Help Wanted: Can You Do A Competent Document Production?
If so, then Uncle Sam wants you. The feds need your valuable skills — badly.
First the Department of Justice produces original documents, instead of copy sets, to Congress. And now, the AP reports on a screw-up by the FTC:
Lawyers for the FTC electronically filed documents as part of [its] court case [challenging the Whole Foods purchase of Wild Oats] yesterday afternoon. Court officials realized the redacted portions of the document could easily be read and blocked it from being downloaded from court computer servers. The Associated Press downloaded the document from the public server before it was replaced by a properly redacted version.In the original version, the words looked redacted but were actually just electronically shaded black. The words could be searched, copied, pasted and read. The second version of the document was filed using scanned pages of the redacted documents. There is no way to remove the blacked-out portions from the final copy.
In a statement late Tuesday, Whole Foods said it was investigating the “apparent improper release by the Federal Trade Commission of confidential proprietary business information.”
So bite your tongue next time you want to dismiss document production as mindless drudgery. If the DOJ and the FTC can’t get it right, surely there must be SOME skill involved, right?
Error by FTC Reveals Whole Foods’ Trade Secrets [Associated Press]
Earlier: Earth to DOJ: Document Production Isn’t That Hard
(15) Comments
Comments
Wrong. Have you met our government?
Lame... first.
FIRST
DAMMIT!
Ha Ha!
Sorry to disappoint on first, people.
By the way, I previously posted and was dubbed Wheelchair Guy regarding social decorum at cocktail parties, etc. I hereby retract all prior assertions. People, talk about gay marriage as much as you wish. The other night I was at a party where one of the other associates brought up the survey she'd seen regarding all the reasons people have sex. This was uncomfortable, but when she started talking about which reasons she agreed with, I ran - metaphorically - for the bar. I don't know what turns this woman on and believe me I don't want to.
So hey, you wanna talk about gay marriage, as long as you don't bring up what turns you on in the marital bed, you're ahead of my coworkers.
Wow. Idiots. Honestly, you black out something in a word document using the highlight tool and believe that gets rid of it? That's classic.
Government lawyers are usually morons. Gee, never heard that one before. Yawn. Next.
This has happened before.
Federal government lawyers?
Lawyers leave the FTC, U.S. Attorney offices, or Main Justice, and become partners at top law firms. They are not "morons."
Does anyone know what method the gov't likely used to "redact" the docs?
I'd like to know so that I don't do it.
2:23 - they probably used the highlight tool in Acrobat. You can change the color and opacity of the highlighting. The best thing to do is to convert the documents to pure images (instead of images with searchable text) or scan them afterwards.
Sometimes, when I am alone late at night working on a huge document production clusterfuck I will slip in a few photocopied images of my enrmous penis.
Apparently, it was a Word error. I heard from friends at the Commission that late this afternoon, IT sent out an FTC-wide e-mail asking all staff to log off their computers tonight so IT can install Adobe Pro 8 with helpful features like Bates Stamping and the ability to remove all meta-data and fully redact .pdfs....
A day late and, well,...
Apparently, it was a Word error. I heard from friends at the Commission that late this afternoon, IT sent out an FTC-wide e-mail asking all staff to log off their computers tonight so IT can install Adobe Pro 8 with helpful features like Bates Stamping and the ability to remove all meta-data and fully redact .pdfs....
A day late and, well,...