Anyway, I made X-ray to analyze the millions of documents we have in CourtListener so that we can try to educate people about the issue.

The analysis was fun. We used S3 batch jobs to analyze millions of documents in a matter of minutes, but we haven’t done the hard part of looking at the results and reporting them out. One day.

I'm almost fully convinced that someone did this bad intentionally, together with the bad redactions, as surely people tasked with redacting a bunch of files receive some instructions on what to do/not to do?

Why should anyone involved retain any anonymity?

I’m asking in good faith because naively it seems like this should not even exist. All of it should be exposed.

EDIT: I did not think about the innocent folks that might be caught in the crossfire. That checks out. Thanks everyone!

Whoever did these "bad" redactions doesn't even know how to use a PDF Editor.

We have paralegals and lawyers "mark for redaction", then review the documents, then "apply redactions". It's literally be done by thousands of lawyers/paralegals for decades. This is just someone not following the process and procedure, and making mistakes. It's actually quite amateurish. You should never, ever screw up redactions if you follow the proper process. Good on the X-ray project on trying to find errors.

I just want to add, applying black highlights on top of text is in fact, the "old" way of redaction, as it was common to do this, and then simply print the paper with the black bars, and send the paper as the final product.

Whoever did it is probably old, and may have done it thinking they were going to print it on paper afterwards!! Just guessing as to why someone would do this.

I think governments should not be able to hide information from citizens in general. I don't trust those who hide stuff while being fed money from the taxpayers - that is a modern form of slavery.

https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Matter%20...

As a test, select with your mouse the entire first line of paragraph number 90, and then paste it into a text editor or a shell. The unredacted text appears!

The releases haven't yielded anything so far. For all we know, Epstein used other methods of communications for the really sensitive stuff. This would not be a surprise, since the whole Maxwell family was deep into tech (Magellan, Chiliad) and Ehud Barak was the head of Israeli military intelligence in the 1980s.

The story is going to be closed in a bipartisan manner except that it might be used to remove some unwanted politicians. The New York Times has already released an article that "explains" Epstein's wealth which names all figures that appear in "conspiracy theories" in an innocent way. Basically, they claim that Epstein could just steal from billionaires like Wexner and the billionaires would roll over and do nothing.

That is the official confirmation that all intelligence angles will be squashed in a bipartisan manner. For all we know, the "incompetence" in the redactions may be a way of saying: "See, we have nothing to hide."

text=about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being text=Epstein also threatened harm to victims and helped release damaging stories =attorneys' fees and case costs in litigation related to this conduct.

=Defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex trafficking and abuse

text=$327,497.48 and $6,487.04 in New York City text=trafficking and abuse conduct. text=destroy evidence relevant to ongoing court proceedings involving Defendants' criminal sex text=Epstein also instructed one or more Epstein Enterprise participant-witnesses to text=trafficked and sexually abused. text=conduct by paying large sums of money to participant-witnesses, including by paying for their

That should in theory prevent overly redacted documents for political purposes.

An approach that could be rolled out today would be redacting with human review, but showing what % of redactions the AI would have done, and also showing the prompt given to the AI to perform redactions.