Texas School Serves Up Magnificent Redaction Failure To Vice Journalist
from the huh-maybe-schools-don't-have-enough-supplies dept
Redaction isn’t terribly difficult to do correctly. And yet, it often seems to be beyond the grasp of government officials who really, really want to withhold information, but just can’t seem to do it.
For instance, litigants asked the court to redact information in an FTC suit against Amazon. The court clerk apparently thought utilizing a PDF editor would do the trick, but the black bars were ornamental. Anyone reading the “redacted” decision merely needed to copy-paste the “redacted” lines into a text editor to see the hidden words.
In another form of redaction failure, a law enforcement agency accidentally sent a document with all of its edits still present in the final release. Redlined paragraphs suggested someone was supposed to redact these before release, but never happened.
Even when the government is in the wrong (i.e., it screwed up redacting documents), it sometimes tries to get the courts to fix its errors for it. Of course, once documents are released with redaction errors, they can’t simply be made to disappear, no matter how many court orders are obtained. A school board in Florida failed to properly redact a document detailing the Parkland school shooting. When it realized its error, it tried to get the newspaper that published the accidentally unredacted version slapped with an injunction for having the temerity to publish information it had legally obtained.
Then there are the sort of redaction failures that make you wonder how anyone thought this obviously faulty attempt to withhold information was adequate for public records purposes. Tim Marchman of Vice offshoot, Motherboard, sent out records requests asking schools for information on how they were dealing with the rise of the machines (learning).
Asking about efforts made to control or supervise AI tools like ChatGPT in classrooms, Motherboard received (and continues to receive) responses that show there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to handling this problem.
But one school in particular handed over more information than it should have. An email chain discussing students who were apparently accessing ChatGPT via a browser with a built-in VPN was handed over to Marchman and Motherboard with quite possibly the most inept redaction attempt yet witnessed.
This redaction, which we are not publishing to protect the identities of the clever students, appears to have been done using a grey Crayola marker that was running out of ink.
Yeah. Was there not another marker or pen or anything available? You’d think a school would be full of things called “school supplies,” among them being pens, darker colored markers, or maybe even a bottle of Whiteout.
But no, this was the tool the redacter chose to apply to the task. Vigorously.
This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of the redactor’s laziness; as the detail at the top of this post shows, they were not lazy at all, and really pressed down hard on the marker, scribbling back and forth and up and down and doing some nice cross-hatching, all in an attempt to obscure the names of the minors.
It obscured nothing. The names of all ten students were left legible. So legible, in fact, Motherboard was forced to create a mockup with fake names to demonstrate the ineptitude of this redaction attempt, rather than actually expose the not-redacted-at-all-actually names of minors left unprotected by a school employee and what was apparently the only marker in the building.
Now, I understand that not everyone tasked with handling public records requests is well-trained (or even well-supplied). But this is so poorly done you’d think the person with the marker would have at least looked for something/someone else to see if this could be handled better, rather than just shrugging it into an envelope and sending it on to Vice.
Live and learn, I guess. Or hope. An educational institution should be on top of this whole thing about using the best tool for the job. This doesn’t exactly demonstrate problem-solving is a prerequisite for the school’s public records department. I don’t know if this calls for a restaffing of the post, but for the love of all that is holy (but, you know, carefully siloed off from the state), get this person a new box of markers.