Thursday, April 18, 2019

What Does "Lightly Redacted" Look Like?

Here's a look at all the pages in the Mueller Report.  You can see it better here.




I was a bit irked that I saw headlines describing the Mueller report as 'lightly redacted' without the quotation marks.  That was Barr's office's description of it, his spin.  And it was clear that he saw his job as not just the head of the DOJ, but as a defender of the president.

So when I saw this view of the Report, I thought it was worth considering.  I don't see enough government reports like this to know if the Mueller Report is lightly redacted, moderately redacted, or heavily redacted.

If we simply go by percentage of blocked text, I suppose this is lightly redacted.
But another way of thinking about it is how it compares to other such reports.
Another way to think about it is whether the parts redacted really need to be redacted for genuine legal and security reasons, or because they reveal things the president doesn't want to reveal.

I'm not using the term 'lightly redacted' ironically, because I don't know the answers to any of those questions.  I'm just offering this visual of what has been described as 'lightly redacted.'

2 comments:

  1. A great analysis from the NYT (link below) today your readers might find informative:

    https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/19/us/politics/redacted-mueller-report.html

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks Jacob. When I got to the view of the report by page, the image just jumped out at me. I guess others reacted the same. Here's your link, but with a link so it's easy to get to.

      Delete

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