One of my fellow graduate students pointed me to a hilarious/disturbing local story about bizarre NC state government secrecy practices:

Here are some words the N.C. Department of Labor thinks the public shouldn’t see: tomatoes, landlord, Mexicans, workers.

The department recently released to News & Observer staff writer Kristin Collins its files on Ag-Mart, the Florida-based tomato grower that last year incurred the N.C. Department of Agriculture’s largest-ever fine for breaking pesticide rules.

The Labor Department blacked out so much information that its files were nearly unintelligible.

Included was a copy of a 2003 News & Observer story, written by Collins herself and another reporter, in which words or phrases were blacked out in 67 places.

References to virtually any human being, including public officials, Ag-Mart executives and workers — even pronouns such as “their” — were missing. In some cases, random words such as “tomatoes” were hidden.

If you click through, you can see a graphic of the article that’s annotated with the blacked-out words — it’s truly bizarre…