[Infowarrior] - The Redactor’s Dilemma

[Richard Forno]

he Redactor’s Dilemma December 8th, 2009 · 2 Comments
It’s been a good week for document dumps—especially if you’re  
interested in surveillance policy. On top of Chris Soghoian’s  
revelations about telecom location tracking requests and a slew of  
leaked telecom and social networking site surveillance manuals for law  
enforcement at Cryptome, I’ve also been poring over the FOIA documents  
on cell phone lojacking obtained by the ACLU. Like a lot of the stacks  
of papers that pile up on your desk when you study national security  
surveillance for a living, these are heavily redacted, and over time,  
you start developing little heuristics for trying to put the puzzle  
pieces together, to at least limit the domain of what might be in  
those black boxes.  What can context tell you? What can you infer from  
the length of the redacted material? Looking at these sets of  
documents, I think I may have picked up on an interesting variation on  
Mike Masnick’s “Streisand Effect”—that now-familiar phenomenon where  
efforts to suppress information end up drawing all the more attention  
to it.

< - >

http://www.juliansanchez.com/2009/12/08/the-redactors-dilemma/