Redactions
What the government blacked out
The law that forced the release lets the Justice Department hide victims' identities. It forbids hiding anything to spare officials or public figures embarrassment. Measured page by page, the Justice Department's later releases are far more heavily blacked out than court records, where judges redact to protect victims.
77%
of pages in the Justice Department's Data Sets 9–11 have at least one black box.
The average page, to scale
Each sheet shows how much of an average page is covered in black, drawn to scale. Data Sets 9–11 black out 4 to 14 times more of each page than the court records.
How often a page is redacted
Share of sampled pages with any black box, with the likely range shaded. Based on 2,939 randomly sampled pages; software found the boxes on images of each page.
The rule
No record may be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.
Epstein Files Transparency Act, Public Law 119-38
What may be hidden
- Personally identifiable information of victims, and victims' personal/medical files, where disclosure would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy
- Child sexual abuse material (CSAM) as defined under 18 U.S.C. 2256 and prohibited under 18 U.S.C. 2252-2252A
- Material that would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution (narrowly tailored, temporary)
- Images of death, physical abuse, or injury of any person
- Properly classified national-defense/foreign-policy information (with a declassification-to-the-maximum-extent-possible requirement, and an unclassified summary where declassification is not possible)
Every redaction must be justified in writing to Congress. How the law passed.
What officials and reporters found
All newsHow this was measured
Software rendered each sampled page as an image and found solid black rectangles, the standard form of a redaction. It never reads or guesses what is underneath. Some black shapes are not redactions (dark photographs, heavy printing); those were filtered out and checked by hand on random samples. Court records are included for comparison because judges redact them under clear rules to protect victims.