There’s something deeply unsettling about watching evidence vanish in real-time. Yesterday, the US Department of Justice accidentally published documents from the Epstein files that were… let’s just say, significantly more revealing than they intended. Within hours, the document was gone from the government website. But here’s the thing about the internet in 2025 – nothing ever truly disappears, does it?

I’ve been working in IT for over two decades now, and one of the first things you learn is that data deletion is rarely absolute. There are backups, archives, and in this case, thousands of people who downloaded those PDFs the moment they appeared. The DOJ’s fumble – whether intentional or through sheer incompetence – has created a situation where the evidence is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere. It’s on hard drives around the world, but officially, according to the US government, it was never meant to exist in the public sphere.

The news about Deloitte’s $439,000 report for the federal government containing fabricated academic references and invented legal quotes has been doing my head in all week. Here we have one of the Big Four consulting firms, charging taxpayers nearly half a million dollars, and they can’t even be bothered to check if the sources they’re citing actually exist.

What really gets under my skin isn’t just the sloppiness – it’s what this represents about the entire consulting industry and how governments have become utterly dependent on these firms for basic policy work. Someone in the discussion threads hit the nail on the head when they described it as “decision insurance” – governments aren’t really buying expertise, they’re buying someone to blame when things go wrong.