Weather Report #16: They redacted my pronouns, Jerry.

Happy Father's Day, dear reader! Welcome to your weekly Weather Report, a column where I recommend a book, a movie, music, and some links to underlooked articles, essays, videos, and podcasts.

Here's what you're getting this week:

1. I look into the redactions in some documents I recently received from the Army Reserve to explain how broken the FOIA redaction system is.
2. A British mystery novel about all the secrets ten years of marriage can hold with a killer twist ending.
3. A mid-2000's War on Terror thriller centered on all the dimly lit offices and men in suits who directed the carnage from miles away.
4. Articles, essays, podcasts, and videos about Meta tracking you, politics at the point of a gun, emotional numbing through slop, the colonial boomerang, and an interview with one of my favourite video essayists.
5. Three tracks I'm putting on at a club in the year 21XX.

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They redacted my pronouns, Jerry.

Earlier this week, I received documents from a FOIA I had done on my FOIA about Vigilant Defender 23 (a counterintelligence exercise that took place in Puerto Rico). I'm still going through the trove of emails to see if there's any information worth reporting on in there, but a couple of the redactions jumped out at me immediately. Since I asked for emails related to my previous FOIA request, it also included emails I had sent to the Army Reserve's FOIA office. And for some odd reason, they redacted the pronoun "he" but not "él" in my email signature.

I initially thought might have been some weird anti-LGBTQ+ thing on part of the Army. But the more I read about stuff like this, it seems like they must have just done a find and replace for every pronoun, and not checked for which ones they actually redacted. There's precedent for redacting pronouns. The justification seems to be that the pronouns could serve to identify the person the documents are talking about. For example, if there's only one woman in an office, then "she" would identify her as the person the documents are referring to.

They also redacted the Department of the Army crest on a letter they had already sent me last year that confirmed they were working on my request. This one doesn't even have a justification for the redaction.

Both of these redactions are very dumb and show how broken the FOIA redaction process is. There's also a ton of information within the documents I received that was branded "non-responsive" and redacted, which seems like it shouldn't be happening either.

According to the Department of Justice:

As a result of the D.C. Circuit’s ruling in AILA, it will be important for agencies to carefully define what they consider to be the “records” responsive to any given FOIA request. Once they determine that something is a “record” they must process it in its entirety for exemption applicability. Only those portions of the record that are exempt can be redacted. After the court’s decision in AILA it is not permissible to redact information within a record as “non-responsive.”

Some of the "non-responsive" documents were emails in a chain of emails, which should be considered one singular "record," according to the DOJ. Therefore, none of the information should have been redacted because it's "non-responsive."

Here's the DOJ again:

The court then held that “once an agency itself identifies a particular document or collection of material –such as a chain of emails—as a responsive ‘record,’ the only information the agency may redact from that record is that falling within one of the statutory exemptions.” Id. at 678-79.

I'm not a FOIA expert or a lawyer, so I might be misunderstanding something along the way, but it seems like nothing should have been branded "non-responsive."

This whole thing makes me incredibly curious as to what information was left redacted and given the same reason as they silly redactions I just described.

We'll see what they say to the appeal.

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