First 100 Pages of Aaron Swartz’s Secret Service File Released

Question for anyone who might know: does a judge sign off on what is redacted and the justification for doing so? Redacting names of investigators, etc. makes sense here, but when entire paragraphs are redacted, it makes you wonder if FOIA requests are really worthwhile?

Or at the very least someone who can accurately place a piece of paper on a photo copier.

I'm sure a lot of it works fine within the agencies, it's just the translation process to "muggle" where the problems coincidentally appear.

Budgets are tight, FOIA compliance is way down the list. Congress likes keeping the executive branch on short rations, and legal stuff like this is a cost center.

If they were asked to supply the White House with photocopies of non controversial documents, would the photocopies look like that? I'm, (perhaps wrongly) assuming not.

So to me, it hints at a level of contempt for having to comply.

In other words, doing a slap dash crappy job because doing it annoys the person tasked with it or authorizing it. Like a kid who is told to clean it's bedroom and then doing it sloppily because it doesn't want to do it.

There is no them. I can just imagine the redactor cursing out the idiot who scanned this for him.