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US lawmakers accuse justice department of 'inappropriately' redacting Epstein files
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essentialsaltes
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Top Trump DOJ official demands lawmaker retract Epstein inquiry: 'Take down that post'
Earlier on Thursday, Khanna flagged an email sent to Epstein in 2016 by an individual whose name was redacted, an email that indicated it was sent by a “political figure,” Khanna argued, and thereby should not have had the sender’s identity redacted. Khanna is the co-sponsor of the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA), the bill-turned law that forced the DOJ to release its files on Epstein, and with redactions limited to those protecting the identities of minors or victims.
The unidentified sender of the email in question wrote to Epstein that they had gotten “more votes” than ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, then a presidential candidate, supporting Khanna's claim that they were a "political figure." The sender also suggested that they had attempted to visit Epstein’s private island, and signed off the email with the phrase “love ya.”
Responding to Khanna’s claim on social media, Blanche accused Khanna of “calling for the release of a victim’s personal information,” alongside a clown-face emoji. Khanna fired back, claiming there was “no evidence this political candidate was a victim.”
'readers added context'
The sender of the email is Gwendolyn Beck, a 2014 congressional candidate and Epstein associate, who visited his island and was accused by victim Virginia Giuffre of joining orgies. Ms. Beck did not identify herself and was not identified as a victim of Epstein.
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Tuur
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Hard to be desperate about something you don't really care about. It's utterly amusing to me that no one wants to consider the labor involved in going through several million documents to redact them. I have to wonder how many have so much as gone through a manuscript with a red pen to make corrections and revisions, or, even worse, waded through pages of texts generated by seriously confused optical character recognition software. For extra difficulty, trying doing the latter without the original documents to compare it against it. Far easier to ascribe failure to conspiracy.,
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Especially when victims' identities were treated in such a sloppy fashion while it seems that conspirators' names were redacted with greater efficiency.
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Hans Blaster
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They should have just released materials without complaint early last year as they redacted them, like they promised to do. They made this bed.
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DaisyDay
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They could have released them in tranches of some number you deem reasonable rather than all or nothing. With AI, they could do it quickly as the documents are all electronic.
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Tuur
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I wonder about AI. In all seriousness, in tinkering with AI online, it sometimes comes up with answers that read like a student trying to bluff their way through an essay question on a test. Just for fun, pose a question about an obscure bit of information, such as an historical event, to an AI and compare the results to information you know about it.
Some of what you can do with a document, like the aforementioned going through text scanned by OCR, is to do a search and replace on character patterns, but it's not 100% effective. Worse, that method can sometimes produce artifacts that doesn't match the original.
So, with AI used for this, for paper documents we'd have to have good OCR, and for both that and text already in electronic form the AI would have to know the names to redact and the ones to allow, and to recognize what's a name and what's not. To break it down into steps, it would have to first convert scanned documents into legible text, then compile a list of what it thinks are name, then, when that's cleaned up, utilize a database of names not to redact (as it's likely smaller than the list of names to redact) to determine what to redact.
Of course, as pointed out, everything is easy for the person who doesn't have to do that, so implementing the above steps is likely harder than it seems. Such is usually the way of things.
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Hans Blaster
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No, those politicians are in Congress. They didn't have the files. That's why they wrote the law.
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RocksInMyHead
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It's not like they had just one person doing it. According to lawyers who do this sort of thing for a living, this would be a small to mid-sized document review for any major firm, and might take anywhere from 5-7 months with a staff of maybe a dozen assigned to the case. The DOJ had more than 500 people (per their own statements) working on the files though.
The DOJ says they identified about 6 million pages of documents, so call it roughly 10,000 pages per person. If we take the worst case scenario and assume that they didn't start working on it until the law was passed, that means they had a little over two months (71 days) from the time the law was passed to when they released the files, so each person would need to average about 140 pages per day (212 if we assume they got weekends and holidays off). That seems pretty doable to me, especially because a lot of those "pages" were fairly short emails.
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Tuur
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Have you ever done it, then? From experience in revising manuscripts, it was less than 140 pages per day, and that was manuscripts I had written. And I'd usually have to go over it again to catch what I missed the first time.
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DaisyDay
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In this case, AI would only be searching for set terms, e.g. victim names, to flag for redaction much like a macro. They wouldn't have to make any decision other than to match the names to those on a list. The same for flagging nude photos - they would not have to decide who was underage just flag for people to look and judge.
Thus the plethora of "=" substituting for letters in the middle of words.
These documents have already been scanned. Every document reviewed and released has been released in electronic form, so that much is not an issue.
The list of victim names is also already known obviously or the humans checking couldn't do it either. The names, with variations, are already known. I don't see how this is an obstacle. There is no need to "know" what is "a" name because only the names on the list/database are relevant. Any "name" not that of a victim is irrelevant and not to be redacted.
That still seems the best way to sort through millions of documents to figure out which ones should be looked at for redactions. As for what should not be redacted, the act specified that no name other than a victim's should be. One difficulty was that the some documents received were pre-redacted for reasons that had nothing to do with Epstein but with the cases the documents stemmed from. These need to be unredacted.
If you've ever worked with mountains of data you would know that it is easier to automate as much as possible as a person's ability to concentrate on repetitious actions over hours, days, weeks diminishes drastically after a certain point. Human minds wander; AI does not. Searching for specific names is simple pattern recognition which AI actually excels at.
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DaisyDay
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That is a totally different task unless you are doing a simple find/replace because, I assume, you have to read and understand a manuscript which is not only unnecessary but a hindrance for the task of finding specific names to redact.
The documents reviewed for redaction are not paper documents. A huge number such as emails are originally electronic in form. Paper documents are scanned for archives; microfiche is standard for stuff that legally needs to be retained long term (50 years). I think that dvds might be accepted nowadays as well, but most are also kept on a database for accessibility. Paper is bulky and fragile.
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Stopped_lurking
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These are not manuscripts, as in article manuscripts where you twist and turn every sentence to see if you can make it better. What type of manuscripts do you feel would be comparable to the process of redacting names?
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