May has been a busy month, and as a result, I’ve neglected you, my readers. Here are a few links to stuff I’ve posted elsewhere on the web.
Over at Freedom to TInker, I report on some research I’ve done into redaction failures in federal court documents. I’ve written software that automatically detects cases like this one in which someone tries to redact a PDF document, but the information is still “under” the rectangle. I examined 1.8 million documents and found about 2000 had redaction rectangles. In 194 of those documents the rectangles actually still had data under them. I urge the courts to make this kind of scan an automatic part of the document submission process
I’ve also been doing some reporting for Ars Technica about an organization called Medical Justice. On Monday, I did an in-depth story about a Medical Justice program to use copyright law to censor patient reviews. Since that story came out there have been two additional allegations of wrongdoing by Medical Justice or their clients. Follow-up stories are coming soon.
I’ll have a big personal announcement next week, and regular blogging should resume soon. Stay tuned!
