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It's really not difficult to properly redact documents. So I can't imagine how someone could even do this unintentionally...

Never attribute to morality that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Given the sheer ineptitude of this administration, this was likely stupidity.

When I worked for DOD, I worked on a FOIA request and was trained on using the declassification software. The software worked by highlighting the appropriate text and then "flattened" the highlight so you couldn't do this.

The software was REQUIRED to be used because it would also perform the validation.

These people probably used regular Adobe acrobat. Because they are that dumb. And they don't know about proper FOIA procedures.

Because they are stupid.

If true, their information needs to be noted if possible only after the arrest of all these other assholes. Gotta protect the ones that did not follow orders of this pedophile regime.

I have heard of a gov employee keeping a usb cable in a locked cabinet because they thought it had leftover data after use.

From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t released, they were uploaded and it’s url kept private. Imo they probably did that to send it to a few highly ranked people so they could check if they agreed with the censorship before releasing them. However, the URL for those to-be-released files were easily guessed based on the pattern of the previously already public ones.

At this point? Probably, this isn’t the first time we have seen thick exact rookie mistake.

Of course, who knows since doge or whatever probably wiped the people who knew how to get things done I it and replaced with high schoolers that just can’t wait to gobble elons musky bits

And also has a long history. They've done this before.

Trump’s GOP supporters are all incompetents.

When you fire all of the intelligence out of the intelligence community, and the rest jump ship.

I really hope they're put in front of a panel and say "we don't have the manpower"

I haven't checked myself, but on another post someone claimed that only some of the pages were "redacted" in this manner. If that's the case then while we got more information than they probably wanted us too, there is still some information that's yet to be made available.

Except, if we’ve learned anything to this point, it’s that Trump will once again face zero repercussions from this.

It was more competent before they fired everyone competent and replaced them with incompetent sycophants. It wasn't perfect before, but far better than now.

Propaganda i guess, the evidence for incompetence has been right there for decades and it keeps getting easier to find.

It's entirely dependent on which parts of the government you're dealing with. The parts operated by the career civil servants and people who got there by working the job tend to be run perfectly well.
In cases where it's political appointees following rules and guidelines setup by the aforementioned people, it tends to be... Fine.

It's the political appointees who actively disregard or are hostile to the civil service who are profoundly incompetent. You know, because they were selected for ideology, not competency.

For some reason that I think is spelled really similar to "traitorous anti American assets and useful idiops" the trump administration has been opposed to. and in favor of making it easier to fire, the civil service, AKA: the competent part.

It's why you can end up with the parts that work well, like the military, NOAA and others like it wandering around being competent (prior to the current "let's fire everyone and try to destroy the country" moment), while political appointees accidentally add a reporter to an illegal group chat. It's the authoritarian impulse to demand orthodoxy and committed belief not just from the people who decide direction, but from the people who make day to day decisions as well.

As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.

Idk this just being incompetence wouldn't be the most insane thing ever. I'd hardly expect anyone in the Trump Administration to know how Microsoft word works

I’ve done all 18,000 pdfs. This must have happened in one document. The vast majority are redacted correctly.

This looks like a disinformation campaign to distract from other stuff. “Some people are saying there are word in the document that should not be in the documents, so we have to wonder how they got there”.

The entire thing is a classic disinformation campaign. Right before Christmas. Multiple tranche release. Then pullbacks and rerelease. Maximum confusion. Make sure nobody knows who to trust.

Fun fact: this technique was developed in Russia.