#Definition of redactor manuals
#Definition of redactor code

There are some bits that you just obviously cut out-whole paragraphs describing operational details that, for good reasons or bad, you want to keep secret. Imagine you’re given the task of censoring documents like these for public release.

This is, after all, a model application for getting cell site and sector information to reveal location, and knowing what kinds of orders they typically use to get this information, I had figured they would invoke the part that enables them to request a “temporarily assigned network address.” But it does point toward the larger problem-or strategy for reading, if you spend your time outside the federal government poking through this stuff-that I want to call the Redactor’s Dilemma.

#Definition of redactor code

Not the statutory definition-that was already sitting on my desk in yet another pile-but the fact that the investigative technique they’re taking pains to conceal (that’s what “b7e” means, it’s the code for the FOIA exemption they’re invoking) involved exploiting that part of the statute in some crucial way. What sort of jackass (I fumed) had concluded that the contents of American public laws were some kind of operational secret? But of course, once I got over my pique at this obnoxious excess of secrecy, I started thinking: Why, exactly were they worried about someone reading that? I had, perversely, just gained a bit of new information. (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address and Code! Even if you don’t happen to have §2703(c)(2)(E) seared into your memory, the citation to the law is right there! The missing bit reads: What bonehead had redacted this? They’d cut out the statutory definition of “basic subscriber information” found in the U.S. Here’s a partly redacted footnote that leapt out at me from a template application for a cell-tracking order from Nevada:Īt first, I was just irritated.

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.

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.

#Definition of redactor manuals

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. It’s been a good week for document dumps-especially if you’re interested in surveillance policy.