The Navy Released Four Seconds Of Ninety-One. The Redaction Is The Crosshairs.

WASHINGTON, United States — The request was for ninety-one seconds of gun-camera video. It took four years, one administrative appeal and one appeal to the command's chief freedom-of-information officer, and it returned four seconds.

It also returned, because the law obliges an agency to say what it is keeping, a line-by-line withholding index: nine pages, forty-one numbered entries, each naming a withheld element and the exemption claimed over it.

The index is the better document.

Thirty-nine lines, all of them symbology

Two of the forty-one lines are administrative — a header and the time-code strip, both released.

The other thirty-nine each claim Exemption 4: trade secrets, and commercial or financial information obtained from a person, privileged or confidential.

Read against the four seconds that came out, every one of the thirty-nine falls on the display overlay.

Lines 3 to 11 cover the tracking gate: the corner brackets, their geometry, and how they resize. Lines 12 to 17 cover the mode annunciator, the small block of text in the upper left that says whether the pod is looking at heat or at light. Lines 18 to 29 cover the range readout — the digits, that is, not the range. Lines 30 to 41 cover the zoom-step designations.

Not one of the thirty-nine is claimed over the object in the frame.

Who owns a reticle

The overlay is drawn by the targeting pod, and the pod is built by Kearsarge Optronics under a clause negotiated in 2004 that treats symbology, annunciation and mode nomenclature as proprietary.

Dr. Anselm Prydderch-Obi, who integrated sensors of this class for twelve years and went through the released frames with our correspondent, thinks the claim is narrower than it looks and largely sound.

"The gate is the only thing in that picture anyone would want," he said. "Watch it hold something that is accelerating and you have learned what their tracker does. The object tells you nothing about their product. The box around it tells you everything."

Kearsarge's own reply runs at the foot of this brief and makes the same argument at greater length, then adds a sentence we did not expect.

The eleven thousand four hundred dollars

Corinne Halstead-Ruiz is the release officer who signed the package out. She spoke to this newspaper on the telephone on 6 August for thirty-four minutes and had our notes read back to her at the end.

She said the whole ninety-one seconds could go out tomorrow if the overlay were masked. She said masking is contractor work, because the command does not hold the tools and has nobody trained on them. She said the last figure she had seen for the job was $11,400.

Then she said the part that made this a story.

"There isn't a line for it," she said. "There has never been a line. Not because anybody decided against it. Because in the whole time I have done this job nobody has ever asked for one, and if you asked me tomorrow I would have to go and find out who I ask."

What this is and is not

Kearsarge says it has never quoted for masking this footage, and says that if it were asked it would do the work for nothing. Ms Halstead-Ruiz says she has seen a figure. Both may be describing something real; a command can hold a quotation from a vendor that is not the pod's manufacturer. We have filed for the document and it had not arrived when this went to press, which is our fault and is recorded above.

What the index establishes is smaller than the argument that has been had over this clip, and it is worth stating plainly.

An agency held eighty-seven seconds of video for four years. It wrote down, as it is required to, exactly why. The reason is a box, four digits, three abbreviations and a mode label, all of them drawn by a machine, all of them belonging to a company in Massachusetts, and none of them the thing in the middle of the picture.

We still do not know what is in the other eighty-seven seconds. Nobody at this desk is going to pretend that the shape of a redaction is evidence about what sits underneath it.

But the redaction has a shape, and it is a rectangle with the object inside it and the exemptions around the edge.