
The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as DOJ lawyers regularly tell courts) by the need to “protect the information of innocent U.S. citizens.”
But the “bad at redactions” part isn’t an accident. It functions as a litigation tactic. Makes production slow, make FOIA responses slow, and then point to that slow, manual process as the reason the timeline has to be slow. The government could easily buy the kind of redaction tools that most law firms have used for decades. Purpose built redaction tools speed the work up and reduce mistakes. But the government doesn't buy those tools because faster, cleaner production benefits the requester.
The downside for the government is that every so often a judge gets fed up and orders a normal timeline. Then agencies go into panic mode and initiate an “all hands on deck.” Then you end up with untrained, non-attorney staff doing rushed redactions by hand in Adobe. Some of them can barely use a mouse. That’s when you see the classic technical failures: someone draws a black rectangle that looks like a redaction, instead of applying a real redaction that actually removes the underlying text.
This is an extremely interesting perspective. I haven't really heard it before, but I once worked for the state in a technical capacity and watched as they spent entire workdays and scheduled multiple meetings with the sole purpose of figuring out ways to slow down or narrow FOIA requests.
I didn't really know how they slept at night, but I don't know how a lot of people sleep at night. I only had to be involved because I had to do the actual trawling through the emails. They spent their time trying to narrow the keywords that I'd have to search, and trying to figure out new definitions of the words "related to."
There’s a great Australian comedy called Utopia about a government department that has a whole episode B-plot of the characters working on the Aussie equivalent of a FOIA request. It’s pretty funny and in the end one of the workers just finds it easier to leak the document to the requesting journalist rather than deal with the official process, even though it was mundane contract details on a carpark that came in ahead of schedule and under budget.
In another episode they’re trying to find out the length of a stealth submarine for construction planning purposes of a port or something, and they have to go through endless layers of security checks with the military that lead nowhere. In the end a reporter filming a documentary episode on the government agency tells them the length because they were allowed to film the submarine on another program.
Definitely recommend the show and my friends in government say it’s scarily accurate.
Imagine if society were a program and laws, policies and procedures were its codebase. The scary thing is that the way it gets patched in reality isn't very different from the way agentic LLMs perform on actual codebases today. Bug in this department? Delete it. People abuse this system? Add more friction for legitimate users. Society has a need? Greenfield a feature that works great but doesn't fit in with existing systems at all. This didn't used to be so on the nose. I can't decide if we should welcome our new robot overlords or even what is a reflection of who anymore.
Please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
No, there isn't an enormous cohort of bureaucrats going to work every day, collectively wringing their hands and saying "haha, we're going to be STUPID today!"
You ought to re-read GP. They aren't saying there's a decision to be stupid, but that it's a byproduct of their process.
I'm not so sure.
> Some of them can barely use a mouse.
How/why are they employed for that position then?