Wikileaks publishes court redacted report from Turks and Caicos - legal opinion

The controversial site "Wikileaks" is known for publishing documents that are otherwise "classified, censored or otherwise opaque to the public record."

Is this site acting responsibly by allowing an anonymous person, someone with a possible agenda, to publish a document to harass a person or to gain business leverage? What if it was a court-ordered censored document? In one such case recently in the news, a commission report was posted to Wikileaks by a so-called whistle blower from Turks and Caicos Islands.

The document in question was a corruption report as to ousted Premier, Michael Misick and some of his ministers, in the Turks and Caicos Islands. The report itself was edited or redacted by a court order to expunge the names of three businessmen, real estate developers, on Turks and Caicos Islands, Dr. Cem Kiny, Mario Hoffman and Jak Civre.

There had appeared to be a big victory by the person, Shaun Malcolm, who posted the unedited Wikileaks report, which he described as a "suppressed final report of the Turks and Caicos Islands Commission of Inquiry." The Turks and Caicos courts made a legal ruling for certain names to be edited from this corruption report to protect certain individuals and their businesses. However, reading characterizations of this court ruling on Wikileaks, you will see it called "media suppression order," "media gag order," "suppressed order," or even "cover-up order."

Redaction orders (striking information from documents) are used by many judges for many reasons. In some cases it is used to edit an address from public record, or state secrets, medical records and the like.

If a legal adjudication was achieved to remove names for good cause, the legal ruling renders that unedited document not to be published by "court order." US Admininstrative Article 9 for court justice states that it provide limited immunity for clerks and their staff who unknowlingly and unintentionally release redacted documents to the public, but offers no protection for willfully publishing a court ordered redacted document.

In the case of the Turks and Caicos report, Wikileaks' cover letter to the report in question stated that, "WikiLeaks has obtained the full report—and unredacted the missing text." Wikileaks acknowledged in a preceding paragraph that the redacted text was by court order, admitting that it knowingly released court ordered redacted text.

In a very public case, Connect U v. Facebook, the judge sealed and/or redacted certain documents stating, "The integrity of the court is an issue." What was redacted? "Source code, proprietary trade secrets, financial information, and communications between Facebook employees and their family and friends." However, a well-respected news agency, The Associated Press, "was able to read the blacked-out portions by copying from an electronic version of the document and pasting the results into another document.”

Conversly, other sites that release public documents, pride themselves in using redacted versions as in the case of Scribd which published Alfred B. Schultz' plea deal for violating NASA secrets. Scribd intentionally told its audience that the document is "[redacted]."

Keeping redacted text away from hackers is not easy. The most traditional way to redact a document is to cut the text out manually. However, that is not the methodology used today. There are several ways to retrieve redacted text in documents. According to a report, "Information Leakage Through Document Redaction, Attacks and Countermeasures," Daniel Loprestia and A. Lawrence Spitz explain how information can leak when text has been redacted.

1. The text has not been completely obliterated (e.g., the reective qualities of \black" may differ for laser-printer toner and a marker pen).

2. Although largely obscured, certain features of the text may remain apparent (e.g., the numbers and locations of ascender and descender characters). As Spitz has shown in his work on character shape coding, this is often enough to narrow down the set of choices to a small number.

3. When using a monospaced font (such as Courier), the width of the gulf between the cleartext immediately adjacent to the redacted region reveals the length, in characters, of the missing word(s).

4. For proportionally-spaced fonts, based on the locations of adjacent words and estimates of character widths (which are easy to obtain through a number of methods, including an analysis of cleartext on the page in question), the widths of missing words can be estimated and, as in the monospaced case, NLP brought to bear.

There are legal remedies for those who have been violated by having court-ordered redacted information published. However, nothing can make up for the damage already done to someone's privacy or credibility when these court redaction orders are violated.

http://www.theconnectedlawyer.com/archives/category/security http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~lopresti/Publications/2005/spie05a.pdf