October 2003: Justice Department Redacts Report on Its Own Record of Racial Diversity, Hides Own Failings

The Justice Department posts on its Web site a heavily redacted copy of a report it had commissioned about its own record of racial diversity in the workplace. Half of the report’s 186 pages are censored, including the summary and conclusions. Russ Kick, the author and First Amendment activist who maintains the Web site “The Memory Hole,” downloads the report and realizes that he can digitally remove the redaction lines to read the report in its entirety. When he does so, he realizes that most of the redactions are to hide reports from minority lawyers at the department, who have filed numerous complaints claiming work conditions rife with “stereotyping, harassment, and racial tension.” When Kick posts the unredacted version of the Justice Department document, civil rights experts and Congressional Democrats accuse the department of trying to hide its findings to avoid culpability and negative publicity. But the department claims that the portions of the report that were redacted, including the conclusions, were “deliberative and predecisional,” and therefore legal to exclude under the Freedom of Information Act. [Russ Kick, 10/21/2003; Savage, 2007, pp. 105]