Lawyers for victims said in a letter to the judge Sunday that botched redactions had damaged the lives of nearly 100 victims.
www.pbs.org
The Justice Department said Monday that it had withdrawn several thousand documents and "media" related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein after lawyers told a New York judge that the lives of nearly 100 victims had been "turned upside down" by sloppy redactions in the government's latest release of records.
The exposed materials include nude photos showing the faces of potential victims as well as names, email addresses and other identifying information that was either unredacted or not fully obscured.
The department blamed it on "technical or human error."
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Eight women who identify as Epstein victims added comments to the letter to Judge Richard M. Berman. One wrote that the records' release was "life threatening." Another said she'd gotten death threats after 51 entries included her private banking information, forcing her to try to shut down her credit cards and accounts.
"There is no conceivable degree of institutional incompetence sufficient to explain the scale, consistency, and persistence of the failures that occurred — particularly where the sole task ordered by the Court and repeatedly emphasized by DOJ was simple: redact known victim names before publication," the lawyers, Brittany Henderson and Brad Edwards, wrote.
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Dozens of Associated Press reporters analyzing the files have so far found multiple occasions where a name was redacted in one document, only to be left exposed in another version of the same file.
In other places, names and email addresses are crossed out but not fully blackened out, so they're still visible. Other text redactions can be easily overridden by simply double clicking on them to reveal the hidden text underneath.
The Justice Department has said all nude or pornographic images were redacted from the 2,000-some videos and 180,000 images in the release, even if they were commercially produced, as the agency considered all women depicted in the images as potential victims.
But reporters with The New York Times still found dozens of uncensored photos of naked young people with their faces unredacted.
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In another instance, the AP found a set of more than 100 images of a young, unidentified female lounging on a bed, standing on a beach and at other summertime locations while wearing a short top.
The images are almost fully blacked out so only the person's arms and legs are clearly visible, save for the very last image, a profile photo that is completely unredacted and reveals her face.
Elsewhere in the files, the face of one of Epstein's alleged underage victims was clearly shown on an organizational chart created by federal investigators.
The poor redactions didn't just involve victim information.
One email showed Epstein's entire credit card number, expiration date and security code. An interview transcript from the investigation into Epstein's suicide included a jail worker's full Social Security number and date of birth. Some email addresses were visible under thin cross-outs.
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