you saw a bunch of stuff that you had already read here at BMG.  😀
On the front page of the Metro section, we find the revelation that Suffolk Downs has said that it would stop running horse races if that would help it get a casino license. Â What we don’t find is any mention of the fact that that revelation was previously reported in Commonwealth Magazine almost a week ago, and noted by our own EB3 at that time.
The lead editorial today says that the Obama administration should release the al-Awlaki memo authored by David Barron, who has been nominated for a federal judgeship. Â Precisely as I have been saying since early last week. Â Welcome aboard.
And over on the op-ed page, Joan Vennochi joins the growing chorus of people saying that Steve Crosby should resign as Chair of the the Gaming Commission because his recusal from the Boston-area license debate makes it impossible for him to do his job properly.  Several gubernatorial candidates (Coakley, Grossman, Kayyem, Baker, and some others) issued the same call last week – interestingly not including Don Berwick, who, because he is against casinos overall, perhaps sees it in his best interest to have the Gaming Commission operating as ineffectively as possible.  In any event, I said that Crosby probably ought to step down the same day he announced he was no longer going to participate in any issues relating to the Boston-area license.  I’m not sure if I was the first to publicly raise the question of whether he should resign, but I might have been.
However, credit where credit is due: Maria Sacchetti wrote a terrific story yesterday about the Todashev shooting in which she unmasked the identities of the FBI agent who killed Todashev (who turns out to have had “a brief and troubled past” with the Oakland, CA police department, including a couple of brutality lawsuits) and the two MA state troopers who were there with him, and humiliated a Florida prosecutor in the process:
Over the past year, FBI and Massachusetts officials have refused to identify the two state troopers and the agent involved in the May 22, 2013, shooting of Ibragim Todashev, 27, in his Orlando apartment, where he agreed to be interviewed…. The Globe obtained their names by removing improperly created redactions from an electronic copy of Florida prosecutor Jeffrey L. Ashton’s report — which in March found the shooting of Todashev justified — and then verifying their identities through interviews and multiple government records…. Their names were also confirmed by the Globe by unredacting the prosecutor’s report — a process made relatively simple because the blackout technique used to cover the names was faulty and could easily be removed by using common software.
Now that is good reporting. Â More like that, please. Â Newspapers are already struggling for relevance; they don’t help their cause by publishing week-old stories.
Here’s how that works oftentimes:
1. Obtain a pdf of the document, with redactions. It’s machine readable — that is, it’s native to pdf, not a printout that’s been scanned.
2. Highlight the text from the line before the redaction (a black box) to the line after.
3. Ctrl-C
4. Open Word, Notepad, or any other text editor.
5. Ctrl-V
This doesn’t always work, but it works surprisingly often.
Here’s an alternative. Sometimes, the black box redaction is a different layer than the image below. Good pdf software (not just Adobe Reader) can differentiate the layers, and allow the user to just delete that layer.
Bottom line: when redacting, don’t do it with software unless you’ve got a protocol approved by your IT security team. If you must do a redaction, obtain the original document. If electronic, change the actual text in the document and then re-pdf it. If a paper copy, use a black magic marker on the text itself, preferably with multiple layers to ensure the reflectivity of the printout doesn’t “shine through” the ink.
the Twitters are saying that the FBI agent’s name was already well known before the Globe story came out, but that media organizations were reluctant to publish it. FWIW.
in this post.
“. . . interestingly not including Don Berwick, who, because he is against casinos overall, perhaps sees it in his best interest to have the Gaming Commission operating as ineffectively as possible.”
Long live King Crosby!
I’m SHOCKED, just SHOCKED, that the FBI shooter had a “troubled history” with multiple allegations of brutality and a suspiciously generous pension package from the Oakland PD where he allegedly committed his first alleged misconduct.
I wonder if those who are so eager to believe the self-serving leaks from authorities regarding the Florida execution of Mr. Todashev may perhaps have more doubts now.
I applaud the Globe for publishing this story. Perhaps someday the mainstream media and the audience it panders to will have as much interest in the shooters who participate in killings like this as they do in smearing the victims.
I’ve been accused of “hating cops” because such behavior and subsequent coverups are so disgustingly common among our authorities.
Surely Ms. Coakley knew of the shooter’s troubled history when Ms. Coakley chose to not investigate the Florida killing. This kind of killing and subsequent coverup exemplifies why I feel that Ms. Coakley is a very real danger to those of us who abhor this kind of behavior by police.
We need a Governor who seeks to protect us from government thugs like those who killed Mr. Todashev. We need an AG who investigates and prosecutes police misconduct like this. Ms. Coakley clearly fails to meet either criteria.
The statements I’ve seen from the candidates who have called for Crosby’s resignation have emphasized that Crosby’s tenure on the MGC at this point taints the licensing process, or at the very least delays it; the argument is that Crosby should step down in order that the licenses may be awarded without further controversy or unnecessary delay. I would suspect, for whatever speculation is worth, that this accounts for Berwick not signing on. If you support repeal, you can also reasonably believe that Crosby should go, but you may also feel that his resignation would be no more than a public-relations gesture, lacking in any real impact.
Which, it seems to me, is the case here. Crosby should go; he shouldn’t have been there in the first place. Yet at the same time, what does it accomplish for him to step down now? At most, it protects what tattered remnants remain of the public faith in a process that was fatally flawed from the beginning. And to the extent that it might help speed up the licensing process, it might well prove to be more harmful than not.