The FBI Arbitrarily Covers Up Evidence of Misconduct

They show a handful of instances, from thousands of documents, where different copies of the the same source document have been redacted at different times, probably by different people. Unsurprisingly, the results are different. In one of the four examples, I think the conclusion that there was an improper search is redacted.

The rules must by byzantine. I notice that the specific department of the government is redacted. That might be to protect the innocent. But other bits redacted are just bizarre. e.g. They redacted a version number in front of a policy name. They left the policy, but covered which version it was. ???

I have not met any, but I expect redactors are either grunts trained in global guidelines but without specific knowledge of what they are reading, or they are the people familiar with the material and are irritated to be taken away from their actual work. Either way there will be variable work. Secrets will be missed. Non-secrets will be redacted. I predict they err to the latter.

The FOIA requests are allowing out evidence that documents improper searches and information gathering. So, to that extent they are working.

Did the EFF make their entire corpus available so people can see how well? I didn't see a link in the article.

[1] Also note, the EFF isn't scouring documents to uncover unlawful information gathering, these are summaries of internal government self investigations.

An internal FBI FOIA tracker could solve this problem, but the project to develop it would probably cost $3 billion and take 5 years.