Spies Do a Huge Volume of Work in Invisible Ink
Nothing expresses American ambivalence about government secrecy as vividly as the old Washington craft of redaction, the selective removal of passages from once-secret papers or books by spies. It is the bureaucratic equivalent of lingerie, covering the very parts you most want to see.
In every nook of the national security agencies, redactors labor anonymously. The federal Information Security Oversight Office says 460 million pages of previously classified records have been made public since 1996, usually after a markup by the overworked gnomes of declassification.
The redactors sometimes slip. Before the days of e-mail, it was occasionally possible to make out imperfectly deleted passages of a document by holding it up to a light. More recently, journalists receiving electronic documents have been thrilled to learn that a mere mouse-click can restore some redactions, as one researcher, Russ Kick of TheMemoryHole.org, discovered with a Justice Department diversity report in 2003.
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In every nook of the national security agencies, redactors labor anonymously. The federal Information Security Oversight Office says 460 million pages of previously classified records have been made public since 1996, usually after a markup by the overworked gnomes of declassification.
The redactors sometimes slip. Before the days of e-mail, it was occasionally possible to make out imperfectly deleted passages of a document by holding it up to a light. More recently, journalists receiving electronic documents have been thrilled to learn that a mere mouse-click can restore some redactions, as one researcher, Russ Kick of TheMemoryHole.org, discovered with a Justice Department diversity report in 2003.