The Memory Hole wrote up a quick little investigation into an instance of the United States Justice Department‘s attempt at hiding information. “Redaction” is the fine art of “cleaning up” information for public release. For example, oftentimes, police reports containing information about minors will have their names blacked out to protect them.

However, the recent actions by the DOJ are rather surprising. In the ongoing Supreme Court case between the ACLU and the DOJ regarding parts of the PATRIOT Act, the DOJ tried to black out portions of the ACLU’s court filings, using the excuse that they were “protecting the security interests of the United States”. This would be an honorable goal if the hidden items were truly dangerous in the hands of the public, but the Supreme Court decided that the “threatening” words were not worthy of being hidden.

So, what were the hidden words? How about a quote from a Supreme Court decision:

“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.” – US vs. US District Court for the Eastern Dist. of Mich., 407 U.S. 297,314 (1972)