Embarrassing Redaction Failures

[...]during a proffer meeting held with the Special Counsel on September 11, 2018, Mr. Manafort explained to the Government attorneys and investigators that he would have given the Ukrainian peace plan more thought, had the issue not been raised during the period he was engaged with work related to the presidential Case 1:17-cr-00201-ABJ Document 471 Filed 01/08/19 Page 5 of 10 6 campaign. [...]a 2002 article in the National Law Journal reported about a California family filing a wrongful death suit that included allegations against a criminal defense attorney who failed to properly redact documents that contained their son's contact information.4 The article, entitled "A New Generation of Redacting Tools," reported on third-party redacting tools available to law offices and government agencies. A 2007 Boston University Journal of Science and Technology Law article noted that the legal profession had suffered its share of inadvertent metadata disclosures and provided an example from the previous year involving electronically redacted excerpts from a U.S. Justice Department brief that became publicly viewable after they were copied and inserted into a Microsoft Word document.7 In 2008, Public.Resource.org released an audit of PACER documents and noted 1,600 cases in which litigants submitted documents with unredacted Social Security numbers and many actions where the redaction was performed incorrectly by simply placing a black box on top of the taxpayer ID, leaving the numbers untouched underneath the graphic.8 Does this sound familiar? The redactions in the documents released by the New York Times were easily bypassed by the now-familiar highlighting, copying, and pasting technique.11 As my last example, in 2016, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., asked lawyers to investigate and report back to him on how a redacted detail in a lawsuit was published by an online media organization.12 The probe was ordered after the media organization published a court order that included a redacted detail, specifically, the name of the plaintiff.