Too Many Mundane Secrets: The Problem of Redaction

I spent much of the winter/early spring putting together a classroom reference on Chilean human rights abuses under Pinochet (one of my primary gigs is writing/editing these sorts of textbook-like things; more on that here). In the course of my research I sifted through a lot of FOIAed documents released by the CIA in the early 2000s (when they were forced to ‘fess up to Congress about their involvement with Pinochet as a condition of getting their budget money). Predictably, most of this stuff was at least partially redacted–and since it was all stuff form the 1970s-1990s, what I was looking at were PDFs of scans of actual hardcopy from which the offending words and phrases had been excised with a hobby knife. These pages are then stamped “SANITIZED,” which tends to imply something about the parts that were removed. (Here’s a representative sample; I love that the “one thing” Jesse Helms has to say is specifically redacted. I met Helms once, when I was a grade-schooler visiting Washington, DC. At the time I thought he looked like Boss Hogg, but very affable.)
Anyway, what struck me about these documents, these secrets, is that some human–likely a low-level clerk–went through all of these *very sensitive materials* and cut out those words. All day? Every day? Was this her whole job? Did every day end with a garbage can packed with word salad? In any case, still, some specific human saw all of these secrets unredacted; she knows what Helms’s one important thing to say to Kissinger about Chile and Pinochet was. She likely worked in a room *full* of people just like her, and they knew *all* the secrets. And they weren’t the only ones: Someone typed up this transcript. For every secret that’s deemed such by fat men in expensive suits, there’s someone at the bottom who could spill those beans. She’s wearing a cheap off-the-rack tweed skirt-and-jacket combo. Her blouse binds under her arms when she reaches up to fetch the next page out of her IN basket. She’s going to sip a Diet Tab while sitting on a concrete planter during her 30-minute lunch hour.
People with good salaries and lots to lose knew about what was happening in Chile; the new about the systemic use of rape and electricity, they knew about the “disappearances,” they knew about the torture camps, the new about the stadium *as it was happening.* They didn’t know rumors; they knew facts and names and places and numbers.
But also, plenty of people at the bottom, people with a lot less to lose, they knew these things, too. Not as much, and not in an organized way, but each of them knew a few things. Probably all of the individual things seemed sort of pointless and unintelligible. But they had to occasionally talk, right? Occasionally glance at each other’s work loads? Occasionally read something in the Washington Post months later and say “Hold up; I’ve seen that document. I . . . I know what Jesse Helms’s one thing he had to say was!”
So, in the front of my mind I was editing together this book on Chile, so that high schoolers in America could know about what was done to folks just a year or two older then them in Chile in the name of thwarting Communism. But in the back of my head, I thought a lot about those women at their desks with their hobby knives and their IN baskets.
But I didn’t go further, and think at all about the job itself; I was too wrapped up in the people. And, when you start to think about it, the job is pretty crazy.
So, I was delighted to come across Alex Wellerstein’s recent post to his Restricted Data blog, where-in he really fully explores the bureaucratic curiosity that is redaction:
The Problem of Redaction | Restricted Data