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Comment by rglover | Hacker News Reader

It should be illegal for the government to keep redactions in anything made public/declassified. It's a slap in the face to see entire sections of text (that most certainly contain important context) blocked out with a white blob.

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Seems like a great way to ensure nothing gets declassified, as any tiny part that is still relevant then blocks the whole document.

If that were the requirement, documents would not be made public/declassified unless the entire document was considered safe to release.

In many cases, a partial public document is better than no public document.

A) a lot of what is censored ends up being publicly-known information already, so it's not a matter of safety but rather public image (imo), and B) this creates a perverse incentive to associate national security (...or other sources of unsafety) with unrelated topics to avoid having to hold yourself accountable for your work.

Plus, there's little way of knowing for the documents for which we haven't seen the uncensored version if they aren't just censoring arbitrary things.

It may be reality, but it's still pretty bad for any government that pretends to value transparency.

The people who generate the documents /cannot/ be the people who decide if they're safe to release. There needs to be independent oversight. These are not agency documents they belong to the public. They may be classified but the moment they're no longer _objectively_ worth classifying they are absolutely public domain material.

It's also extremely offensive to see the names of AUSA's (Assistant US Attourneys) and SA's (FBI Special Agents) redacted. They had personal involvement in this case so I genuinely don't understand why their names cannot or should not be a part of this document. They're public figures in a public role.

I completely disagree. In this case, it is clear there wouldn‘t be a reprisal but in many case law enforcement agents and prosecution teams get involved in might involve serious reprisal threat for them or their loved ones. Their names should never be revealed.

I think you possibly haven't read very many court documents. When these cases actually get tried much of this becomes public anyways. In particular this document details agents Mitnick _himself_ spoke with. Are you really suggesting their redactions here are to prevent reprisals? How could that possibly work?

It's one thing if Kevin Motnick knows and the other if all of the internet knows and it's indexable

So he goes on a blog and types it.

Are we not at square one again?

And did Mitnick ever know Motnick? Am I experiencing the Mandala effect here?

Why do we need to have the names of people like a random security guard that was duped by social engineering? To make sure he pays for a mistake or something? What is the reason for not reacting his name?

> What is the reason for not reacting his name?

The reason is GP doesn't understand the reason, so there is no reason, so it must be made public. /s

I'm not concerned with names. It's entire paragraphs that may have names in them that are redacted. If it's just a name or address, redact that, sure.

"Called -------- on July 1st, 1983 to get access to a router"

Is much better than

"----------------------------------------------------------"

Unless we get an unredacted version leaked in the future it's impossible to say what the redacted paragraphs say, but this document has a ton of the former style of redaction which makes me trust that the larger redactions (ie page 42) were in fact necessary to protect PII as labeled.

The Mitnick files contain information about innocent people who are alive and whose privacy rights remain paramount.

Perhaps too naive a question, but if they are innocent what is there to protect? I get it in the case of informants or agents that operate undercover or in plains clothes but if just a bystander how is it different than some news article?

Details about victims whose release might cause them further harm is the obvious one.

What's your name and address? (Rhetorical question, please don't answer.) Is that info you'd be comfortable sharing on a public forum? I presume you're not doing anything particularly wrong.

This also assumes that we can all agree on a definition for "innocent."

> what is there to protect?

Their privacy. Some people have strong opinions on 3 letter agencies and poor reading comprehension. Some people are just mean spirited. Best way to prevent dumb stuff from happening is to not create a situation where dumb stuff could happen.

Licensed ham radio operators give their address every 15 minutes by law. And their full name. Sometimes it's a PO box, but mostly a home address's.

I can't think of anything more public than airwaves.

That regulation is known before one signs up to be a ham. So the disclosure is voluntary.

There are many things you're allowed to disclose about yourself that are considered unacceptable to disclose about others without their consent.

Sure, they know what they're doing and they're doing it on purpose.

If you rented out a room (or even a hotel room) to Eric Weiss (mitnicks alias, one of many), do you really want everyone here to see your full name and address?

Or if someone hacked some database of users and used your name/surname to socially engineer someone else.

or worse!

This is a bad take. Plenty of licenses involve essentially exchanging a right for a privilege (in simple terms). People who aren't comfortable with this compromise have the choice to not get a certain type of license (and many don't, HAM radio licenses aren't held by anywhere near a sizeable chunk of the population).

Is the underlying assumption that everyone redacted in that report is a licensed HAM radio user deprived of their right to have a private name and address?

Nothing to hide, nothing to fear?

Their privacy, which has value to them and should be respected. You can argue it on a case by case basis but the default is (and should be) to not disclose. As for comparisons to news articles, well maybe this is a place where the government is doing better than some news agencies (reasoning as to why is left to the reader).

maybe you told someone you were going to be some place else

maybe you were with your other family and this unwarranted disclosure revealed that to a scorned spouse and friend group that are always looking for holes in the story 40 years later

not criminal issues, not an FBI problem, and yet can alter your private life

I completely disagree. Nothing would get declassified.

Anyway, each redaction has a usually-legible Exemption code next to it that tells you why it's redacted. You can find out what those are here:

https://foia.wiki/wiki/Exemptions

For example, you see 7c/b7c in the document a lot:

"could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy"

There may be a middle ground where, with some effort effort, a watered down summary of the redacted information could be given (e.g. if a name of a person is redacted, replace it with some sort of unique handle). As long as this is done as an annotations for the visibly marked redaction, I see no problem. The reader may choose to trust those annotations or not.

This would be fair (I hadn't considered names in my original comment). Whether truly sensitive or not, protecting names/addresses/numbers/etc. would make sense (especially if there was a footnote to a "why" something was redacted).

Ukrainian court rulings do this -- it's always person_1 meeting person_2 at address_1, so only the parties have an unredacted ruling, while redacted one is publicly searchable

Plain redactions require the same amount of trust in the redacter but are less likely to leak information.

I write a lot about history, and as part of that work I occasionally file FOIA requests. There was one occasion where the FBI's response contained dozens of pages that were typewritten memos consisting of:

To: [recipient name]

From: [sender name]

Date: [date]

[Multiple paragraphs of redacted text]

...and that was basically it. It was funny, but frustrating (funstrating?).

Example: https://www.damninteresting.com/temp/memo.jpg

Also, the human effort required to make the redactions is high.

That means records cannot be automatically declassified after N years because the effort to redact every document created N years ago would be extreme.

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