The Epstein Files Debacle

This post isn't about what's in the files. It's about why the Trump administration might have made such an almighty mess of the release of the files. Consider it a thought experiment, from one who has spent decades of her life in the Information Technology Wars.

Remember The Mines of Moria the Pennsylvania Limestone Caves, where the United States Civil Service Commission stores all its records, far beneath the surface of the earth, somewhere in the middle of Nowheresville, Western Pennsylvania? I wrote about them here.

I wrote about them, in February of last year, because they suddenly came to the attention of Elon Musk, who was—I think—alternately amused and then horrified to discover that so much of the federal government's human resource effort was contained in a largely non-digitized underground facility without even an elevator, one which effectively limits the number of federal retirees that can be processed through the decrepit and still largely handwritten system to 10,000 per month. (This was in the halcyon days when Elon was sure he could save a trillion or two annually in "waste, fraud, and abuse" and when he'd like to have eliminated several times the ultimate number of federal workers via voluntary or involuntary retirement, per month, for several months in a row.)

Irresistible force, meet immovable object.

I wrote about those limestone caves because I used to know them very well.

And nothing Musk had to say about the lack of, or very slow progress towards, modernization in the intervening forty-plus years surprised me. I know how the government works. But I bet it was a shock for some.

One of the possible pitfalls of hiring into an organizational structure's senior positions, breaths of fresh air in the form of people who have had no real experience in such a structure, is that, no matter how competent in other aspects of their job they may be, they simply might not be prepared for the culture shock associated with such a move.

Consider, for example, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino.

These are two who had spent quite some time—on the outside—shouting about how "the Epstein files" should be released. They thought there was a "list." They thought there was a "black book." They thought there was a "cover-up." At least in Bongino's case, he was pretty sure Epstein didn't kill himself.

And I don't think it's unreasonable to posit that—as outsiders, who'd never really been in the bowels of large government agencies before*—both men probably thought that modern information technology being what it is, database searches, criteria selection, appropriate redaction, reporting, and release of such information should have been quite automatic, straightforward, and simple. And they simply couldn't understand, absent deliberate malfeasance, why it hadn't happened.

I doubt either of them was prepared for what is—evidently and as we have seen—the technologically backward, uncollated, disparate, unrelated, and incoherent mess of stuff that comprises the millions of pages of "the Epstein files." And I wonder how they reacted and felt, what they thought, when they discovered what they'd gotten themselves into.

Just one example:

I've heard, numerous times, on sundry podcasts, that it ought to be easy to redact faces in the images, because, after all, any modern software worth its salt—even free stuff that comes with your phone—can do that, and can distinguish between those whose faces are well-recognized in the public domain, and those belonging to private individuals. But then (thank you, @CarolJoy) there is this, from a government document requesting guidance about redaction of facial images:

The software does not have IA [perhaps they mean AI? Or perhaps this is an abbreviation with which I'm not familiar] facial recognition to assist with the identification of some of public officials, well-known or not well known celebrities.

In other words, they are saying all facial redactions, across the millions of pages of raw data, will be manual and must be undertaken one at a time. So they are asking TPTB what the priorities are, and which faces should be redacted.

Small wonder there's the occasional mistake.

I'm not making excuses for Pam Bondi here. She's in a class by herself when it comes to tripping herself up and throwing her subordinates under the bus. I know a number of people who were impressed by her service as Attorney General of Florida, but she hasn't really rung my bell, at least to this point. I guess the best thing I can say about her is that she's not Matt Gaetz.

But I do wonder about Patel and Bongino, who've always struck me as pretty good actors, but who've both received what may be an undeserved black eye over this. I'm glad, for his sake, that Bongino is out of the picture, and I wish him well. Don't know where Patel goes from here.

Thoughts?

*I know that Patel spent a year (2020-2021) as Chief of Staff to the Acting SecDef. I don't know how involved he was in that role with the technology. But I do know that much of the DoD technology and IT is advanced far beyond most other in the government.

Image, top of post, via Wikimedia public domain