at the bottom, and this hospital has also, in an effort to provide some kind of privacy, done some redaction . The same kind of redaction and coarsening in their database, and now three records match Rebecca there. And of course, the real problem here is the join of these two databases, right?
So we made it look like it had been redacted. But then we had one bit where the redactions go on for two pages with only the word "than" exposed-- so just-- There were things. --fun to be had that you can't do in YouTube videos.
And were you able to proactively prevent them from redacting anything? Yeah, it's less a matter of preventing them from redaction or them taking too heavy a hand. But we worked very closely together.
deny, deny, drag their feet, um, after about five years the Parliament, and exposure in other ways, the Parliament finally set up a committee, ah, to start to release the records. Um, what they were really doing is they set up a internal secret redaction unit to clean up the records before they were released so nothing embarrassing would come out. So, ah, in May of 2009 the Telegraph, the British newspaper the Telegraph, actually started publishing the unexpurgated records and they were leaked to them by a a guy named John
foyer requests writes about this, she says, "Some of the people on the staff of that unit were so disgusted by what they saw and by the lies being told about the delays in releasing the information that they made a copy of the data, a mole inside the redaction room made a copy, later passed it to John Wick." Wick says that he also was told that critical information was being removed from the files that would prevent many of the expense scandals from being revealed and he said to the, to the Telegraph at the time, "The ultimate source
from two different hospitals of medical records. And due to privacy concerns, there's been some anonymization done here, and anonymization largely consists of operations of redaction , like entirely removing certain columns from a database, or coarsening in which you sort of fuzz up the information.
Now, again, in a real large database and in a real application of these methods, you might go for a criterion like what's called k-anonymity. So what's k-anonymity? K-anonymity basically asks that you do enough of this coarsening and redaction so that any row in the allegedly anonymized database matches at least k other-- there at least k matches to that row, k identical records, OK?
The real problem, of course, comes when you also know that your neighbor Rebecca happened to also have a visit to a second hospital whose database is at the bottom, and this hospital has also, in an effort to provide some kind of privacy, done some redaction . The same kind of redaction and coarsening in their database, and now three records match Rebecca there.
And after any commercial flight, any member of the crew or even a passenger, if you feel that there's something irregular, a safety concern that took place on the flight, that person can actually submit a report, and then the report does go through some redaction process. Some subset of the reports after being redacted are actually released to the public.
Wick who is a former SAS officer who is actually the intermediary for an anonymous source. We don't know who that person was, we believe it's somebody who was actually on the staff of this redaction unit. Um, and Heather Brooke, who was the journalist who was doing all these foyer requests writes about this, she says, "Some of the people on the staff of that unit were so disgusted by what they saw and by the lies being told about the delays in releasing
tried to get the research from the Denver District Attorney's Office. I sent a written request in. It took dozens of phone calls and a year later before I finally got a response and they said, "Sure, we'll let you look at all the 12 boxes, but you're gonna have to pay $150.00 per box. You're gonna have to pay a $50 per hour attorney redaction fee for us to go through the boxes first and then you're gonna have to pay another $50 for an attorney to sit there when you go through them."