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Comment by SilverElfin | Hacker News Reader

Is there any avenue to validate the claims of the governor’s office, that these things must be protected? Are there for example, firms that will look at the unredacted content as a third party with confidentiality agreements, to certify that it is correctly being redacted? Otherwise it feels like they could easily be hiding any number of unethical or outright criminal activities this way.

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There actually is a legal process for just this sort of situation.

It's called an "In camera review". Assuming someone sues Abbott over this, then a judge can take the documents in question, look over them, and make a determination on whether or not Abbott's claims are true.

That ruling can be appealed to higher courts.

Exactly this. I've used this on many FOIA cases where the defendant public body has argued for redaction. One was an 800 page manual on jail procedures which the body said was 100% subject to redaction. On the first round we got them to concede the table of contents, after that it wasn't worth arguing further, so sadly we had to file a motion for in camera review and the judge had to take it home and read all 800 pages. The final determination was that only the locations and operations of the keys, how knives were stored in the kitchen, and how the armory operated were actually redactable.

Of course, then the public body appeals it and the appellate justices then have to read the 800 pages all over again.

But eventually you should get a half-decent result.

If there were a lawsuit it’s possible that the original communications could be obtained by court order. I wouldn’t be surprised if that happened eventually.

The FBI and friends can also use their means of unlawful surveillance and leak the contents to politically aligned publishers.

My guess is that they discussed a lot of horse trading too candidly.

> Are there for example, firms that will look at the unredacted content as a third party with confidentiality agreements, to certify that it is correctly being redacted?

No. But there are investigative reporters.

Not entirely accurate.

The government uses "special masters" or "taint teams" if there's a scenario like this, at times. One was involved in the Trump Mar-a-Lago case.

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/resources/news...

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