Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time
- Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019)
Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” parts were basically black highlighting/boxes over live text. Reporters could recover the hidden text (e.g., via copy/paste).
- TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” manual (U.S., 2009)
A publicly posted TSA screening document used black rectangles that did not remove the underlying text; the concealed content could be extracted. This led to extensive discussion and an Inspector General review.
- UK Ministry of Defence submarine security document (UK, 2011)
A MoD report had “redacted” sections that could be revealed by copying/pasting the “blacked out” text—because the text was still present, just visually obscured.
- Apple v. Samsung ruling (U.S., 2011)
A federal judge’s opinion attempted to redact passages, but the content was still recoverable due to the way the PDF was formatted; copying text out revealed the “redacted” parts.
- Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009)
The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
A broader “history of failures” compilation (multiple orgs / years)
The PDF Association collected multiple incidents (including several above) and describes the common failure mode: black shapes drawn over text without deleting/sanitizing the underlying content.
https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PD...
Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker.
I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public.
Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.
If the software is going to leverage the familiarity of using a blackout marker to give you a simple mechanism to redact text, it should honour that analogy and work the way any regular user would expect, by killing off the underlying text you're obscuring, and any other correponding, hidden bits. Or it should surface those hidden bits so you can see what could come back to bite you later. E.g. It wouldn't be hard to make the redact tool simultaneously act as a highlighter that temporarily turns proximate text in the OCR layer a vibrant yellow as you use it.
It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document.
This was basically the only reason we were willing to cough up like $400 for each Acrobat license for a few hundred people. One redaction fuckup could cost you whatever you saved by buying something else.
I would like to believe that the DOJ lacking the proper software might have something to do with DOGE. That would be sweet irony.
Law firms are notoriously behind in tech. I’ve seen some shit. A small firm running on the owner’s personal Dropbox account with client matter files stored alongside his porn collection, ancient, unsupported software, unpatched systems, basically zero information security, servers in a bathroom and network switches in a shower, a literal hoarder with garbage and shit in the office, etc. The Dropbox guy was basically a giant in his practice area. Very successful. You have no idea how bad things are behind the scenes.
I think it's usually a bit more complicated, i.e. the people who were expected to do processes don't and someone else shows the people asking for access that there's a faster, cheaper, cooler tool.
This is to be expected from an effort like DOGE simply because the E is for Efficiency. That is, how well a system is performing. The ratio of energy input to output.
Unfortunately the E in DOGE should have been for Effectiveness. That is, is the system shooting at the right target, and how close is it to hitting that target.
You can be very efficient but if you’re doing the wrong thing(s) you’re ultimately wasting resources.
The irony is, DOGE got the E wrong. It’s efficient but not effective
Or it a scam run by someone who wants to get access the social security info on americans. We are in trouble if you think the acronym is the biggest issue
I was speaking to the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. DOGE is simply the current best example.
Putting the obvious aside, sure, it’s Trump’s fault the system was so mismanaged that he’s been able to get elected. Twice. You’d think that after the first term the system would have gotten the message. It did not.
My recommendation to you is ask: How did we get here? And who is accountable for this?
There’s a very good chance those giving you your current narrative marching orders are on that list. Funny, right? Why own their failure when they can convince fools to blame a symptom?
not even, anyone still left at DOJ working to protect the president is immensely corrupt, and this is just that careless stupidity that typically goes along with deeply corrupt people.
Are you saying that only Adobe PDF has proper redaction tools? I did a quick search and found several open source PDF tools claiming to do redaction- are they all faulty? I would honestly be surprised if there aren't any free tools that do it right.
No that's not what GP is saying. GP is saying that there is software that does not have a redaction feature (perhaps because the developer didn't implement it), but users of the software worked around it by adding a black rectangle to the PDF in such software, falsely believing it to be equivalent to redaction.
Properly implementing redaction is a complicated task. The redaction can be applied to text, so the software needs to find out which text is covered by the rectangle and remove it. The redaction can be applied to images, so the software needs to edit a dizzying array of image formats supported by PDF (including some formats frequently used by PDFs but used basically nowhere else, like JBIG2). The redaction can be applied to invisible text (such as OCR text of a scanned document). The redaction can be applied to vector shapes, so some moderately complicated geometry calculations are needed to break the vector shapes and partially delete them.
It's very easy to imagine having a basic PDF editor that does not have a redaction feature because implementing the feature is hard.
For the same reason, a basic PDF editor does not have a real crop feature. Such an editor adds a cropbox and keeps all the content outside the cropbox.
> Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.
Absolutely. They know this is confusing, and they're bound and determined not to fix it. At the least, they need a pop-up to let you know that it's not doing what you might think it's doing.
Apple’s Preview app does exactly that. I discovered this while trying to make a blanked copy of kid #2’s homework worksheet for kid #1 who left his at school after kid #2 already wrote on her copy.
I’m optimistic that because LLMs have brought down the cost of the mere act of typing out code that we will see a shift in focus on certification and verification. Preferably with some legal protection for customers that are sorely lacking today.
Apple’s Preview app (which has a very thorough PDF markup tool) does this right: it has an explicit “redact” tool which deletes the content it’s used on.
Always worth remembering that PDFs are basically a graphic design format/editor from the 70s. It was never intended for securely redacting documents and while it can be done, that’s not the default behaviour.
No surprise non-experts muck it up and I don’t see that changing until they move to special-purpose tools.
Of course we can blame incompetence. It's incompetent not to realise your own incompetencies, also known as overconfidence.
Any lawyer should be like "I don't know what I'm doing here I'll get an expert to help" just like as a software developer I'd ask a lawyer for their help with law stuff...because IANAL uwu
The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data:
I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.
We have 30 years direct evidence that the users would ignore that warning, complain about the computer warning them too much, insist that the warning is entirely unnecessary, and then release a document with important information unredacted.
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can overlap. They think it's paper. Because that's what it pretends to be.
The best fix for this in almost any organization is the one that untrained humans will understand: After you redact, you print out and scan back in. You have policy that for redacted documents, they must be scanned in of a physical paper.
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on
Sorry, but a professional user not having an operational understanding of the tools they're working with is called culpable negligence in any other profession. A home user not knowing how MS Word works is fine, but we're talking desk clerks whose primary task is document management, and lawyers who were explicitly tasked with data redaction for digital publication. I don't think we should excuse or normalize this level of incompetence.
I don't expect radiologists to have a good understanding of the software involved in the control loops for the equipment they operate. Why should a lawyer have to have a mental model or even understand how the pdf rendering engine works?
Have you ever had to actually react a document in acrobat pro? It's way more fiddly and easy to screw up than one would expect. Im not saying professionals shouldn't learn how to use their tools, but the UI in acrobat is so incredibly poor that I completely understand when reaction gers screwed up. Up thread there's an in complete but very extensive list of this exact thing happening over and over. Clearly there's a tools problem here. Actual life-critical systems aren't developed this way, if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot. Boeing tried to do that with the max, but they weren't able to successfully convince the industry that that was OK.
if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot
That's true, we blame the manufacturer and demand that they fix their product under threat of withdrawing the airworthiness certification. So where's the demand for Adobe to fix its software, under pain of losing their cash cow?
Yet, people here are arguing that it is perfectly OK that professionals keep working with tools that are apparently widely known to be inappropriate for their task. Why should we not blame the lawyers that authorized the use of inappropriate tooling for such a sensitive task as legal redaction of documents?
The link in the comment you are replying to has a screenshot of exactly this. it’s a prompt with a checkbox asking you to delete the metadata and hidden info involved with the redaction. you’d have to blaze past that and not read it to make this mistake. It is user error.
I guess if you really want to defend users here you could say people are desensitized so much by popup spam that a popup prompt is gonna just be click through’d so fast the user probably barely recognizes it, but that’s not the software’s problem. For whatever reason some users would prefer to just put black boxes over obfuscated text, so here we are
Professional users doing more than 1 document? Yes, I'm absolutely blaming them.
I agree that affordances are good, but tools are tools, they can have rough edges, it's okay that it occasionally takes more than zero knowledge and attention to use them.
If software developers designed hammers, you'd have to twist the handle before each swing to switch from tack to nail mode. And the two heads would be indistinguishable from each other.
If business MBA's designed them, you'd wind up with the SaaSy Claw 9000, free for the first month then $9.95 in recurring subscription fees, and compatible only with on-brand nails that each have a different little ad imprinted on the head.
But it doesn't matter, because by the end of the year all construction will be vibe-built from a single prompt to Clawde.ai, which will pound non-stop, burning through $1T of investor funds, and confidently hallucinate 70% of the nails until the roof collapses on the datacenter destroying the machine and civilization along with it, and a post-singularity survivor picks up a rock and looks calculatingly at a pointy shard of metal...
The software could do better, sure, but in this case the accountability clearly falls on the lawyers. It's their job - and it's a job that can profoundly impact people's lives, so they need to take it seriously - to redact information properly.
If they get caught, they just take the document down and deny it ever got posted. Claim whatever people can show is a fake.
Since they control the levers of government, there's few with the resources and appetite for holding them accountable. So far, we haven't un-redacted anything too damning, so push hasn't come to shove yet.
The only might change if there's a "blue wave" in the midterms, but even then I wouldn't count on it.
I’ve not looked too deeply, but based on other discussion, I wonder if this was malicious noncompliance meant to reveal what the higher-ups were ordering hidden. If victims’ names are properly redacted that would be strong evidence.
It is more likely they have no conceptual understanding that the PDF is a file format. They likely assume that whatever is shown in the interface is what is exported.
Indeed, incompetence is basically guaranteed if the organization selects for allegiance rather than competence. But I prefer to think that at least part of this was malicious compliance, because that suggests that at least some people at the FBI still have their soul.
Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered.
There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.
For one of my first jobs I negotiated a better offer because "strings" on the document revealed the previous offer they'd sent out, and made me confident I could ask for more.
Though, makes me wonder if someone has intentionally sent out offers like that with lower numbers to make people think they're outsmarting them.
You don’t even need a digital format for this. When I was a consultant I waited in a room with a flip chart for a negotiation. I flipped through the “old slides” of the flip chart and found one where they did budget planning for the project. This was very good background info for the negotiations.
Similarly, I’ve been sent PDF proposal letters by my customers with redacted pricing from my competitors so I can compare the scope against mine. A simple unflatten reveals the price along with the scope.
Yup. I’ve gotten documents from an Asian country’s government. One known for its good governance and meritocracy, that had hidden sheets with competitor data.
Don’t underestimate work shoved onto a university intern.
The most likely explanation when hundreds of people make the same fuckup is the tooling and/or process sucks. Not that hundreds of people lack basic competence.
The most recent analogy I have is field techs in IT work. A company sends out "truck roll" tickets, and then complaints when there is a 40% failure/re-work rate on said truck rolls.
A single or handful of techs with said failure rate? Yep, perhaps incompetence.
A global failure rate across dozens of cities/countries and 40+ technicians total? No longer incompetence. At least at the field tech level. That's a documentation, process, and standards problem 100% guaranteed.
That some above average highly competent "hero" technicians are able to compensate for it is irrelevant.
If I have a sheet of paper and I color a section black. That's it. It's black. No going back.
So I can see people thinking the same for PDFs. I drew the black box. It's black. Done. They don't realize they aren't dealing with a 2D sheet of paper, but with effectively a 3D stack of papers. That they didn't draw a black box on the page, they drew a black box above the page over the area they wanted to obscure.
The fact that this happens a lot is an indication that the software is wrong in this case. It doesn't conform to user expectations.
Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.
> Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Hundreds of people might be involved, but the only key factor required for a single point of failure to propagate to the deliverable is lack of verification.
And God knows how the Trump administration is packed with inexperiente incompetents assigned to positions where they are way way over their head, and routinely commit the most basic mistakes.
See also “weaponized incompetence”, which usually has to do with getting out of work but in this case could easily be used to get away with “bad” work for longer.
In 2025, never attribute to incompetence what you could to a conspiracy. [sarcasm]
They fired/drove away/reassigned most of those who are competent in the executive branch generally, it is pretty easy to believe that none of those managing the document release and few of those working on it are actually experienced or skilled in how you do omissions in a document release correctly. Those people are gone.
> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?
Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
> What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?
Typically, two copies of a redacted document are submitted via ECF. One is an unredacted but sealed copy that is visible to the judge and all parties to the case. The other is a redacted copy that is visible to the general public.
So, to answer what I believe to be your question: the opposing party in a case would typically have an unredacted copy regardless of whether information is leaked to the general public via improper redaction, so the issue you raise is moot.
My guess would be that if the benefitting legal party didn't need to declare they also benefitted from this (because they legally can't be caught, etc.) they wouldn't.
I know and am friends with a lot of lawyers. They're pretty ruthless when it comes to this kind of thing.
Legally, I would think both parties get copies of everything. I don't know if that was the case here.
> strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth)
If it's worth so little to your eyes/comprehension you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...
That snide remark is used to discredit a profession in passing, but the reason you won't find a lot of examples of this happening is because the trust clients have to put in lawyers and the legal system in general is what makes it work, and betraying that trust is a literal professional suicide (suspension, disbarment, reputational ruin, and often civil liability) for any lawyer... that's why "strict" doesn't mean anything "little" in this case.
I’m not a lawyer, but I did watch every episode of Better Call Saul and I’d point out that a lawyer who generates one complaint likely generates multiple complaints so that 1 complaint/10 law licenses number is misleading about the scope of the issue. Similarly, 2000 disbarments sounds high until you realize that there are roughly 1.3 million lawyers. What’s more, when I was checking to see what reasons for disbarment might be, I found an article (https://law.usnews.com/law-firms/advice/articles/what-does-i...) which cited a number much lower (less than 500) and that pointed out that reasons other than professional misconduct can lead to disbarment including DUI and domestic violence. The following gives some reasons for disbarment:
> … disbarment is the presumptive form of discipline for an attorney who steals clients’ money, Best says.
> Disbarment is more likely when the attorney committed fraud or serious dishonesty, particularly in front of a tribunal or to a client. Similarly, priority may be given to cases where an attorney is convicted of a crime of moral turpitude, Levin says.
> Priorities also change in response to society’s changing values and when there’s a belief that tightening down on types of cases will help the profession as a whole, Best says.
> For example, in Massachusetts, there has been an increased focus on violations relating to the administration of justice, such as when prosecutors engage in racist behavior.
> And while, in the past, an attorney’s drunk driving or domestic violence would probably not have led to sanctions (because they were seen as unrelated to the attorney’s legal work), they now might result in discipline, Best says.
> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.
My recollection is that it varies quite a bit between jurisdictions. The ABA's model rules require you to notify the other party when they accidentally send you something but leave unspecified what else, if anything, you might have to do.
A famous case where this came into play was one of the Infowars defamation suits. Alex Jones’s lawyer accidentally sent the families’ lawyer the full contents of a phone backup. They notified Jones’s lawyer, and gave him some time to reply. After that time elapsed, the whole dump was considered fair game.
I’m unclear why this is downvoted given the below. While it would theoretically be jurisdiction-specific, if the ABA model rules don’t provide some specific guidance, it’s clear that the lawyers would be ethically obligated to use whatever info they obtained if it helped their client and as otherwise consistent with their ethical obligations in the jurisdictions that follow those. I’m admitted in New York, and I don’t recall any kind of bar on the usage of this type of info there. Seems like in a lot of jurisdictions they’d have a duty to notify, but that may not even be the case in all.
Here in NL if confidential information about offenders leaks from court documents, it usually leads to a reduction in sentencing because the leak of classified information is weighed as part of the punishment. If the leak was proven to be intentional, it might lead to a mistrial or even acquittal. Leaking of victims' information usually only results in a groveling public apology from the Minister/Secretary of Justice du jour.
Given the context and the baldly political direction behind the redactions, it's not at all unlikely that this is the result of deliberate sabotage or malicious compliance. Bondi isn't blacking these things out herself, she's ordering people to do it who aren't true believers. Purges take time (and often blood). She's stuck with the staff trained under previous administrations.
This has happened so many times I feel like the DoJ must have some sort of standardised redaction pipeline to prevent it by now. Assuming they do, why wasn't it used?
I am happy with their lack of expertise and hope it stays that way, because I cannot remember a single case where redactions put the citizenry at a better place for it.
Of course if it's in the middle of an investigation it can spoil the investigation, allow criminals to cover their tracks, allow escape.
In such case the document should be vetted by competent and honest officials to judge whether it is timely to release it, or whether suppressing it just ensures that investigation is never concluded, extending a forever renewed cover to the criminals.
There was also a process on how to communicate top secret information, but these idiots prefered to use signal.
I'm completly lost on how you can be surprised by this at all? Trump is in there, tells some FBI faboon to black everything out, they collect a group of people they can find and start going through these files as fast as they can.
"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king; the palace instead becomes a circus."
Here in the UK we have a thing called the civil service. They are not immune from government meddling but if they are good at anything it's writing and following processes, even under duress.
Secure systems are not exactly the right environment for quick release and handling. So documents invariably get onto regular desktops with off the shelf software used by untrained personnel.
Not to mention when the White House published Obama's birth certificate as a PDF. I remember being able to open it and turn the different layers off and on.
Are you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1].
Yeah, the idea that proves it's fraudulent has been debunked, but the alternative hasn't been proven, either. Nobody has named the specific OCR software that does this destructive replacement. It's a case of "well, there's an alterastive theory, and that's good enough" debunking.
I just took a look at the layers. In some cases, e.g. the 2nd letter in the Local Registrar's signature, a single letter is partially in the background layer, and partially in the upper layer.
This is easily explained by the character separation software being not 100% accurate.
It's not at all explained if someone is fraudulently adding text. Why would someone put half of the character in 1 layer and half of the character in a different layer?
Not sure what you mean by destructive replacement, since nothing is destroyed.
So I just looked into this, and it's specifically Mixed Raster Content pipeline (ISO/IEC 16485) used in lots of different scanners. There's no need to find which specific software generated it because it's used by lots of them.
It's a technique used to attempt to isolate font characters of the same size and style as separate layers before OCR-ing to make OCR more accurate.
ABBYY FineReader, for example, is mentioned as producing the exact same type of results. But there's no guarantee that was the actual software because lots of scanning software does it -- it's a general technique. Plus it won't even be deterministically reproducible if it was e.g. scanned and OCR'd at higher resolution and then saved at a lower resolution, as is generally considered best practice for maximizing accuracy while keeping file sizes lower.
So this program really doesn't keep the original image of the document as a raster layer? That's kind of surprising, especially if it's used in the legal world. Personally, I'd always want to be able to recover the original document from the OCR layers. Or, are you saying you can? Then you should tell snopes, because it'll make the snopes article a lot shorter if they can just lead with that.
I think you are misunderstanding. The pipeline is e.g.:
Scan (600 dpi) > MRC (600 dpi) > OCR (600 dpi) > Downsample (150 dpi) > Save to PDF (150 dpi)
The image is saved in raster format at 150 dpi. That's the document, but not at the original scanning resolution. If you performed MRC and OCR at the 150 dpi level, you'd get different/worse results than were originally gotten at 600 dpi. Which is why you always OCR before downsampling, and you downsample for smaller files.
This isn't changing anything about the Snopes article. It just explains why if you run MRC/OCR at the PDF resolution, you won't deterministically reproduce it because it's not the resolution it was originally run at.
You do understand that this OCR is only for being able to search and highlight text? It's not changing what's displayed. That's still the pixels.
Are you saying that I'm saying that there are no pixels in the document? Like, do you think that I think that scanners have come to operate on pure platonic forms and no longer use the concept of pixels? That would be really cool, wouldn't it. But no, I don't believe that. Hm. Where did this conversation go wrong. I think I was unclear in my last statement. I have yet to see someone show the original scribbles or ink marks that these OCR layers were generated based on. That's what I meant by "destructive". Now, I'm no expert on documents, so you might want to just cut your losses and stop trying to educate me and let me be uneducated in this matter. I'll accept that I don't know what I'm talking about, and reduce my criticisms of this whole thing to pointing out that the explanations don't make sense to me.
> Are you saying that I'm saying that there are no pixels in the document?
I genuinely don't know what you're saying.
> Like, do you think that I think that scanners have come to operate on pure platonic forms and no longer use the concept of pixels? That would be really cool, wouldn't it.
Yes, because that is absolutely a thing. That's what Adobe ClearScan does, converting pixels to smooth vector outlines. Zoom in, and zero pixels in OCR'd text. That's not the case in this file though.
> I have yet to see someone show the original scribbles or ink marks that these OCR layers were generated based on. That's what I meant by "destructive".
I still genuinely don't know what you mean. The original scribbles and ink marks are a physical piece of paper. The MRC layers are generated from the scan and don't destroy anything, they only separate. The resulting layered bitmap is identical, pixel-for-pixel. My best interpretation of what you're saying is you want a higher-resolution scan? But why? Again, nothing "destructive" has happened except maybe reducing the resolution. But "destructive" is not a word people usually use for that.
> so you might want to just cut your losses and stop trying to educate me and let me be uneducated in this matter
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I am genuinely happy to help you understand, but if you really don't want to then obviously I won't spend any more time replying. But if you're going to publicly throw suspicion on the validity of the birth certificate, I feel it's important to correct the record here on HN simply for other people who might read this exchange.
I'm starting to understand where this conversation diverged. I'm coming from a place of having read the Snopes page and watched the videos linked there. I think understanding where I'm at, is a good place to start trying to explain it to me. To put it more clearly, at this point I've seen a video that seems to show that the PDF has a collection of layers, some contain text and one contains the page below. Now, it seems like you were saying that the text layers are just the pixels from the page moved up to a new layer. I said that I think that's surprising. Then we got caught up on the meaning of the words "original pixels". I probably should have said: a full buffer of pixels from the CCD sensor, perhaps with resolution reduction or compression, but nothing moved to new layers (whether that's normally considered "destructive" or not is another issue).
OK, well hopefully you understand now! This part is key:
> Now, it seems like you were saying that the text layers are just the pixels from the page moved up to a new layer. I said that I think that's surprising.
That's indeed all it is. It may be surprising, but that's how it works. Absolutely nothing about the pixels are changed as part of the process of that text layer separation. Later when saving the final PDF there's normal lossy compression, same as any JPEG, but the layer process actually preserves the text edges better than JPEG.
So I do hope you're satisfied now that everything about this is just normal image processing, and that nothing has been destroyed, there's no "missing evidence" or anything. And that the whole idea that the layers imply some kind of manipulation or forgery is false. What you're seeing is just the scan itself, saved (presumably) at a lower resolution and with the normal image compression scanners produce. The layer separation process is completely non-destructive and doesn't manipulate pixels at all.
"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.
The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools."
> Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text
Sure. But anyone can visually examine this. That means everyone with situational context can directly examine the quality of the redaction.
Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works. Or you have to separate the folks with context from the folks with techical competence. (There is the third option of training everyone in the DoJ how to examine the inner workings of a PDF. That seems wasteful.)
Can they? In principle it could be the difference between RGB 0.0,0.0,0.0 and RGB 0.004,0.0,0.0, that could be very difficult to visually see, but an algorithm could unmask the data with some correlation.
If you do it digitally and then map the material to black-and-white bitmap, then that you can actually virtually examine.
> Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works.
While true, I think the key problem is that the tools used were not made for digital redaction. If they were I would be quite a bit more confident that they would also work properly.
Seems like there could be a product for this domain.. And after some googling, it appears there is.
> While true, I think the key problem is that the tools used were not made for digital redaction. If they were I would be quite a bit more confident that they would also work properly.
Adobe Acrobat's redaction tools regularly feature in this sort of fuck-up, and they are (at least marketed as being) designed for such use
It's probably fine, but certainly better than what's being discussed ITT.
The larger point is that the "usual" redaction involves a tape pen or paint-style ink (dries opaque), IIRC, then photocopy, because the blocked out area is opaque. Scanner is probably no different than photocopy for these purposes.
They can't, if the variations are subtle enough. For example, many people are oblivious to the fact that one can extract audio from objects captured on mute video, due to tiny vibrations.
Analog is the worse option here. Simple screenshot of 100% black bar would be what a smart lazy person would do.
Perhaps an imagemagick pipeline dumping each page out as a png then blanking areas associated with a list of words (a pixel level concordance of the coordinates of all the words having been compiled from a text dump? Hand-waving here).
I'm probably overthinking this one but the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps? So three conspirators with names like Stonk, Hephalump and Pragma-Sasquatch would be sort of easy to distinguish between if the public had a limited list of people who might be involved?
It's like Russian spies being caught in the Netherlands with taxi receipts showing they took a taxi from their Moscow HQ to the airport: corrupt organizations attract/can only hire incompetent people...
Anyone remember how the Trump I regime had staff who couldn't figure out the lighting in the White House, or mistitled Australia's Prime Minister as President?
Yes I remember that incident. It was big over here.
However I'm 100% sure that that was not a real spy incident. But rather just a 'message' to be sent from the Russian govt. The same way they have infiltrated our airspace with TU-95 bombers nearly every month for decades. Just a message "Hey we are still watching you".
When you see how ridiculously incompetent they were, not just their phone history but also the gear they had with them. It amounts to nothing more than a scriptkiddy's pineapple. There's no way they would have been able to do any serious infiltration into any kind of even remotely competent organisation.
Also the visible fumbling about in a carpark with overly complex antennas instead of something more hidden (e.g. an apartment across the street, a cabling tent or something). IMO the objective here was to get caught and stir a fuss.
Nothing is. The point is it’s highly precedented, surprisingly robust and far more competent than half the armchair suggestions being raised in this thread.
The bigger difference from my perspective is that they have competent people doing the strategy this time. The last Trump administration failed to use the obvious levers available to accomplish fascism, while this one has been wildly successful on that end. In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country, and unfortunately more and more competent people will choose to work for them in order to receive the benefits of doing so.
> but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well.
I imagine Republicans such as this still populate a majority of the house and Senate. If they disagree, they are sure making an effort to do so silently.
The amount of things Trump did circumventing Congressional approval might suggest that he does not a clean pass even though Republicans have majority in both the house and the senate.
>In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country
I disagree. It felt that way for the first few months, but the wheels are coming off. Trump is too old and unpopular to steal a 3rd term. Therefore everyone around him has to worry about what will happen in 3 years, and plan for post-Trump rather than forever-Trump.
> Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit.
Are you talking about the same Bill Barr? "Eager to win accolades from liberals" is a hilariously Trump-after-he-fired-someone thing to say.
Have you read his Wikipedia page? Do you know who he actually is?
I'm not talking about paper credentials, I'm talking about accomplishments. 90% of lawyers in DC are liberals. Conservative lawyers can get credit for being "one of the good ones" so long as they don't attack the core tenants of liberal universalism or advance conservative social change in any meaningful way.[1]
Obama's DOJ did stuff like go after Catholic nuns to make them offer birth control, to vindicate liberal principles like supremacy of secular values over religious values. Guys like Barr never did anything like that. Trump and his merry band of chuckleheads have achieved more legal wins for conservatism in a year than anyone in the Bush administration did in eight years.
[1] It's not necessarily apparent from the outside where those lines are drawn. Bush's $8 trillion effort to blow up the Middle East was far less controversial among D.C. lawyers than Trump's effort to restrict immigration from the Middle East. Liberal universalists agreed with Bush's fundamental premise, if not his approach. Both believed that Iraq was the way it is due to external factors like Saddam, not internal factors like Iraqi culture. Even if liberals thought it was a terrible idea to go to war to topple Saddam, they didn't disagree with the core premise that Saddam was the barrier to Iraq becoming just like Iowa.
So you haven't read his Wikipedia page then, and you are too young, I guess, to remember Iran-Contra. You apparently don't even remember how Barr got the job from Trump.
Iran-Contra is a perfect example. How did that advance conservative principles? Whether Nicaragua is communist doesn’t affect anyone in America. Precisely because it has no consequences domestically, you won’t get disinvited from Georgetown parties for trying to overthrow Latin American governments. In fact, there’s an upside for liberals in such policies.
The resulting chaos facilitated mass migration and cultural transplantation to the U.S. from places where socialism and communism found fertile soil.
DC is full of trad cons who are sensitive to what liberals think. More specifically, the type of liberal that dominates the professional class in DC—folks who will happily represent Phillip Morris but consider immigration and affirmative action to be moral imperatives.
It’s just the math of the city. The DOJ is more democrat-leaning than most college campuses: https://admin.govexec.com/media/general/2024/11/110124donati.... Trump got three times the level of support in AOC’s district than his share of donations from DOJ employees.
Yeah I mean, orchestrating an assassination in a federal prison of a guy the whole world is watching, and never even so much as a whiff of a leak? Because how do you contain that without whacking everyone involved (which we would know about)? You don't. Not without teleportation, time-travel, or at the very least post-hypnotic suggestion.
There were some leaks. Some of the events I would need to check my offline documents for more specific references but, for example, the Reddit leak with a person who was working at the jail saying that he had to let in someone associated with the military and they left shortly after Epstein was killed.
> but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file.
This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position
I'm not so sure it's about knowing his own limitations, rather it's about building a reliable process and trusting that process more than either technology or people.
Any process that relies on 100% accuracy from either people or technology will eventually fail. It's just a basic matter of statistics. However, there are processes that CAN, at least in theory, be 100% effective.
So following that strange logic if a dumb person knows he's dumb, he's suddenly become intelligent? Or is that impossible by your peculiar definition of intelligence?
Knowing your limits has to be a sign of intelligence.
"Dumb" people (FTR the description actually refers to something rather than that which you think it does...) run around on the internet getting mad because they haven't thought things through...
It's an interesting question though. I know quite some "smart" people who lack self awareness to an almost fatal degree yet can outdo the vast majority of the population at solving logic puzzles. It tends to be a rather frustrating condition to deal with.
Knowing your limits is a sign of intelligence, but it's not the only one, and it's not a requirement. Meaning that not having that understanding doesn't exclude you from being intelligent.
Wisdom would be knowing not to try and exceed those limits
Intelligence would be knowing they exist (I know that I cannot fly by flapping my arms, it took intelligence to deduce that, wisdom tells me not to try and jump from a height and flap my arms to fly. Further intelligence can be applied, deducing that there are artificial means by which I can attain flight)
Not at all. It's a procedure that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. Sometimes that's what you want.
> you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.
>Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.
I suppose a global search/replace to mark text for redaction as an initial step might not be a bad idea, but if one needs to make sure it's correct, that's not enough.
Don't bother with soft copy at all. Print a copy and have multiple individuals manually make redactions to the same copy with different color inks.
Once that initial phase is complete, partner up persons who didn't do the initial redactions review the paper text with the extant redactions and go through the documents together (each with their own copy of the same redactions), verbally and in ink noting redactions as well as text that should be redacted but isn't.
That process could then be repeated with different people to ensure nothing was missed.
We used to call this "proofreading" in the context of reports and other documents provided as work product to clients. It looks really bad when the product for which you're charging five to six figures isn't correct.
The use case was different, but the efficacy of such a process is perfect for something like redactions as well.
And yes, we had word processing and layout software which included search and replace. But if correctness is required, that's not good enough -- a word could be misspelled and missed by the search/replace, and/or a half dozen other ways an automated process could go wrong and either miss a redaction or redact something that shouldn't be.
As for the time and attention required, I suppose that depends upon how important it is to get right.
Is such a process necessary for all documents? No.
That said, if correctness is a priority, four (or more) text processing engines (human brains, in this case) with a set of engines working in tandem and other sets of engines working serially and independently to verify/correct any errors or omissions is an excellent process for ensuring the correctness of text.
I'd point out that the above process is one that's proven reliable over decades, even centuries -- and doesn't require exact strings or regular expressions.
If the word you need to redact is also an English verb there is a risk that you accidentally mark the name of person in a context where that redacted word has a clear meaning in that context and can be used as a proof that such a term has been accidentally redacted because a large scale search&mark has taken place.
According to a random dictionary I found:
To trump. Verb. Surpass (something) by saying or doing something better.
You process doesn't make sense, why wouldn't you just black box redact right away and print and scan? What does underline then ink give you? But it's also not the process described in the blog
> that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up.
You've already screwed up by leaking length and risking errors in manual search&replace
Absolutely. The other comments replying to your original comment that are nitpicking over implementation details miss the purpose and importance of this step.
The fact that this release process is missing this key step is significant too imho. It makes it really clear that the people running this didn't understand all of the dimensions involved in releasing a redacted document like this and/or that they weren't able to get expert opinions on how to do this the right way, which just seems fantastical to me given who we're talking about.
In other threads people are discussing the possibility of this being intentional, by disaffected subordinates, poorly vetted and rushed in to work on this against their will. And that's certainly plausible in subordinates but I have a hard time believing that it's the case for the people running this who, if they understood what they were tasked with would have prevented an entire category of errors by simply tasking subordinates to do what you described regardless of how they felt about the task.
So to me that leaves the only possibility that the people running this particular operation are incompetent, and given the importance of redacting that is dismaying.
Regardless of how you feel about the action of redacting these documents, the extent to which it's done and the motives behind doing it, the idea that the people in charge of this aren't competent to do it is not good at all.
This is one of the biggest document collections ever released to the public (...or will be when it's finally done) and the redactions were done in a hurry by a government agency with limited resources which would usually be doing more useful things.
So it's likely there simply isn't the time to do extended multi-step redactions.
What's happening is a mix of malicious compliance, incompetence, and time pressure.
It's very on-brand for it to be confused, chaotic, and self-harming.
Why would I settle for a rough equivalence? The point was about the chance of making mistakes in redaction, so sure, if you ignore the difference in the chance of making mistakes (which the underline process increases), everything becomes equivalent!
They're equivalent in security. The digital method is more convenient (albeit more error prone). What confers the security is the print-scan step. Whether one is redacting in between or before doesn't change much.
You'd still want to do a tabula rasa and manual post-pass with both methods.
> point was about the chance of making mistakes in redaction
Best practice is humans redacting in multiple passes for good reason. It's less error prone than relying on a "smart" redactor, which is mostly corporate CYA kit.
They aren't, security is defined as the amount of information you leak. If you have an inferior process where you're substituting the correct digital match with an in incorrect manual match, you're reducing security
> albeit more error prone
The opposite, you can't find all 925 cases of the word Xyz as efficiently on paper without the ease of a digital text search, my guess is you just have made up a different comparison (e.g., a human spending 100hrs reading paper vs some "smart" app doing 1 min of redactions) vs. the actual process quoted and criticized in my original comment
> Whether one is redacting in between or before doesn't change much
It does, the chance to make a mistake differs in these cases! Printing & scanning can't help you here, it's a totally set of mistakes
> Best practice
But this conversation is about a specific blogged-about reality, not your best practice theory!
The blog has no relevance to your claim that the print and scan procedure somehow fundamentally precludes automated search and replace. I refuted that. You remain free to perform automated search and replace prior to printing the document. You also have the flexibility to perform manual redactions both digitally as well as physically with ink.
It's clearly a superior process that provides ease of use, ease of understanding, and is exceedingly difficult to screw up. Barr's DoJ should be commended for having selected a procedure that minimizes the risk of systemic failure when carried out by a collection of people with such diverse technical backgrounds and competence levels.
Notably, had the same procedure been followed for the Epstein files then the headline we are currently commenting under presumably wouldn't exist.
> The blog has no relevance to your claim that the print and scan procedure somehow fundamentally precludes automated search and replace.
It has direct relevance since it describes the process as lacking the automated search and replace
> I refuted that
You didn't, you created a meaningless process of underlinig text digitally to waste time redacting it on paper for no reason but add more mistakes, and also replaced the quoted reality with your made up situation to "refute".
> and is exceedingly difficult to screw up.
It's trivial, and I've told you how in the previous comment
> Notably, had the same procedure been followed for the Epstein files then the headline we are currently commenting under presumably wouldn't exist.
Nope, this is generic "hack" headline, so guessing a redacted name by comparing the length of plaintext to unmask would fit the headline just as well as a copy&paste hack
Now that you've shifted the goalposts back closer to the original discussion, what's your point? Yes, you can leak the "nonexisting" file in multiple ways, including the printed one, and yes, "accidents" happen. So are they more likely to happen if you ban digital search and force paper and ink redaction instead? Are they more likely to happen if you black out digitally before printing or underline digitally and ink out physically?
And the "obvious word needle in a haystack of many thousands of pages" isn't as self-healing as you appear to think it is.
> This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with.
No, this is an example of someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful outcomes.
"Smart" people like to believe that knowing enough minutiae is enough to result in a successful outcome.
Actual smart people know that the process is more important than the minutiae, and proceed accordingly.
> someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful
Oh, man, is he the only smart person in the whole department of >100k employees and an >x contractors??? What other fantasy do you need to believe in to excuse the flaws? Also, if he's so smart why didn't he, you know, hire someone smart for the job?
> even a very dumb person still has successful
Except it's easier to make mistakes following his process for both smart and dumb people, not be successful!
> Actual smart people know that the process is more important
So he's not actually smart according to your own definition because the process he has set up was bad, so he apparently did not know it was important to set it up better?
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length
This is the only weakness of Barr's method.
> it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Anyong relying on automated tools to redact is doing so performatively. At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context to sit down and read through the documents and strike out anything that reveals–directly or indirectly, spelled correctly or incorrectly–too much.
Of course it isn't, the other weakness you just dismiss is the higher risk of failed searches. People already fail with digital, it's even harder to do in print or translate digital to print (something a machine can do with 100% precision, now you've introduced a human error)
> At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context
Before the end of the day there is also the whole day, and if you have to waste the attention of such people on doing ink redactions instead of dedicating all of their time to focused reading, you're just adding mistakes for no benefit
Forget about typoes. Until recent LLMs, machines couldn't detect oblique or identifying references. (And with LLMs, you still have the problem of hallucinations. To say nothing of where you're running the model.)
> if you have to waste the attention of such people on doing ink redactions instead of dedicating all of their time to focused reading
You've never read a text with a highlighter or pen?
Out of curiosity, have you worked with sensitive information that needed to be shared across security barriers?
Reading through material in context and actively removing the telling bits seems very focused to me.
Furthermore, reading through long winded, dry legalese (or the like) and then occasionally marking it up seems like an excellent way to give the brain short breaks to continue on rather than to let the mind wander in a sea of text.
I am for automating all the things but I can see pros and cons for both digital and manual approaches.
The reading is focused, but that focus is wasted on menial work, which makes it easier to miss something more important
> give the brain short breaks
Set a timer if you feel that's of any use? Why does the break have to depend on the random frequency of terms to be redacted? What if there is nothing to redact for pages, why let the mind wander?
> I am for automating
But you're arguing against it. What's the pro of manually replacing all 1746 occurrences of "Trump" instead of spending 0.01% of that time with a digital search & replace and then spending the other 1% digitally searching for variants with typos and then spending the last 99% in focused reading trying to find that you've missed "the owner of Mar-a-Lago Club" reference or something more complicated (and then also replace that variant digitally rather than hoping you'd notice it every single time you wade through walls of legalese!)
> What's the pro of manually replacing all 1746 occurrences of "Trump" instead of spending 0.01% of that time with a digital search & replace and then spending the other 1% digitally searching for variants with typos
Because none of this involves a focussed reading. It's the same reason why Level 3 can be less safe than Level 4. If you're skimming, you're less engaged than if you're reading in detail. (And if you're skipping around, you're missing context. You may catch Trump and Trup, but will you catch POTUD? Alternatively, if you just redact every mention of the President, you may wind up creating a President ***, thereby confirming what you were trying to redact.)
If it doesn't matter, automate it. If you care, have a team do a proper redaction.
> Because none of this involves a focussed reading
That's not a pro, thats an incorrect rejection of the pro of the alternative. The thing is is that it does not preclude focused reading, I don't understand why you make up the "skipping around/skimming" alternative when I've expclitily mentioned that the is that 99% of time you spend on focused reading. It's just when you do that focused reading, you don't have to waste time on trivial redactions that you've already done automatically, and instead you can dedicate that time to catching POTUDs. So in total, you can spend more time on focused reading.
> may wind up creating a President **
How? Even if your 1% on digital alternatives somehow doesn't include this obvious combination, why would the word "President" in "President **" be harder to redact during focused reading?
> If it doesn't matter, automate it. If you care, have a team do a proper redaction.
I don't get, where is the actual option that I've described - do both while saving time???
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions
Increasing the size of the redaction box to include enough of the surrounding text to make that very difficult.
IIRC there was a Slashdot discussion about it that went "Oh yeah, obviously you need to black out the face entirely, or use a randomized Gaussian blur." "Yeah, or just not molest kids."
similar to pressing delete or emptying recycle bin, in that all that happens is the operating system is told that section of the hard drive is now blank, but the underlying files are still there and available to recover
The covid origins Slack messages discovery material (Anderson & Holmes) were famously poorly redacted pdfs, allowing their unredacting by Gilles Demaneuf, benefiting all of us.
The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose.
The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as DOJ lawyers regularly tell courts) by the need to “protect the information of innocent U.S. citizens.”
But the “bad at redactions” part isn’t an accident. It functions as a litigation tactic. Makes production slow, make FOIA responses slow, and then point to that slow, manual process as the reason the timeline has to be slow. The government could easily buy the kind of redaction tools that most law firms have used for decades. Purpose built redaction tools speed the work up and reduce mistakes. But the government doesn't buy those tools because faster, cleaner production benefits the requester.
The downside for the government is that every so often a judge gets fed up and orders a normal timeline. Then agencies go into panic mode and initiate an “all hands on deck.” Then you end up with untrained, non-attorney staff doing rushed redactions by hand in Adobe. Some of them can barely use a mouse. That’s when you see the classic technical failures: someone draws a black rectangle that looks like a redaction, instead of applying a real redaction that actually removes the underlying text.
This is an extremely interesting perspective. I haven't really heard it before, but I once worked for the state in a technical capacity and watched as they spent entire workdays and scheduled multiple meetings with the sole purpose of figuring out ways to slow down or narrow FOIA requests.
I didn't really know how they slept at night, but I don't know how a lot of people sleep at night. I only had to be involved because I had to do the actual trawling through the emails. They spent their time trying to narrow the keywords that I'd have to search, and trying to figure out new definitions of the words "related to."
There’s a great Australian comedy called Utopia about a government department that has a whole episode B-plot of the characters working on the Aussie equivalent of a FOIA request. It’s pretty funny and in the end one of the workers just finds it easier to leak the document to the requesting journalist rather than deal with the official process, even though it was mundane contract details on a carpark that came in ahead of schedule and under budget.
In another episode they’re trying to find out the length of a stealth submarine for construction planning purposes of a port or something, and they have to go through endless layers of security checks with the military that lead nowhere. In the end a reporter filming a documentary episode on the government agency tells them the length because they were allowed to film the submarine on another program.
Definitely recommend the show and my friends in government say it’s scarily accurate.
Imagine if society were a program and laws, policies and procedures were its codebase. The scary thing is that the way it gets patched in reality isn't very different from the way agentic LLMs perform on actual codebases today. Bug in this department? Delete it. People abuse this system? Add more friction for legitimate users. Society has a need? Greenfield a feature that works great but doesn't fit in with existing systems at all. This didn't used to be so on the nose. I can't decide if we should welcome our new robot overlords or even what is a reflection of who anymore.
No, there isn't an enormous cohort of bureaucrats going to work every day, collectively wringing their hands and saying "haha, we're going to be STUPID today!"
It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF.
I always felt paranoid (without any real evidence, just a guess) that there would always be a chance that anything done in software could be reversed somehow.
If it's not done properly, and you happen at any point in the chain to put black blocks on a compressed image (and PDF do compress internal images), you are leaking some bits of information in the shadow casted by the compression algorithm : (Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/jpguncrop )
And that's just in the non-adversarial simple case.
If you don't know the provenance of images you are putting black box on (for example because of a rogue employee intentionally wanting to leak them, or if the image sensor of your target had been compromised to leak some info by another team), your redaction can be rendered ineffective, as some images can be made uncroppable by construction .
Right, using stenography to encode some parity bits into an image so that lost information can be reconstructed seems like an obvious approach - all sorts of approaches you could use, akin to FEC. Haven't looked at your site yet, will be interested to see what you've built :)
Edit: I checked it out, nice, I like the lower res stenography approach, can work very nicely with good upscaling filters - gave it a star :)
Somewhat related, I once sent a FOI request to a government agency that decided the most secure way to redact documents was to print them, use a permanent marker, and then scan them. Unfortunately they used dye based markers over laser print, so simply throwing the document into Photoshop and turning up the contrast made it readable.
I remember noticing that a teacher in high school had used white-out to hide the marks for the correct multiple choice answer on final exam practice questions before copying them. Then she literally cut-and-pasted questions from the practice questions for the final. I did mediocre on the essay, but got the highest score in the class on the multiple choice questions, because I could see little black dots where the white out was used.
I was thinking I understand what's going on but then I came to the image showing the diff and I don't understand at all how that diff can unredact anything.
It's not that you can unredact them from scratch (you could never get the blue circle back from this software). It's that you can tell which of the redacted images is which of the origin images. Investigative teams often find themselves in a situation where they have all four images, but need to work out which redacted files are which of the origins. Take for example, where headed paper is otherwise entirely redacted.
So with this technique, you can definitively say "Redacted-file-A is definitely a redacted version of Origin-file-A". Super useful for identifying forgeries in a stack of otherwise legitimate files.
Also good for for saying "the date on origin-file-B is 1993, and the file you've presented as evidence is provable as origin-file-b, so you definitely know of [whatever event] in 1993".
I'm trying to understand this cause it sounds fascinating but I don't get it. I don't have an advanced understanding of compression so that might be part of why.
If you compare an image to another image, you could guess by compression what is under the blocked part, that makes some sense to me conceptually, what I don't get is for the PDF specifically why does it compressing the black boxes I put have any risk? It's compressing the internal image which is just the black box part? Or are you saying the whole screenshot is an internal image?
There's also metadata in the image files. What specifically would be sensitive in the pdf with screenshots metadata that is also not present in the sceenshot image metadata?
PDF has something called an "info dictionary", which most mainstream PDF-writing software will fill out with various bits of info that you might not want known.
Image files usually have substantially less metadata by default, unless it's one taken by a camera.
it's absolutely bewildering how ridiculous everything has been so far in terms of competence and this really takes the cherry on the top near Christmas too.
USA is still very high, so they can go much much lower, but I think they might go to some still lower places, finding them where we didn't even know such places could exist. Some ideas:
Slavery has never been illegal in the US. The 13th amendment leaves slavery legal as punishment for a crime. The US has the highest rate of crime punishment in the world (higher than places like North Korea), an industry that profits by selling slave labour of those punished criminals, and known ties between those who profit from selling slave labour and those who decide how many things should be crimes.
Oh also this isn't some quiet conspiracy or anything because the Union of correctional facility officers will openly say that things like legalizing recreational marijuana will hurt them, so they oppose it.
Same with cops.
They also oppose removing things like three strikes laws that haven't done a damn thing to make our country "safer" or better.
I know you’re joking, but grievance over the loss of slavery after the civil war is privately one of the major drivers behind Trumps extremely loyal core supporters.
Taking Greenland and Venezuela is given, as they took most of Latin America already. Just the new Mexican president looks like the next thorn in their eyes. Too competent, too social, too anti-corruption.
They effectively already left NATO and openly support Russia already.
ICC members are already under fire and some had their microsoft account banned by Trump.
Trump will invade Greenland and Canada first. China is less of an priority.
NATO works by projecting a united force. Nations unconditionally backing each other up. The USA is now clearly no longer a part of that. That's not to say that the USA will do nothing if a NATO member is attacked. It might. Or not.
Limiting Nuclear proliferation was already fucked.
Trump tore up Iran's "we won't do nukes" deal, doesn't matter whether you think they were genuine or not, it demonstrates we will go back on a deal so our word isn't worth anything.
Ukraine shows that the west will not actually protect you like they claim, so your only option is getting nukes to really deter people.
North Korea and Pakistan demonstrate that you can pretty much do whatever you want with just a couple nukes, the west will cower in fear over idle threats.
No country would look at any of this and conclude that they have any choice but to build nukes to protect themselves.
Any country without nukes, that is not currently developing them, is stupid imo.. Nukes are the only thing that can guarantee sovereignty now.
Ukraine gave up their nukes.
No need to consider. The UK and France have nukes. France even has a two-tier response. Not enough to vitrify Russia or China five times over, but enough to make them reconsider.
For much of NATO history, the US is NATO. The US doesn’t want it to be like that anymore because it needs to strategically shift to the other side of the world. So, the US says “What if Europe can be NATO? If we can force them to meet the GDP commitment then maybe we don’t need to worry about them too much and commit less of our own resources to this theater.” But of course people interpret this as if the US is abandoning the alliance. No, the US just has other problems to deal with in the world.
That is the rationalization, but don't be surprised if the US would not confront China at all.
The main flow of capital in the US had been going to the mil.industry, but that is not the case anymore. It is mainly surveillance tech that is receiving capital. In a very unhealthy economy, this all looks eerily pre-'30s.
The US, right now, is only threatening weak countries, they don't have the industrial power to confront China, nor do they want it. This shouldn't be a surprise, some ideologues behind this maga-project belief in an America from one pole to the other. They believe in "spheres of influence", and as such China has their own sphere of influence. A sphere of influence means a kind of colony, where natural resources, people and industry are all resources to be extracted by them. It is the Russian model, it is the model of criminal mobs, it is might makes right, it is a multi-polar world.
Meanwhile, re-industrialization projects have been scrapped, partners have been scared of, and tariffs have hit the industry that was still left in America.
Monopolists are parasites on the economy, and the US is already very weakened from that. As the Japanese said, the US is still a great power, but the throne is empty. I suspect there will be skirmishes with other "great powers" over exploitable resources like Africa, Middle East, Europe, but I don't expect the current crop to go all-in on China.
Yes, the US has always been the driving force behind NATO. It provides close to 40% of the combined military personnel, and an even higher portion of military spending.
No longer committing to defend other NATO countries, even if their military spending exceeds the target, is abandoning the alliance though. NATO is little else than that commitment.
There's a left wing cooker conspiracy theory that the guy who gave Ukraine the Javalin anti tank missiles and forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP is actually a secret Russian agent.
I didn't group NATO and the US separately. You thought I did, but I didn't and you just hadn't read properly.
I waffled a bit in my reply to not rub it in too hard.
And do you want to contribute with something other than nitpick or insult?
Do YOU think that an informed and intelligent person can conclude that Trump is secretly a Russian agent, given he was the driving force behind a massive hike in NATO spending (which Putin really hates)?
I'm not calling Trump competent, or consistent, or benevolent. You can say he has a weird crushed on Putin and is easily manipulated and corrupt.
You can even suggest a lot of the MAGA people who surround Trump are actually working for Russia, since Russia tries to influence a lot of groups and Trump's cronies (and the influencers Trump listens to) are often compromised.
But do you think Trump is actually consistently taking orders from Putin because of some kind of leverage Putin has? Because people say this constantly and it's (in my opinion) almost as embarrassing as Republicans and the Pizza conspiracy. Trump has done some things that are increadibly damaging to Russia, and blackmail doesn't work on a pathological liar with no sense of shame.
I'm sure you're smart enough to agree with pretty much all of this. But you disingenuously attack me because I'm attacking people who are on your side, even if you would privately admit they are dumb.
This is what I read in your comment: that Trump "forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP". Are you talking about the US there? No, tautologically, you are talking about those parts of NATO that Trump forced to increase military spending to 5% of GDP. So what is controversial about my observation that you used the term NATO to stand for a NATO without the US?
My point was that by doing so you yourself add weight (a very little weight) to the thesis of the grandparent that, at least in people's perceptions, the US has left NATO. It wasn't just a nitpick, but at the same time I did not intend to join this side or that side in some mad argument that is playing out in your mind. I freely admit that at this point I am not reading all your output.
Russian asset, not necessarily agent. At least that's the commonly spread idea, for which there is at least some circumstancial evidence: commercial projects in Russia for several decades and well documented links to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs under Trump I just to name two.
This low https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse_in_Pakistan aka a society where child abuse is simply accepted and mainstream, with the child abuse of child labour and dhijhadism being just additional nightmare fuel on top.
If we survive long enough I do believe historians will look back on this period and state as a matter of fact, rape and child abuse were completely acceptable, because it seems it’s totally fine with our elected leaders. If these leaders were democratically elected there is only one conclusion to draw from it…
Normally, I'd never attribute to intention what can be blamed on incompetence. Especially if the government is doing it. But sure, if I were the intern tasked with this job...
My personal guess is that only 10% of people love their work, and don't object to doing more of it - governmental or private sector. But the efficacy of those people is amplified in the private sector and nullified in government.
Source: I'm the guy everyone wanted on their group science project in high school, because I'd feel responsible for doing all the work while they smoked weed. I have brothers both in and out of government who work equally hard at similar jobs, and I see the dispatity of motivation.
I learned that a long time ago when I was a student and wanted to submit a pdf generated by a trial version of some software as an assignment and was trying to be clever and cover the watermark that said unregistered with a white box.
When opening the file in my slow computer, I could see all the rendering of the watermark happening in slow motion until the white box would pop up on top of the text.
When I was a student, and using a shareware or trial version of some software and wanted some printed output from it without a watermark, I printed to postscript (chose a printer that supported postscript and the driver used it instead of rasterized images), but using a file instead of a printer.
I could then open up the postscript, delete the commands that rendered the watermark, save it, then I converted it to PDF so it would be easy to print.
You don't need PostScript for that. The PDF text commands are Tj and TJ, and rarely ' and ". They are easy to delete without going through PostScript. Tj means showing a simple text string. TJ means showing an array of strings possibly with space adjustments. ' means moving to the next line and showing a simple string. " means doing that and setting character spacing.
Perhaps, but it's easier to open up and edit a .ps file in a text editor than a PDF. PDF is a binary format with compressed streams, while postscript is just a stack-oriented programming language.
Tools like qpdf makes it easy to edit a .pdf file in a text editor too. I’d argue using such tools is easier than and simpler than printing to postscript.
It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title.
Randomly removing these by trial and error will usually quite easily allow you to find the watermark and nix it, with the advantage that even a sophisticated recipient will not be able to find out from the pdf file what the watermark was.
I then convert the image to grayscale only. Then I apply a filter so that only 16 colors are used. And I then adjust brightness/contrast so that "white is really white". It's all scripted: "screenshot to PDF". One of my oldest shell script.
16 shades of grey (not 50) is plenty enough for text to still be smooth.
I do it for several reasons, one of them being I often take manual notes on official documents (which infuriates my wife btw) but then sometimes I need to then scan the documents and send them (local IRS / notary / bank / whatever). So I'll just scan then I'll fill rectangle with white where I took handnotes. Another reason is when there's paper printed on two sides, at scan times sometimes if the paper is thin / ink is thick, the other side shall show.
I wonder how that'd work vs adversarial inputs: never really thought about it.
Personally, I only trust an image manipulation tool to put down solid colored blocks, or something that does not involve the source pixels when deciding on the redacted pixel. Formats like PDF are just so complicated to trust.
This is what I do while sharing such images. I crop out those parts first and then take another screenshot. I do not even risk painting over and then take another screenshot. I have been doing this forever.
In practical terms, a more convenient way to achieve this is just printing the document to a PDF, which rasterises the visible layer into what the printer would see. Most pdf tools support this.
That seems like a dangerous approach. Though printer drivers do often use rasterization, especially when targeting cheap printers, many printers can render vector graphics and text as well. Print-to-PDF will often use the later approach, unless of course the source program always rasterizes it's output when sending it out to the printer driver, or the used Print-to-PDF driver is particularly stupid.
You can, but I don't trust software for these types of niche but critical tasks hah. Next thing I know I'd be reading a headline about how "bug in print to PDF actually retains XYZ metadata"
They're not 'hacks' it's the people doing the redaction making beginner mistakes of not properly removing the selectable text under the redactions. They're either drawing black rectangles over the text or highlighting it black neither of which prevents the underlying text from being selected.
Keeping that secret would require sponaneous silence from everyone looking at these docs which is just not possible.
Impossible which is the point of the last sentence. Spontaneous secrecy when some people are discovering the bad redactions while publicly streaming is impossible.
The whole thing is just too suspicious. Too good to be true. What's the chance of this being some 4D chess where the government has already edited the files, and then presented them as redacted so the "unredacted (but edited)" version looks more genuine?
> What's the chance of this being some 4D chess where the government has already edited the files, and then presented them as redacted so the "unredacted (but edited)" version looks more genuine?
With how they have pushed out any career public servants who were good at their jobs in favor of sycophants and loyalists, I'm not sure government organizations are still capable of playing 4D chess, if they ever were.
Please share your redacting tricks as loudly as you can, but only the ones that allow retrieving the original text. I'd love Google and the AIs to spout bad censoring tricks as much as possible.
This was my initial reaction to this news. I mean think about it
The Trump team knows that nobody is gonna buy whatever they put out as being the full story. Isn't this just the perfect way to make people feel like they got something they weren't supposed to see? They can increase trust in the output without having to increase trust in the source of it
And as far as I've heard there hasn't been anything "unredacted" that's been of any consequence. It all just feels a little too perfect.
No, it's the opposite, it's fairly damaging. Previously they could claim, dubiously but plausible, that all redactions were about protecting victims (the only redactions allowed under the act). A lot of the "undone redactions" are solely about protecting the abusers, illegal under the law.
Whether breaking a law actually matters anymore is another question though, as crime is legal now.
"Some" is 99% crimes against the state with the occasional bone they throw the peasants to look like they care. Heck, murder probably wouldn't even be unlimited if not for the fact that it thumbs it's nose at the state's monopoly on violence.
That's seems like some rather bleak hyperbole. If the goal of a conversation is to seek some improvement above the status quo then this is a solid impasse.
The problems we face can't be accurately assessed let alone solved if we are limited to thinking and reasoning about the government (and large institutions generally) the way we are taught to by our grade school civics class.
As others have mentioned, the administration is staffed and run by loyalists, whose primary skills are flattery and obedience.
Back in the day they had true masters of the Dark Arts. The forged letters about Bush's service were incredibly convenient in helping Bush beat Kerry. I am not alone in thinking it to be masterminded by Karl Rove.
This is probably one of those events where everyone on the inside has their own story that won't fit into a neat overarching narrative of how the files are handled because they only gets to feel part of the elefant each.
Black square vs redaction tool difference is well known if someone's job involves redacting PDF or just working with PDF. It's most likely that additional staffs were pulled in and weren't given enough training.
Colleagues whose full time job is doing this sort of thing for various bits of the government have told me this is exactly the case here. People from all over the government have been deputized to redact these documents with little or no prior training.
I wonder if this activity is being used as a kind of loyalty test. Keep track of who is assigned to redact what, and then if certain files leak or are insufficiently redacted, they indicate who isn't all in on Dear Leader.
It's not like a few more stories of Trump raping $whomever are going to move the needle at all, especially with how the media is on board with burying negative coverage of the regime.
Also if you're wondering how this activity isn't some kind of abuse of government resources, keep in mind that thanks to the Supreme Council's embrace of the Unitary Executive Theory (ie Sparkling Autocracy), covering up evidence about Donald Trump raping under-aged sex trafficking victims is now an official priority of the United States Government.
Let people believe it's deliberate sabotage. Unfortunately, in real life, minions of a dictator serve the dictator; they don't risk their live or safety for a noble cause. Any screw-ups are a result of gross incompetence that is typical for every dictatorship.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
>Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Same reason unions always work hardest when fighting on behalf of the worst workers. If you go to bat for a man who can't do better elsewhere he'll go to bat for you in return.
But wait, the situation is more complicated than that you say? Why yes, that's exactly the point. Two of us can play at the stupid smug oversimplification game.
While the effect being described is real to an extent, distilling it to the point you did is useless because there is so much more nuance. Why assume the place was staffed with first rate talent to begin with? And even if there is a lot of first rate talent many will stick around because they don't care who they serve (people not like this don't tend to make careers in government TBH).
A man who tried to overturn an election is in power and is disappearing people on the streets without due process.
The other day there was news about some ICE members who blew up the door to a family's home in order to detain a man. The man was a citizen. They knew that. They came to intimidate him because a few days earlier he tried filming their cars on a public street. That's just one example but these cases are only becoming more common.
One thing that's clear is that if he tries to overturn an election again, he is way better positioned to succeed this time. ICE is now the 5th most heavily funded military in the world and the whole point of DOGE[0] was to centralize the government and fill only with loyalists.
> disappearing people on the streets without due process.
Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process.
What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense.
When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law.
The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dictatorship, but it’s definitely trending toward authoritarianism.
Wasn't too hard to put together a quick graph of the past decade for the U.S. using the World Press Freedom Index (relative ranking and score) - an annual ranking of 180 countries published by Reporters Without Borders that measures the level of press freedom.
what is the US exactly currently if not dictatorship? is there a single
thing “President” cannot do right now and if so who would be stopping him? so perhaps on paper US is not dictatorship much like Russia and China are not… We spend decades trying to fight these regimes and lost so much that now we are worse than them :)
You said "right now". If you want to change to "will be able to do in the near future, before the end of his second term", that's a (slightly?) different list. But it's also a different comment.
You said "anything", in the context of dictatorship. I only used items in this list which IMO you can reasonably say Putin, an actual dictator, can do. Right now. Except the first one! Because that was a joke, a reference to something he himself said he could do.
If you want to change to "anything which has backroom deal importance, not just bread and games for the masses, but the real things, if you know you know", that's a (slightly) different list.
He has functionally neutered Congress. It is almost completely meaningless and it is operating without an independent Speaker.
I think he could succeed in principle re: Mount Rushmore, to be honest. I think eventually people will cave in and agree to do it, and then they will just pray to cholesterol that they can wait it out.
it is not a setback, they have to play a little game now and again to entertain the masses. scotus as it was before doesn’t exist anymore and won’t for decades, it now just rubberstamps
I quoted the media. The main point in this context is the "rare" part. I'm well aware of the nature of the GOP operatives on the SCOTUS. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all voted in Trump's favor. That Beerhead, Ms. IDreamOfGilead, and "Citizens United/I hate the VRA/worst chief justice since Taney" voted to temporarily uphold the stay actually surprised me (Bart O' said he would have given Trump more leeway) but yes, it's theater.
To be exact, CNN reports that for the period Sep - Dec there have been ~30 boats destroyed in ~26 attacks, with at least ~105 deaths in these operations.
The US govt is of course claiming narcotics smugglers ("narcoterrorism") while others say they are not. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween, though who knows one which end of the spectrum.
What I think is maybe more interesting is the general pressure being applied to Venezuela by the US and the EU.
I've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries.
Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap.
Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not observe significant, active regression and effort by the government to replace it with something else.
I truly believe we're headed that direction. I've lived long enough to have seen a wide variety of presidents, both good and bad. This one is easily the worst one, in terms of bare naked power grabs.
I believe Trump will manufacture a crisis before he's out of office in a bid to maintain control. I believe he will have learned from Bush Jr. that a simple war isn't good enough, and it needs to be a genuine emergency.
I believe he'll do whatever he can to make that happen. Native born terrorist, or war with a close country, or absolutely over the top financial crash. Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval - he'll just skip the congressional approval part like he already does.
> Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval
There is literally no such obscure rule, and a new Congress will be seated two weeks before the 2029 Presidential Inauguration.
Elections, and the compulsory ends of terms, inauguration of new Congresses, etc, happen on schedule without regard to any exceptional cases, including Civil War.
If he can get a majority of the Electoral College for a third term, and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2028, then things get much more complicated.
But there is no other path. Elections matter, and don't let anyone discourage you from believing that they don't matter enough to vote.
The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
I have very little faith that scotus will have any consistency in their decisions going forward - they seem to be nakedly political, and backing trump. If the elections swing the other direction (despite their aid in gerrymandering), expect them to cry about the power of the presidency and start rolling it back as fast as they can push decisions through the shadow docket.
> The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
That sounds reinsuring, but it is completely false. The idea that the pendulum swings is just regression to the mean: sure, after a terrible president, the next one is likely to be less terrible. But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
> If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre. The American culture hasn’t changed that much and American leftists did not suddenly become competent at getting popular support.
> But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would? The Cold War may have been a factor.
> Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre.
The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left. There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
> Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would?
In western democracies, I can think of a couple. For example, the wave of left-wing intellectualism that was prevalent up until the 1980s got somewhat lost and lost contact with the lower classes, which left an opening for far-right populists.
> The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left.
You’re right. In that frame of reference, it might indeed regress to the far left, but that would still be slightly to the left of Bill Clinton. The US don’t strike me as having a particularly strong left-wing culture and I don’t see it appearing any time soon.
> There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
I don’t think the word exist, but the concept proved very useful to a lot of dictators.
> And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
They will find excuses to reverse. There will be some technicality, made up historical precense or some actually untrue fact about the world that wil totally make the situation different.
Conservative heretage foundation group has outcome in mind ... and "opposition" is not their preffered outcome.
Well, I'd do a guess and say at least since the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment got deep-sixed back in the 95. Either that or they never had them.
I'd love to limit the semi-auto rifles like the infamous AR-15. Useless for hunting, useless for self-defense. In exchange for country-wide reciprocity for concealed carry and firearm transportation.
I'm not a 1A guy, I think that for instance people with a history of domestic violence shouldn't be armed (that is what I would cite as "common sense"), but this statement really damages your credibility. Of course semiautomatic rifles are useful for both hunting and for self defense. They are effective weapons. That's the problem.
> I'm not a 1A guy, I think that for inference people with a history of domestic violence shouldn't be armed
Whut? How the fuck did you make that jump?
AR-15 rifles are useless for hunting. They are too small to reliably kill large game (deer) and too large for small game (rabbits). Sure, they're fine for coyotes, but if you're buying an AR-15 to hunt coyotes, then you should just stop.
AR-15s are also useless for self-defense. They are too bulky for indoor use, and the bullets can penetrate multiple walls. A regular semi-auto handgun is far superior if you're looking to protect yourself against domestic violence.
The domestic violence thing was about a potential gun regulation, not a scenario. People with domestic violence convictions are overrepresented among murderers and mass shooters. So it would make sense to prevent them from obtaining guns.
It's useless for hunting, but you identify circumstances it's useful in. You say it's useless for self defense because it's bulky, I've heard a hundred people say it's ideal because it's easier to be proficient with a rifle than with a pistol.
Say whatever you want, but when you make absolute statements like that, it damages your credibility. That's my feedback for you.
I don't really care to have an in depth discussion of self defense scenarios because I don't think that helps us understand common sense gun regulation any better. I'm sure you can find people making that argument if you are curious. My point is not that the AR-15 is an appropriate self defense weapon but that there are better arguments you could have made, and that the one you did make lost someone who is already sympathetic to your position.
I did find someone making that argument, you. I don't think asking for one example out of a hundred is asking for an in depth discussion, but if you claim this is too much for you then I won't push the issue.
Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA, unless the CIA is effectively answerable to some other authority despite not being answerable to the law, and then it is equivalent to a dictatorship by that higher authority.
From what I gather, it's so tight that when a clandestine company has served its purpose and winds down, anybody who managed to become a shareholder gets to cash out.
Yes, and if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes, then the conclusion would be different (even though an agency the scale of the CIA would still have different implications than an individual even then), but that wasn't the hypothetical under discussion, which had much fewer—as in zero—qualifications on the CIA’s lack of accountability.
> if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes
My point is their actions are committed outside the law. They've just been able to avoid punishment by covering it up. What they are not is above the law, at least not in the long run. (There are absolutely short bouts where the CIA acts above the law overseas, and rare cases where it has done so domestically. But the fact that they're covering it up betrays that they're crafty bastards, not invincible ones.)
The CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture.
Then they got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence.
> CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture
One, source?
Two, this above reproach. Not above the law. They deleted the evidence, they didn't just blow the scandal off. (Historically, our IC was popular. Right now, it's the deep state. You're seeing political appointees at the FBI and CIA exert control.)
It seems insane that nobody at the other end runs something as simple as MAT or imagick (twice) over it to take the text layers out before uploading though. I hope this is at least partially intentional.
My understanding is that many people were fired and replaced by loyalists at the FBI. I think there are a lot of incompetent people working there right now.
Any major documents/files have been removed all together. Then the rest was farmed out to anyone they could find with basic instructions to redact anything embarrassing.
Since there's absolutely zero chance anyone in the administration will ever be held accountable for what's left, they're not overly concerned.
The thing that I've been waiting to see for years is the actual video recordings. There were supposedly cameras everywhere, for years. I'm not even talking about the disgusting stuff, I'm talking security for entrances, hallways, etc.
The FBI definitely has them, where are they?
What about Maxwell's media files? There was nothing found there? Did they subpoena security companies and cloud providers?
The documents are all deniable. Yes video evidence can now be easily faked, but real video will have details that are hard to invent. Regardless, videos are worth millions of words.
Reporting is that they had a basically impossible deadline and they took lawyers off of counterintelligence work to do this. So a conscious act of resistance is possible, but it's a situation where mistakes are likely - people working very quickly trying to meet a deadline and doing work they aren't that familiar with and don't really want to be doing.
It seems like a common tactic by this administration is to just not do what they are required to do until they have been told 50 times and criminal charges are being filed. I suspect the actual truth here is 'don't do this' turned into 'you have 1 day to do this and keep my name out of the release' which led to lots of issues. They probably spent more time deciding the order of pages to release, and how to avoid releasing the things damaging to the administration, than actually doing the work needed to release it. Now they will say 'look, see! You didn't give us enough time and our incompetence is the proof'
Given the sheer number of people they had to pull in and work overtime to redact Trump's name as well as those of prominent Republicans and donors as per numerous sources within the FBI and the administration itself, incompetence is likely for a chunk of it.
It’s funny that this effort, the largest exertion of FBI agents second only to 9/11, seems to be unprepared to redact. Cynically, I’m prepared for it to be part of a generative set of PDFs derived from the prompt “create court documents consistent with these 16 PDFs which obscure the role of Donald Trump between 1993 and 1998.”
For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's relevant to the subpoena, it's marked as responsive, given an identifier and handed over to the other side. Non-responsive communication might not be eg attorney-client communications.
It can go further and parts of documents can be viewed as non-responsive and otherwise be blacked out eg the minutes of a meeting that discussed 4 topics and only 1 of them was about the company purchase. That may be commercially sensitive and beyond the scope of the subpoena.
Every such redaction and exclusion has to be logged and a reason given for it being non-responsive where a judge can review that and decide if the reason is good or not, should it ever be an issue. Can lawyers find something damaging and not want to hand it over and just mark it non-responsive? Technically, yes. Kind of. It's a good way to get disbarred or even jailed.
My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts, particularly when the only incentive is keeping their job and the downside is losing their career. It could happen.
What I suspect is happening is all the good lawyers simply aren't engaging in this redaction process because they know better so the DoJ had the wheel out some bad and/or unethical ones who would.
What they're doing is in blatant violation to the law passed last month and good lawyers know it.
There's a lot of this going on at the DoJ currently. Take the recent political prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, etc. No good prosecutor is putting their name to those indictments so the administration was forced to bring in incompetent stooges who would. This included former Trump personal attorneys who got improerly appointed as US Attorneys. This got the Comey indictment thrown out.
The law that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey co-sponsored was sweeping and clear about what needs to be released. The DoJ is trying to protect both members of the administration and powerful people, some of whom are likely big donors and/or foreign government officials or even heads of state.
That's also why this process is so slow I imagine. There are only so many ethically compromised lackeys they can find.
Fine, but the teeth of this act belong to some future justice department. I predict Trump will issue blanket pardons for everyone involved, up to Bondi; and that none of them will respect a congressional subpoena.
The discharge petition to all the bill that forced this release was going nowhere until President Trump declared that he was onboard, and then it happened. Until then it was going nowhere.
My guess is that someone suggested to Trump that they could redact most of the bad bits and plausibly deny that they were doing that, and he decided that this was the path of least resistance.
So I don't think there is any chance that he will easily allow any more votes to go the way of putting more pressure. Unless the pressure gets so bad that he has no choice (read: Newsmax and FoxNews both start pressure campaigns).
The GOP are masters of using parliamentary procedure to avoid votes that would pass that they don't want to pass, nominations and bills that they can't defend voting against.
This was a big issue in the Obama era where Mitch McConnell was determined to make Obama a one term president and decided to "obstruct, obstruct, obstruct" on things that historically never been obstructed, or at least not to the degree they were under Obama. For example, judicial appointments would get stuck in committee and never come up for a vote because the vote would pass. The most famous example of this was the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination that was never given a vote for 11 months, which was completely unprecedented.
The GOP has a narrow working majority in the House. The House, unlike the Senate, has the discharge petition process where if a majority of House representatives sign it, it forces a vote. All the Democratic reps signed on so it only took about 4 GOP reps for it to pass.
The lengths Mike Johnson went to to avoid this were unprecedented. 3 Democratic reps have died in office this Congressional session. Texas has consistently delayed a special election to avoid a replacement. Arizona had a special election. A Democrat won and Johnson avoided swearing her in for 7 weeks because she would be the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition.
4 GOP reps signed on and the White House and the Speaker both put incredible pressure on them to change their mind. It was a big part of why Trump fell out with Marjorie Taylor-Greene (she was one of the 4).
Why go to all this effort? Because Epstein was core foundational mythology for MAGA, reps couldn't defend voting against it and everybody knew it.
Johnson then tried to use a procedure to pass a vote called unaminous consent. Basically, rather than go through a roll call of up to 435 members, the House is given the option to object. If anyone does, it forces a vote. Why would he do this? Because there's no voting record for unanimous consent. It gives members cover to say they did or didn't vote for something. A roll call is an official record. Democrats objected and thus we got an official vote with only 1 "no" vote (Rep Clay Higgins).
The SEnate passed it with unanimous consent.
This was a veto proof majority. So if it was so popular, why just not schedule a vote to begin with?
And the obstruction continues. Johnson again put the House in recess 1 day before the 30 day deadline. Coincidence? I think not.
And now we're getting illegal redactions, not meeting the 30 day deadline and a drip feed of document releases because (IMHO) they can't find enough ethically-challenged lackeys to do doc review and redact the names and images of Trump and powerful people, many of whom are likely donors.
Johnson may well lose his position over this. The Attorney General has a non-zero chance of being impeached and removed over it.
There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. It's not going away and at no point was the Trump circle comfortable they could redact their way out of it. They are in full on panic mode right now.
MAGA is a cult and every cult has a mission. MAGA's mission is to uncover the elite pedophile ring. A cult can only be sustained so long as the mission is incomplete. Epstein is core foundational mythology. It's going to be really difficult if not impossible to redirect this.
You'll notice that Mike Johnson once again has put Congress in recess to avoid it taking action, this time a day before the 30 day deadline. The last time was for 7 weeks to try and get Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition to avoid all this. Republicans know what a core problem this is.
So it's politically damaging with his base for Trump to pardon attorneys involved in obstructing this. But even if he weathers that, it doesn't solve his problem.
For one, any attorneys despite any pardon are subject to disciplinary proceedings (including disbarment) as well as possible state charges.
For another, this stuff is simply going to get out. Where previously a DoJ attorney would be committing career suicide if they got caught leaking things like grand jury testimony and confidential non-prosecution agreements, now they're obligated to. So they're not leakers anymore, they're whistleblowers who are following the law.
Congress will eventually have to come back into session and Pam Bondi may actually face a real risk of impeachment. If that happens, who is going to want this job when the key requirement is being such a loyalist that you have to break the law?
Congress will also seek compliaance from DoJ and hold investigations as well as drip feed their own documents from,say, the House Oversight Committee.
And in the wings we still have Ghislaine Maxwell who is clearly operating under an implicit understanding that she will get a pardon or, more likely, a commutation. Her move to a lower security prison that isn't eligible for her type of offenses was (IMHO) clearly a move to buy her continued silence until it became politically possible to free her. I don't think that's ever going to be possible other than maybe a lame duck pardon when leaving office.
> My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
> So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts,
Political redaction in this release under the Epstein Transparency Act is an overt, illegal act.
Does that reconfigure your estimation of whether DoJ attorneys that aren't the Trump inner-circle loyalists installed in leadership roles might engage in resistance against (or at least fail to point out methodological flaws in the inplmentation of) it?
I tried to reproduce this - turns out the affected files weren't in the data sets recently released, but other files on the DOJ site (now taken down).
I guess the big take-away is scrape everything ASAP when it comes out. I haven't found any meaningful differences yet, but file hashes are different in the published data set zip files available today versus when Archive.org took a snapshot a few days ago.
I did write a bit of a tool which will detect and log and dump the text of affected PDF's, since redacting via drawing black boxes as well as using dark-colored highlights are both programmatically detectable. Pretty trivial to do so. Happy Holidays for anyone else who has the day off!
Ah, you new 'round these parts? It's unfashionable to speak directly--we must fragment, hypothesize, add complexity and nuance rather than simply leave someone's slightly vague statement uncorrected. -_-
HN rewards "technical discussion" in controversial threads, even when it's not salient or intellectually gratifying. Touching on the political implications is enough to split opinion and guarantee your place towards the middle/bottom of the thread.
I noticed my most recent nitpick comment got a significant number of upvotes. I spent some time today wondering if HN needed a way to indicate something is a nitpick and cause the votes on it to carry less weight in the sorting. Because if the nitpick is valid I don't think downvotes are appropriate since people might end up seeing it and having misconceptions corrected, but it also shouldn't detract from discussions on the meat of the post.
Of course I'm probably the odd one out, wanting to apply that modifier to my own nitpick comments, so that idea probably wouldn't end up being very useful in general.
(There is also some irony in me commenting on your comment here where it's completely unrelated to the actual post...)
Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack.
I’m not an attorney or anything, but the relevant federal statute is explicitly about unauthorized access of computer systems (18 USC 1030).
Opening someone else’s laptop and guessing the password would absolutely fall under that definition, but I think it’s very much questionable if poking around a document that you have legitimately obtained would do so.
If someone sends me a document with text in it that they meant to remove but didn't and then I read that text, I haven't hacked anything they're just incompetent.
Hacking is unauthorised use of a system. Reading a document that was not adequately redacted can hardly be considered hacking.
Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime?
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.
Precisely. If someone wants me to sign a contract on acceptable use of resources (like an agreement not to reverse engineer their software) they send me then that's another thing.
Absent that excluding other default protections like copyright, what I do with it should fall under the assumption of "basically anything".
If this were prior to 2021, I would say the CFAA could be violated so long as the property owner's _intentions_ were for that information to only be accessible to certain users. But I think the CFAA has been sufficiently reduced in scope after Van Buren v United States [0]
Hacking is not just authorised use of a system. Hacking and hacking techniques can apply to systems you fully own or systems which you are authorised to hack.
Hacking is using something in a way that the designer didn’t anticipate or intend on.
Adobe designed pdf to behave this way. Placing layers over text doesn’t remove the text from the file. They have a specific redaction feature for that purpose.
Placing a black box on the text isn’t a redaction any more than placing a sticky note would be. No reasonable person can expect a sticky note to permanently prevent readers from seeing text and no reasonable person can expect a black overlay box in pdf to prevent reading text because this is literally a fundamental feature of pdfs as a layer format file
But copying and pasting text of publicly released documents is not illegal. Accessing someone’s computer is illegal.
While maybe it could fall under the umbrella of hacking in some general way, articles, and especially titles, should be more precise.
You guessing my password is not the same as a know and expected behavior of a program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. PDF is a format known to have layers. Lawyers are trained on day one not to make this mistake. (I am a recovering lawyer). This is either incompetence or deliberate disclosure.
Yes, this is the digital equivalent of sticking a blank Post-it over text and calling it “redacted”. Mind-boggling that the same mistake has been made over and over again.
Hacking is any use of a technology in a way that it wasn’t intended. The redaction is so stupid as to almost appear intentional, so maybe you’re right, this isn’t hacking because maybe the information was intended to be discovered.
Also had this first thought, but then a hack could just be a way around a limit/lack of authorization, doesn't have to be unknown/sophisticated, so copy of black boxes fits
By serving up the PDF file I am being authorized to receive, view, process, etc etc the entire contents. Not just some limited subset. If I wasn't authorized to receive some portion of the file then that needed to be withheld to begin with.
That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
For starts, wouldn't it be kind of ironic to set up limits and authorization in a context that is about making some content available to the public?
I'd say any technical or legal restrictions or possible means to enforce DRM ought to be disabled or absent from the media format used when disseminating content that must be disclosed.
Censorship (of necessary) should purge the data entirely,ie: replace by ###
That's not true, you can mistakenly receive data you're not authorized to have (might even be criminal to have!)
> That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
That's not the sum total of hacks, if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack. Copy& paste of black boxes is similarly a hack around content protection
> To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
To put it even simpler, this conversation is not about you and your responsibility, but about the different meanings of the word "hack "
> you can mistakenly receive data you're not authorized to have (might even be criminal to have!)
Not the layman, at least to the best of my knowledge.
Yes, certain licensed professionals can be subject to legal obligations in very specific situations. But in general, if you screw up and mail something to me (electronic or otherwise) then that is on you. I am not responsible for your actions.
> if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack
Sure, I'll agree that the software to break the DRM qualifies as a hack (in the technical work sense). It also might (or might not) rise to the level of "lack of legal authorization". I don't think it should, but the state of laws surrounding DRM make it clear that one probably wouldn't go in my favor.
However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization as it relates to black box redaction and similar fatally flawed approaches that leave the plain text data directly accessible (and thus my access plainly facilitated by the sender, if inadvertently).
> this conversation is not about ...
You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.
That said, while we're on the topic I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context. Illegal access versus clever but otherwise mundane bit of code (no laws violated). You seem to be failing to clearly differentiate.
> Not the layman, at least to the best of my knowledge.
Are you not aware of content that is criminal to possess? Like CP is the most common example.
> I am not responsible for your actions.
I've already addressed this confusion of yours - this is NOT about your responsibility for someone else's actions, but about your own actions and whether they constitute a "hack".
> You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.
Please open a dictionary for the word hack to understand this conversation! And note the word "authorization" in the definition.
> However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization
Understandably you're confused, the legal limit is your own making, authorization is way broader than that.
> I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context
Exactly!!! Keep looking into the definition to resolve the ambiguity!
You realize we just went from (the legal equivalent of) "I accidentally mailed you my tax return" to "I accidentally mailed you a bomb". Like yeah, it remains illegal to retain possession of said bomb irrespective of the fact that someone intentionally sent it. That is ... not at all surprising?
Beyond that you're clearly just trolling at this point, going to great lengths to manufacture an argument about a term that I never used to begin with. "Lack of authorization" has a clear legal meaning whereas "hack" does not.
For the 3rd time, this conversation is not about YOU and not about what surprises you!
> "Lack of authorization" has a clear legal meaning whereas "hack" does not.
No, you've made up this limit to some "legal meaning" (also wrong here, large variety there as well but wouldn't want to endulge you further). Again, open up a dictionary on "hack", then follow the definition of "authorization" from there, if you only find "legal" in there, get a better dictionary, journalists / commenters are usually not lawyers, so they wouldn't accept your artificial legal limits on meaning!
> Beyond that you're clearly just trolling at this point
I think this is the greatest proof of the simultaneous validity of two different arguments. Disclaimer, I'm assuming (I think fairly) that you're in good faith.
The funny thing is, to me, the other commenter's arguments are quite clear/obvious to me and make sense. Not that your points are wrong - but... I'm 99% sure the other person isn't trolling in the slightest. Y'all are just talking across each other.
Initially, perhaps. However note that my attempts to clarify exactly that are repeatedly followed by misconstruing my position. It's not so much that we disagree as that the supposed disagreement is about things I never said. The repeated failure to respond to what was actually said coupled with the combative tone is pretty much the definition of trolling. Of course that term does assume intent to an extent - if he's just having a bad day I'm not sure that technically qualifies. The end result is the same though.
BTW if you feel I've missed some insightful point of his do please elaborate.
But this isn’t an unexpected technique it’s literally the core design of the pdf format. It’s a layered format that preserves the layers on any machine. Adobe has a redaction feature to overcome the default behavior that each layer can be accessed even if there is a top layer in front.
A dictionary definition: "use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system."
This isn't about knowledge or expectations. They didn't use colored boxes to jazz up the presentation, they _intended_ to prevent you from reading it, and now you can, with this, again incredibly _lame_ almost meaningless even-my-five-year-old-could-do this "hack."
The non-complex mafia businesses is moot since the 50ies already. They run Vegas, most of big sports leagues, politics, secret services and restaurant chains. Everything which can effectively wash money.
Rather than bemoaning the ignorance of those who can’t grasp that the text still exists under black rectangles, we should thank our lucky stars that this method of deredacting still works, well over a decade after the first time I heard of it.
The average office worker has it on their computer, illustrating how commonplace unredacting could be. Any text tool will work, even some designed to detect bad redactions in PDFs via drag and drop (now specifically trained on these known bad redactions). https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray
Apart from the technological and procedural question, I would love to learn why the DOJ found it important to protect Indyke. He was Epstein's lawyer, and now we learn that he was personally involved. He is not a Washington person. We expected there to be politically motivated protection of certain people, but is the DOJ just going to blanket protect anybody in the docs?
Indyke works for other powerful people, runs in MAGA circles.
Two things come to mind:
* Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1]
* He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented.
> It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans.
Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.
Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing).
It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.
And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
The goal (at least it appears this way to me) is less about having any sort of airtight defense or actually successfully protecting people in the docs so much as giving plausible deniability for the talking heads that support the administration to push as truth. If it’s murky, sloppy, or otherwise unclear, then “no one wins” and “no one is right,” so the event can be easily dismissed.
You can open up any popular conservative forum/watch any mainstream conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes who cares?” Then some deflection about Bill Clinton, making sure to bring up the hot tub photo.
The reason it hasn’t gone away though, despite this often being a very effective approach, is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. It made a lot of people a lot of money and catapulted more than a handful of political careers. Now they have the means to be transparent and they can’t make an acceptable excuse not to be since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
I think almost all the discussions about Epstein are incredibly crass and gross. It’s not about the victims or justice, it’s about politics. I think there are obviously legitimate reasons to redact portions because we don’t want to ruin more lives (not that this was a real good faith attempt at that). But there is still a small part of me that can’t help but enjoy watching the Trump administration simmer in the pot they so clearly made for themselves over the last five years.
Gotta be honest, I think this has just been incompetence from top to bottom. But I also think this is a fracture in the trump coalition. It may be that conservative media is trying to move on from Trump which is why the "this is a nothing burger" defense hasn't been deployed as much.
It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.
Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"
These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".
This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".
Yeah to be clear I don’t think they deliberately screwed up, I think they just don’t care because they don’t need it to be perfect. I think you’re right that at its core this is incompetence
He was Epstein’s lawyer, he almost certainly has the dirt on anyone the DoJ wants to protect, and may be the kind of person that would be inclined to burn whoever DoJ was protecting if he wasn't getting treatment at least as favorable.
..."Indyke, an attorney who represented Epstein for decades, has not been criminally indicted by federal authorities. He was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate."...
> [Indyke] was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate.
So I don't know about "not a Washington person", but clearly connections exist to the current administration.
Stupid question: why is the government even allowed to redact stuff? Isn’t the government keeping secrets from the people totally antithetical to democracy?
It's not the government, it's the department of justice. To name two: protection of witnesses, protection of state secrets ("the people" is not a person who can keep secrets).
Right, I’m aware of the excuses the government uses to keep secrets.
But on principle, what right does the government have to keep secrets from its own people? I don’t believe we had that button at the founding, it was added somewhere along the way. I’m asking what is the justification for this, and whether in the grand scheme of things that outweighs the principle of the government not being a separate entity from the people.
There are multiple ways to approach witness protection. For example if we have a problem with witnesses being harmed we could make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense. We can probably think of other options besides the government being allowed to keep secrets from its own people.
>I don’t believe we had that button at the founding
Every government everywhere has and has always had state secrets e.g. names of spies.
>make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense.
People still commit capital offenses. This just makes it much easier to get to that witness and get away. We also know from empirical evidence that the death penalty is not useful for deterring crime.
Witness protection is also getting to start over without everyone in your neighborhood knowing you were a criminal. It's part of the deal.
No you are confused. People commit capital offenses for one of two reasons: either because they lack impulse control, or because they don’t think they will be caught.
If we fix the second one, we only have the first group. We can fix the second group, and the remaining first group, while it does apply to capital offenses in general, does not apply to violence against witnesses.
It seems like killing witnesses (after the fact, since witness protection does not intervene during the initial crime being witnessed to protect the witness mere moments after their witnessing) actually requires impulse control, because to do it you need to a) anticipate an abstract threat b) formulate a plan in advance c) carry out the plan. This is why it is typically executed in organized crime by bosses, and not by people engaging in random violence.
I’m not saying no one carries out capital offenses, I’m just saying that no one engages in witness directed violence due to lack of impulse control, they do it because they don’t think they will be caught, and more thorough rules enforcement does address that.
On witness protection making one’s criminal record secret. Okay? One can easily be opposed to that practice. How about we don’t make deals to hide relevant safety information from the public? It seems pretty easy to oppose. Just because the government does it, doesn’t mean it is a good reason. Are you defending the reason, or just stating what is? If you are just stating what is, I don’t see how that’s relevant.
The power/right came from national security legislation written and enacted by elected officials. Because we have a government that works by proxy, it means that the leaders we elect are effectively supposed to represent the people they serve (that's the ideal. Obviously we've fallen WAY short of that).
Pragmatically, I think it's easy to recognize that the government should be allowed to have some secrets from the public. I think the clearest and most extreme example is the details of our nuclear armaments.
But the question of where the line is is a tricky one. IMO, we definitely allow the government far more secrets than it should have.
Is there an enemy invader actively performing military operations inside the country? In that case, I believe it’s typical for a nation to suspend its normal procedures, we don’t need our principle to hold in case of active invasion.
Otherwise, just don’t do war. It’s pretty simple. Especially when you have zero need for land.
Witness protection is a compensation for an inadequate and overly soft criminal justice system. If the person calling the hit fully expected to die by hanging for calling the hit, he would not call the hit.
It's not correct that there is a legal duty to redact names of people who might be accused of wrongdoing, but where the allegations haven't been proved.
The only two reasons that redactions are allowed are a) to protect the privacy of victims and b) to protect the integrity on ongoing investigations.
Competence and possibility of malicious compliance are interesting questions, but I think the more appropriate question is if DoJ will be sued for violating the law by redacting unrelated content?
I think even after printing and scanning there could still be jpg artfacts from the original (e.g. if you scan lossless).
However, I wonder whether heavily compressing the redacted image would help remove any unwanted artefacts. But the best solution is probably to render the original file from scratch, without compression, before redacting the image.
Redacting documents is hard for people who didn't learn how to properly do it, and don't have the right tools. But for courts, the FBI or the DOJ this shouldn't apply. They know how to do it right.
I can only imagine, that some people didn't redact the documents properly on purpose. Plausible deniability.
PDF is an absurdly complex file format. It's part of the reason there is no single "good" PDF reader, just a lot of mediocre PDF readers that are all terrible in their own way. Which is a topic for another day.
There are several ways to remove data in a PDF:
- Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
- Then you have the computer illiterate, who think changing the foreground and background color to black is good enough anyway.
> - Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
Compared to other formats this is actually relatively easy in a PDF since the way the text drawing operators work they don't influence the state for arbitrary other content. A lot of positioning in a PDF is absolute (or relative to an explicitly defined matrix which has hardcoded values). Usually this makes editing a PDF harder (since when changing text the related text does not adapt automatically), but when removing data it makes it much easier since you can mostly just delete it without affecting anything else. (There are exceptions for text immediately after the removed data, but that's limited and relatively easy to control.)
> - Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement.
That's actually rather tricky in PDFs since they usually contain embedded subset fonts and these usually do not have "🮋" as part of the subset. Also doing this would break the layout since "🮋" has a different width than most letters in a typical font, so it would not lead to less formatting issues than the previous option. Unless the "🮋" is stretched for each letter to have the same dimensions, but then the stretched characters allow to recover the text.
> The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
PDF does not have a concept of a background color. If it looks like a background color in PDF, you have a rectangle drawn in one color and something in the foreground color in front of it. What you usually see in badly redacted PDF files is exactly this, but in opposite color: Someone just draws a black box on top of the characters. You could argue that this is smarter since it would still work even if someone would chnage colors, but of course, PDF is a vector format. If you just add a rectangle, someone else can remove it again. (And also copy & paste doesn't care about your rectangle)
>- Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
>- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
You're making it sound way harder than it is, when both adobe acrobat and the built-in preview app on mac can both competently redact documents. I'm not aware of instances of either (or any other purpose-made redaction tools) failing. I wouldn't homebrew a python script to do my redaction either, but that doesn't mean doing redactions properly in some insurmountable task for some intern.
I would not trust either tool to adequately redact documents, though I'm sure it works under normal levels of scrutiny.
The most reliable way is to just screenshot the document or print and scan it, effectively burning it down and recreating it in a new format that has no concept of the past. This works across basically all formats, too, and against all tools.
Thanks for this. Really quells the urge I get every so often to just code my own PDF editor, because they all suck and certainly it couldn't be THAT hard. Such hubris!
> PDF includes eight basic types of objects: Boolean values, Integer and Real numbers, Strings, Names, Arrays, Dictionaries, Streams, and the null object
Wait, this is more complete than SOAP. It may be a good idea to redo the IPC protocol with a different serialization format!
7.5.6 "Incremental updates" from the specification is an interesting section too, speaking about accessing data people didn't think to remove from PDF files properly.
I did a bunch of work creating pdfs using a low-level API, object goes here stuff.
As far as I understand it, at its core, pdf is just a stream of instructions that is continually modifying the document. You can insert a thousand objects before you start the next word in a paragraph. And this is just the most basic stuff. Anything on a page can be anywhere in the stream. I don't know if you can go back and edit previous pages, you might have a shot at least trying to understand one page at a time.
Did you know you can have embedded XML in PDFs? You can have a paper form with all the data filled in and include an XML version of that for any computer systems that would like an easier way to read it.
I remember reading the recommendation for journalists to redact documents is to black them out in the digital version, print it out, and re-scan it. Anything else has too many potential ways by which it might be possible to smuggle data.
Even that might leak to length attacks: one reasonable plaintext would lead to black bars of 1135 px, another to 1138 px, and with enough redactions you can converge on what the plaintext might be.
The only safe way for journalists is to paraphrase what the document said and to say "an unnamed source claims that ..." and to guarantee with your reputation, and the reputation of your publisher, that you are being faithful to what the original source said. For even better results, combine multiple sources.
Unfortunately paraphrasing things and taking editorial responsibility have both been deprecated in favour of rereleasing press releases in the house style, so it's difficult to get the actual journalism these days.
Mistaking redaction tool (replaces data with black square) and black highlighter (adds black square as another layer). If people doing redactions are computer-illiterate, they won't see the difference.
They drew black boxes over the text. The text is still underneath. On OCR'd scanned documents, the text you'd copy is actually stored in metadata and just linked by position to the image.
Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text.
PDF is less like an image, and more like a web page where elements can be stacked on top of each other. You can visually obscure things by sticking a black rectangle over the top, but anyone who inspects inside the pdf can remove it or see the text in the source.
There would also be a mix of text documents, and image scans. The way to censor each is different.
Perfectly censoring documents, particularly digital ones is actually surprisingly difficult.
It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks.
Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function.
Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted.
Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who discovered the information, rather than on the people were put in charge of handling the redaction and screwed it up.
The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the vein of the Arthur C Clarke quote of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
To the journalist, it looks like "hackers at work" because the result looks like magic. Therefore their editor attaching "hacks" to the title for additional clickbait as well.
To us technical people, who understand the concept of layers in digital editing, it is no big deal at all (and is not surprising that some percentage of the PDF's have been processed this way).
>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.
Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
But there is a more-powerful combo we’re beginning to see: journalists can take a story and prompt their way into a list of missing perspectives. The Lindbergh baby, for example.
You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too
And the lawyers should have used an LLM to perform a first pass of the redactions and methods of redaction.
Going forward the full stack of perpetrators, unindicted coconspirators, lawyers, judges, legislators, journalists, editors, fact checkers, ... it'll all be LLM all the way down such that nothing will be trustable save something akin to Stephenson's gargoyles and Flock cameras for which people will conduct spectacles to shape the salience landscape.
Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
I wish it was true.
From the bullshit jobs in the book, I can only see the box tickers being replaced.
The flunkies, goons, task masters, and duct tapers will probably continue to exist.
Als unless we come up with something like UBI or a dramatic rethinking of how capitalism works in our society there will probably be __more__ bullshit jobs.
My wife was a reporter with a top tier news agency in DC and I was shocked how they divvied up topics.
At best, it was "you're good with computers, go report on this hearing on cybersecurity" but more commonly, it was "who has this morning open? You do? Great. Go cover this 9am on the Israel-Palestine negotiations and what the implications are. We'll do a segment in the 11am hour."
It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age.
It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.
They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.
Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.
I agree they have no understanding of math, science or technology. But I disagree with your assessment of motivations to get "better paying jobs", most people who went into journalism I knew were in brownstones right out of college. They didn't need the money, they inherited it, it was the lifestyle they were after.. that's why we get the journalism we do..
They're not after money. They're motivated by prestige which CAN be money (ew, tacky) but is actually measured by access to key figures, your name being in the right places with the right people, and the cocktail party circuit.
My wife was a reporter in DC and she was at the White House Correspondents Dinner and everything. Living in those circles is surreal. The namedropping is a whole other level. When I realized I was doing it too (with some legit impressive names at the time), I gtfo. I'd rather be evaluated by what I've done or can do vs who I know or knows me.
I think you have the source of the problem wrong. It's just rich kids who don't actually need the salary, and want to align to a point of view that gets them a contract to write a book, so they get invited to the right parties. They don't know anything, or care about anything.
Journalism school is "eye-wateringly" expensive:
> J-school attendees might get a benefit from their journalism degree, but it comes at an eye-watering cost. The price tag of the Columbia Journalism School, for instance, is $105,820 for a 10-month program, $147,418 for a 12-month program, or $108,464 per year for a two-year program. That’s a $216,928 graduate degree, on top of all the costs associated with gaining the undergraduate prerequisites. (Columbia, it seems important to say, is also the publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, the publication you’re now reading.)
And FWIW, in my very limited and anecdotal experience, the programs are inhabited by people who fully understand their employment and salary prospects, but believe in the work, and often have above-average family wealth to compensate for the gaps. They're good people, but they are not experts.
I don't think you have an understanding of job specialization.
I know some journalists. They are smart people. However, they are not experts in math, science, or technology. They are experts in journalism. This wasn't any different at any time in the past.
Haha. I was a journalist for many years. I went to UC Berkeley. I likely currently have a far better paying job than you and have invented technical concepts that founded the LLM.
Obviously, "who becomes a journalist in this age" does not translate to "every person who is alive now who has ever been a journalist".
I'm not sure if your error lies in parsing colloquial English, or in basic statistics. Either way, I think you have fully illustrated the commenter's point.
Journalists are not reliably selected for, or demonstrative of, comprehension or accuracy.
This is dumb trying to call others dumb. This argument is not just inhumane it’s also wrong. The average of something assumed does not negate a real data point. If you did even bit of data science you’d know that. But just another HNer calling someone dumb while confidently wrong. And ironic calling others dumb because of it. So think on that.
Maybe Christmas just leaves the worst on HN … statistically.
(You can’t engagement logically technically or even correctly here and keep
Spouting others are wrong. Think hard on how poorly you comprehension here is even when explained why you are
Wrong.)
Points have been illustrated contradicting the statement. No points have been made supporting it.
Your argument boils down to “all x is bad is valid by default and all Ys that contradict are inherently ‘statistically invalid’”. Do you not get how horribly dumb your logic is?
By this logic I could state all HNErs posting on Christmas are idiots and wrong by default. This of course can’t by contradicted by any statement you make because you are just a data point of one and therefore invalid. Also the original point is supported with exactly 0 data points so in actuality data point of 1 > 0. So my guy. Jesus. Learn stats. Or anything.
To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".
I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.
I think.. the way to understand it is: levels. After all, files as the abstractions work with are not exactly there in the form of files in a cabinet. In a sense, even names are made made up fiction, BUT.. a helpful one.
> To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic.
State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal.
To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious.
To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time.
Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors).
Your analogy fails because the purpose of stage magic is concealing what’s going on. That’s not what happened here. Someone just made a really stupid mistake that even non-technical folks can accidentally discover.
There are undoubtedly some people who would be fooled by this, but you don’t have to be technical in order to not be one of them.
Most journalists are ex. English majors (or some other non-technical degree). I would not expect any (even the supposed tech. journalists) to understand the technology they report upon to the level that us here on HN understand that same technology.
Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often crops up for any technical article (hint, it also crops up for every article, but we don't recognize the mistakes the journalist makes in the articles where we don't have the underlying knowledge to recognize the mistakes).
I’m my experience most posters on HN are don’t under technology either. So they both don’t understand people or technology putting them two steps behind a journalist.
Journalists are people, like everyone else, and most people are bad at their jobs.
Plus, what even is the job? For most journalists out there, it's just writing something that draws ad impressions and clicks.
The percentage of journalists that work for outlets where the content itself is the cash source is very small (NYTimes, probably a bunch of other paid subscriptions). And even the NYTimes isn't above clickbait.
No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view.
When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.
This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!"
True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!
Using view-source to accomplish something could be considered hacking in the old school MIT sense* of curious exploration of some place or thing for clever purposes.
*: disclaimer, I didn't attend MIT, but did hang out with greybeards on 90s IRC
I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.
They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).
The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.
I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.”
A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
Agreed - not sure why so many are being so critical here. They probably didn't write the title and for better or worse "hack" has now become a common word casually used by many to mean "workflow trick" or similar.
As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor.
But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.
Typical quality of The Guardian unfortunately. Don't read their energy reporting if you're at all literate about any of those topics. Any time they do a story on fusion I just about have an embolism.
I also like to think this was maybe done as a form of malicious compliance. Someone inside the agency was tasked with redacting this, and found a way to sneak the information through but still getting it passed by their supervisors, so that the information got out.
To me this is the only explanation that makes sense.
However wouldn’t they risk repercussions when this is inevitably found out? I assume they have records who redacted which documents
> I assume they have records who redacted which documents
(1) Considering it was a rush job (2) general ineptness of this administration and (3) the management wouldn't have defined the explicit job description ("completely black out, not use black highlighter"), the likeliness that there is any evidence that this was intentionally malicious is pretty low.
This happens too regularly across both minor and major issues for me to think this is entirely redactors intentionally messing up. It's just a lot of people being pulled on to the job and not all of them are competent. Maybe some of it is intentional but not all of it I'm certain.
Out of a thousand people? Where they probably have an email from a PHB that says something like "put a black box over all references to <this list of things?"?
Not in this case, this is just a cover for the guilty because this shows that Epsteins Estate also works for Trump. The rot runs deep. There is no investigation, that is the point.
Furthermore, this happens so often, so frequently, in so many high profile cases that even my 80 year old mother knows this "secret hack to unredact a pdf".
If you are CIA / FBI / Court / Lawyer or professional full time redactor of documents you should know that the highlighter doesn't delete the text underneath it.
I think the more likely cause was precisely that it wasn't a technical professional/lawyer/writer doing the redacting, but someone in the administration or close to it that has no idea how to redact information correctly.
Yeah but there was no lock; somebody put a box around the doorknob without anything holding it there, and somebody removed the box and opened the door.
There's nothing else to say about this. Also, your comment is nested even deeper within the same semantic squabbling, so it's odd that you think that it's a waste of time in light of more important things that you are also not talking about.
They're likely viewing the electronic documents by analogy to photocopies with blacked out sections where there is nothing to distinguish the text from the redacting marks and nothing you can project out. They don't know the structure of the file format and how information in it is encoded or rendered, or even that there is a distinction between encoding and rendering.
(A better analogy might be the original physical document with redaction marks. If the text is printed using a laser printer or a type writer, and the marker used for redaction uses some other kind of ink - let's say one that doesn't dissolve the text's ink or toner in any way - then you can in principle distinguish between the two and thus recover visibility of the text.)
File formats are complicated. The only reliable way to redact is to reduce that complication to one which humans can manage. This is even true for software that is written by humans.
Plain text and flat images are my preferred formats for things which must be redacted. Images require a slight bit of special care, as the example in the underhanded C contest highlights, but it's possible to enforce visible redaction and transcription steps that destroy hidden information.
I think that doesn’t do the scenario justice. They tried to redact and did so in a way that looks visibly redacted (in screenshots many have seen) but can be uncovered.
If you say “they failed to redact data” to a layperson looking at a visibly redacted document they’re going to be confused.
They are not. They are factually incorrect. Look up the various definitions of redacted. They fit perfect for the title. Arguing otherwise suggests you are making up definitions and words, in which case, I am still correct.
To be fair, I put partial blame on the advertisers.
They've been claiming "AI" on their products on anything that has an algorithm basically for the past few years.
> It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks.
That ship sailed a long time ago. The “phone hacking scandal” in ~2010¹ was mostly calling answering services that didn't have pins or other authorisation checks set.
These days any old trick gets called a hack, heck tying your shoelaces might get called a miraculous footwear securing hack.
I think we should all come to terms with it that "hack" doesn't mean anything anymore so we don't have to fight over words that were never clearly defined anyways. On most days this site here should be called "frontendnews".
I find it funny to use a hack to argue about the misuse of words and definitions.
Regardless, redaction does not imply that data is missing. The words were censored or obscured. That's it. Simply looking at the documents proves that. Interacting with them showed how easy they were to uncensor, but the simplicity of the method doesn't change facts.
By all means, complain about definitions and words, but get it right.
I agree, but this would mean that almost anything can’t be called hacking, bc it usually relies on vulnerabilities and implementation defects. If something is poorly encrypted and you retrieve data, you didn’t hack because it wasn’t encrypted to begin with. That can’t be the standard.
There is a line, it is fuzzy, but if all you did was find something which was there for anyone to find, I would place that firmly on the not hacking side. If it was rot 13 I would put that marginally closer to hacking than this.
It also removes blame from the departments that redacted, it's not like they messed up big time, no, some resourceful brainiac hackers did things that were not allowed to undo the redaction process that was put in place to protect victims.
"The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021."
Tell me if im too conspiritorial. Wouldnt it makes sense to have bad censorship on information thats e.g a 8/10 on a guilty scala. And make sure the 10/10s stay censored? Let People assume they can uncensor some, and what they uncensor is representative for any censored information. While the parts that couldnt be uncensored are way worse?
Probably the Underhanded C Contest (https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html) but yeah. Obfuscated C Contest entries usually aren't underhanded, just intentionally obscure about what they do or how they do it.
They are unredacted because either those in charge are not familiar with basic office tasks, or someone wanted this stuff to leak and nobody checked thier work. Either brand of incompetance should cause heads to roll. But, just like the signal fiasco, nothing will happen. When your brand is perfection, you cannot ever admit a mistake.
Maybe someone knows law can answer this.
Is it a crime to ”unredact” files in the US? You probably know that the information is classified since you are putting in the work.
Where I live I believe it’s a crime if you share information that is classified even if it’s leaked.
So I would not publicly brag about this online.
In the US this is protected by the first amendment. Exceptions apply only for military and government employees who agree to prosecution in such cases as a condition for employment or enlistment (getting a clearance, basically). For everyone else it is lawful.
I love how the entire internet thinks that this is a big deal when all that happened is that USDOJ re-posted some poorly-redacted court documents that were poorly redacted by non-USDOJ attorneys more than three years ago.
Yes, USDOJ is incompetent and dysfunctional, but this is not why. But sure, whatever, carry on...
To me is strange that for such important document they didn't print them and scan with a scanner (that way it's physically impossible that some metadata or other thing that is not on the printed piece of paper ends up in what is released).
ah, found it - this is from the 'Court Records' part.
https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court Records/Matter of the Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, Deceased, No. ST-21-RV-00005 (V.I. Super. Ct. 2021)/2022.03.17-1 Exhibit 1.pdf
This reminds me of when some government org leaked social security numbers in client-rendered html comments (or something similar) and people who discovered this were called hackers for using browser dev tools
Copying and pasting doesn't work. Unless your PDF viewer does OCR. And if the redaction is just a black rectangle overlaid on top, that can still be removed.
I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
Doesn't sound like much interesting was found otherwise that'd be what's making all the headlines... Everything in that article is pretty much what I'd expect.
These rape allegations are from 2016 originally. There's already a court case about it. So, it's both already known and just allegations. That doesn't help us and shouldn't surprise us.
Trump has openly admitted to child prostitution in official statements, so the first part of that isn’t surprising at all.
Look at the early quotes where Trump complains about Epstein being a creep. The main problem Trump had was that Epstein poached Trump’s favorite kids for prostitution years after they were hired by Trump.
Not the first time; in 2005 the US report about Nicola Calipari's death in Baghdad was redacted (and unredacted by italian newspapers) in the same way.
PDFs do have a "burn and destroy the parts/layers below" as part of the spec meant explicitly for redaction like this. Apparently they didn't use it, I guess?
So is the data extracted the names of the victims that were supposed to be hidden to protect them? Or is there something else that might be worthy of exposing?
The downvoters assume that it is a bad faith question. The downvoters are 99% right with that. If the 1% hit then OP is just exceedingly naive and did not followed the scandal in which case they should maybe first do some reading.
The names of involved powerful people were NOT supposed to be censored. All those names except Bill Clinton name were redacted. To protect Trump and everybody else involved in the scandal except said Bill Clinton. But especially to protect Trump.
I assume that de facto federal "law" now makes it illegal to be raped, and those men are the victims. That would be a logical conclusion of edgelord vice signalling, right?
I took the question to mean "were the easily circumvented redactions only covering victim details, and maybe suspects from Team Not-One-of-Us?" Implying the "stupidity" card was played to cover the "malice" card.
They had 30 days to process 10s of thousands of documents. The rumors floating around is they had to pull in people from other departments to work on the task.
It's pretty plausible that someone thought a black highlighter was good enough for redaction.
This is "fake stupidity", a decoy to make the public think it is uncovering stuff that was meant to be hidden while in reality the really damning documents have been filtered and or doctored already. You might get thrown some meaningless and practically worthless + innocent scraps and bones like Trump wrapping his arm around a young woman and that‘s it.
You think you uncovered the hidden layer but that was just a decoy.
I never want to hear a MAGA supporter whine about DEI or meritocracy ever again. Supposedly you're against that stuff but just hire loyalists who fuck everything up? Embarrassing.
Additional Info: Again, just trying to find out the NYPD detective on the FBI sex trafficking task force that called me a couple of weeks ago and spoke to me about some of these issues.
How is Contact Known: He participated regularly in paying money to force
me to ‐----- with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan.
I thought that the font spacing allowed for some statistical analysis. Also some letters sneak out of the redaction boxes, but the PDF file having removable black highlighter boxes on top is pathetic.
At least it gives the US a better chance of doing a u-turn on the steep downhill path it recently took. Maybe it was intentional incompetence.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law last month permits the Department of Justice “to withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation”
This is probably just pure stupidity, but part of me hopes there is some tech person in there who knew exactly what they were doing. I’d take a job as a tech person in this administration just to sabotage stuff like this.
One of the most pathetic things that has come out of this is that the British press refuse to say the phrase "Prince Andrew" anymore. It has to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Because he was officially stripped of the title. He’s no longer a Prince. It’s not some grand conspiracy to distance him from the royal family, that’s just how titles work and the British are real sticklers about that class nonsense.
He was Prince Andrew back then. It's yet another example of how the silly British press falls into line whenever Buck House tells it to.
The British media also attempted to bury this story several times but couldn't, because it was so big in the USA, and Americans don't take orders from them. The BBC royal coverage has never been anything but propaganda and flattery.
Anyway, the name should be Windsor-Mountbatten, not the other way round (or the string of German names they were anglicised from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg etc)
Any redactions of note? Going full conspiratard here and assuming this information that was accidentally censored ineffectively also reveals nothing new.
> It was unclear how property material complies with the redaction standard under the law.
In other words, who knows what else was redacted that is unrelated to either the victims or jeopardizing an active federal investigation (are there any related to Epstein? I thought those all got killed, except those ordered by Trump to investigate Democrats of course.)
Who's seeking power, the poor schmuck who misused their PDF tools?
It seems that my novel "razor" is misunderstood. The article attributes bad redacting to gross incompetence. But what if the person having done this bad redacting is instead doing sabotage with plausible deniability "lol, those damn PDF tools, you never know how they work"?
It makes this story more interesting, and it allows one to see an outline of the future film scripts that will be written about this period. The courageous saboteurs at the dawn of american fascism.
I do think I misunderstood your post, sorry. I was thinking of those ordering the redaction.
I do still think incompetence is more likely to be the explanation. Incompetent redactions are a perennial problem even in much less controversial situations.
It's certainly possible that some of the underlings are deliberately sabotaging orders from above. It's also possible that they're incompetent, as so many of the Trump team are. How would we know which it is?
Did we learn anything useful or is it exactly as I said in the other thread, which got downvoted to hell, that all the really juicy blackmail material is with the CIA and will never see the light of day?
Won't know until all the documents are released. The blackmail is undeniable. But what's more interesting is who else was involved. Who purchased his services? That's what they are trying to hide.
Regardless of the content itself, naive redaction of a high profile PDF still exposing the text contents is something that seems relevant to the community. Maybe you are in the wrong place?
it's even less impressive; somebody left the credentials typed into the text boxes and went to get a slimfast out of the staff breakroom and you walked into the computer lab and hit enter.
“Like you guys have had this stuff for a year. Doesn’t it seem like you could just throw all that into AI at this stage of the game? And just redact the names of the victims, and let’s go.” Joe Rogan
There is a book by Richard Dawkins- I am me I am free or something like that, and it has a main picture of Richard standing naked and having a private part being covered by black rectangle but somehow my laptop back then was slow and when you scrolled it would temporary remove the square for a split second
Are you sure? I can't find any trace of any book by Richard Dawkins with a title much like that, and that doesn't seem like a very on-brand sort of cover pic for a book by him, and an image search for "Richard Dawkins book cover" doesn't turn up anything like it.
I think this is a good thing. I think the people talking dictator this and that do not understand we have the ability to critique the administration. What we lack is control of the underhanded lobbyism. It is a warped democracy but still a democracy.
Befuddling that this happened again. It’s not the first time
- Paul Manafort court filing (U.S., 2019) Manafort’s lawyers filed a PDF where the “redacted” parts were basically black highlighting/boxes over live text. Reporters could recover the hidden text (e.g., via copy/paste).
- TSA “Standard Operating Procedures” manual (U.S., 2009) A publicly posted TSA screening document used black rectangles that did not remove the underlying text; the concealed content could be extracted. This led to extensive discussion and an Inspector General review.
- UK Ministry of Defence submarine security document (UK, 2011) A MoD report had “redacted” sections that could be revealed by copying/pasting the “blacked out” text—because the text was still present, just visually obscured.
- Apple v. Samsung ruling (U.S., 2011) A federal judge’s opinion attempted to redact passages, but the content was still recoverable due to the way the PDF was formatted; copying text out revealed the “redacted” parts.
- Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
A broader “history of failures” compilation (multiple orgs / years) The PDF Association collected multiple incidents (including several above) and describes the common failure mode: black shapes drawn over text without deleting/sanitizing the underlying content. https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PD...
Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker.
I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public.
Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.
If the software is going to leverage the familiarity of using a blackout marker to give you a simple mechanism to redact text, it should honour that analogy and work the way any regular user would expect, by killing off the underlying text you're obscuring, and any other correponding, hidden bits. Or it should surface those hidden bits so you can see what could come back to bite you later. E.g. It wouldn't be hard to make the redact tool simultaneously act as a highlighter that temporarily turns proximate text in the OCR layer a vibrant yellow as you use it.
It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document.
This was basically the only reason we were willing to cough up like $400 for each Acrobat license for a few hundred people. One redaction fuckup could cost you whatever you saved by buying something else.
I would like to believe that the DOJ lacking the proper software might have something to do with DOGE. That would be sweet irony.
If my law firm can't afford the $20/month for a copy of Acrobat Pro, I'd be very concerned what else they are cutting corners on.
Law firms are notoriously behind in tech. I’ve seen some shit. A small firm running on the owner’s personal Dropbox account with client matter files stored alongside his porn collection, ancient, unsupported software, unpatched systems, basically zero information security, servers in a bathroom and network switches in a shower, a literal hoarder with garbage and shit in the office, etc. The Dropbox guy was basically a giant in his practice area. Very successful. You have no idea how bad things are behind the scenes.
I think it's usually a bit more complicated, i.e. the people who were expected to do processes don't and someone else shows the people asking for access that there's a faster, cheaper, cooler tool.
This is to be expected from an effort like DOGE simply because the E is for Efficiency. That is, how well a system is performing. The ratio of energy input to output.
Unfortunately the E in DOGE should have been for Effectiveness. That is, is the system shooting at the right target, and how close is it to hitting that target.
You can be very efficient but if you’re doing the wrong thing(s) you’re ultimately wasting resources.
The irony is, DOGE got the E wrong. It’s efficient but not effective
Or it a scam run by someone who wants to get access the social security info on americans. We are in trouble if you think the acronym is the biggest issue
I was speaking to the difference between efficiency and effectiveness. DOGE is simply the current best example.
Putting the obvious aside, sure, it’s Trump’s fault the system was so mismanaged that he’s been able to get elected. Twice. You’d think that after the first term the system would have gotten the message. It did not.
My recommendation to you is ask: How did we get here? And who is accountable for this?
There’s a very good chance those giving you your current narrative marching orders are on that list. Funny, right? Why own their failure when they can convince fools to blame a symptom?
not even, anyone still left at DOJ working to protect the president is immensely corrupt, and this is just that careless stupidity that typically goes along with deeply corrupt people.
I feel like the number of incidents related to "fully public S3 buckets" has gone down after AWS made it nearly impossible to miss the notice.
I think someone just got free marketing materials to promote the redaction tools.
Now much more people will be aware of the issue.
Are you saying that only Adobe PDF has proper redaction tools? I did a quick search and found several open source PDF tools claiming to do redaction- are they all faulty? I would honestly be surprised if there aren't any free tools that do it right.
No that's not what GP is saying. GP is saying that there is software that does not have a redaction feature (perhaps because the developer didn't implement it), but users of the software worked around it by adding a black rectangle to the PDF in such software, falsely believing it to be equivalent to redaction.
Properly implementing redaction is a complicated task. The redaction can be applied to text, so the software needs to find out which text is covered by the rectangle and remove it. The redaction can be applied to images, so the software needs to edit a dizzying array of image formats supported by PDF (including some formats frequently used by PDFs but used basically nowhere else, like JBIG2). The redaction can be applied to invisible text (such as OCR text of a scanned document). The redaction can be applied to vector shapes, so some moderately complicated geometry calculations are needed to break the vector shapes and partially delete them.
It's very easy to imagine having a basic PDF editor that does not have a redaction feature because implementing the feature is hard.
For the same reason, a basic PDF editor does not have a real crop feature. Such an editor adds a cropbox and keeps all the content outside the cropbox.
> Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.
Absolutely. They know this is confusing, and they're bound and determined not to fix it. At the least, they need a pop-up to let you know that it's not doing what you might think it's doing.
Apple’s Preview app does exactly that. I discovered this while trying to make a blanked copy of kid #2’s homework worksheet for kid #1 who left his at school after kid #2 already wrote on her copy.
I’m optimistic that because LLMs have brought down the cost of the mere act of typing out code that we will see a shift in focus on certification and verification. Preferably with some legal protection for customers that are sorely lacking today.
Apple’s Preview app (which has a very thorough PDF markup tool) does this right: it has an explicit “redact” tool which deletes the content it’s used on.
[dead]
Always worth remembering that PDFs are basically a graphic design format/editor from the 70s. It was never intended for securely redacting documents and while it can be done, that’s not the default behaviour.
No surprise non-experts muck it up and I don’t see that changing until they move to special-purpose tools.
Of course we can blame incompetence. It's incompetent not to realise your own incompetencies, also known as overconfidence.
Any lawyer should be like "I don't know what I'm doing here I'll get an expert to help" just like as a software developer I'd ask a lawyer for their help with law stuff...because IANAL uwu
> Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker.
there's white-out on my monitor.
> ...frequency of this kind of ...
sometimes I wonder if it is plausible deniability. Like people don't WANT to cover this up and do it in a certain way.
I think it's part laziness here.
Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.
The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data:
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf....
That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.
I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.
We have 30 years direct evidence that the users would ignore that warning, complain about the computer warning them too much, insist that the warning is entirely unnecessary, and then release a document with important information unredacted.
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can overlap. They think it's paper. Because that's what it pretends to be.
The best fix for this in almost any organization is the one that untrained humans will understand: After you redact, you print out and scan back in. You have policy that for redacted documents, they must be scanned in of a physical paper.
The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on
Sorry, but a professional user not having an operational understanding of the tools they're working with is called culpable negligence in any other profession. A home user not knowing how MS Word works is fine, but we're talking desk clerks whose primary task is document management, and lawyers who were explicitly tasked with data redaction for digital publication. I don't think we should excuse or normalize this level of incompetence.
I don't expect radiologists to have a good understanding of the software involved in the control loops for the equipment they operate. Why should a lawyer have to have a mental model or even understand how the pdf rendering engine works?
Have you ever had to actually react a document in acrobat pro? It's way more fiddly and easy to screw up than one would expect. Im not saying professionals shouldn't learn how to use their tools, but the UI in acrobat is so incredibly poor that I completely understand when reaction gers screwed up. Up thread there's an in complete but very extensive list of this exact thing happening over and over. Clearly there's a tools problem here. Actual life-critical systems aren't developed this way, if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot. Boeing tried to do that with the max, but they weren't able to successfully convince the industry that that was OK.
if a plane keeps crashing due to the same failure we don't blame the pilot
That's true, we blame the manufacturer and demand that they fix their product under threat of withdrawing the airworthiness certification. So where's the demand for Adobe to fix its software, under pain of losing their cash cow?
Yet, people here are arguing that it is perfectly OK that professionals keep working with tools that are apparently widely known to be inappropriate for their task. Why should we not blame the lawyers that authorized the use of inappropriate tooling for such a sensitive task as legal redaction of documents?
The link in the comment you are replying to has a screenshot of exactly this. it’s a prompt with a checkbox asking you to delete the metadata and hidden info involved with the redaction. you’d have to blaze past that and not read it to make this mistake. It is user error.
I guess if you really want to defend users here you could say people are desensitized so much by popup spam that a popup prompt is gonna just be click through’d so fast the user probably barely recognizes it, but that’s not the software’s problem. For whatever reason some users would prefer to just put black boxes over obfuscated text, so here we are
Professional users doing more than 1 document? Yes, I'm absolutely blaming them.
I agree that affordances are good, but tools are tools, they can have rough edges, it's okay that it occasionally takes more than zero knowledge and attention to use them.
I hope you're not blaming the users.
If software developers designed hammers, you'd have to twist the handle before each swing to switch from tack to nail mode. And the two heads would be indistinguishable from each other.
If business MBA's designed them, you'd wind up with the SaaSy Claw 9000, free for the first month then $9.95 in recurring subscription fees, and compatible only with on-brand nails that each have a different little ad imprinted on the head.
But it doesn't matter, because by the end of the year all construction will be vibe-built from a single prompt to Clawde.ai, which will pound non-stop, burning through $1T of investor funds, and confidently hallucinate 70% of the nails until the roof collapses on the datacenter destroying the machine and civilization along with it, and a post-singularity survivor picks up a rock and looks calculatingly at a pointy shard of metal...
JIT dual hardware and software design and manifestation
The software could do better, sure, but in this case the accountability clearly falls on the lawyers. It's their job - and it's a job that can profoundly impact people's lives, so they need to take it seriously - to redact information properly.
Adobe's contempt for users strikes again.
The consequences of fucking it up are low, too.
If they get caught, they just take the document down and deny it ever got posted. Claim whatever people can show is a fake.
Since they control the levers of government, there's few with the resources and appetite for holding them accountable. So far, we haven't un-redacted anything too damning, so push hasn't come to shove yet.
The only might change if there's a "blue wave" in the midterms, but even then I wouldn't count on it.
I’ve not looked too deeply, but based on other discussion, I wonder if this was malicious noncompliance meant to reveal what the higher-ups were ordering hidden. If victims’ names are properly redacted that would be strong evidence.
It is more likely they have no conceptual understanding that the PDF is a file format. They likely assume that whatever is shown in the interface is what is exported.
I want to believe this is malicious compliance.
Lots of loyalists have replaced people there. It's for sure incompetence.
There are hundreds of thousands of documents being reviewed by probably a thousand or more FBI agents. There is zero chance they are all loyalists.
The pool of competence was still diluted
Indeed, incompetence is basically guaranteed if the organization selects for allegiance rather than competence. But I prefer to think that at least part of this was malicious compliance, because that suggests that at least some people at the FBI still have their soul.
I would imagine it would be possible to track down who was responsible for redacting X set of documents, so this seems rather risky?
Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered.
There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.
For one of my first jobs I negotiated a better offer because "strings" on the document revealed the previous offer they'd sent out, and made me confident I could ask for more.
Though, makes me wonder if someone has intentionally sent out offers like that with lower numbers to make people think they're outsmarting them.
Never match wits with a stringscillian!
You don’t even need a digital format for this. When I was a consultant I waited in a room with a flip chart for a negotiation. I flipped through the “old slides” of the flip chart and found one where they did budget planning for the project. This was very good background info for the negotiations.
Similarly, I’ve been sent PDF proposal letters by my customers with redacted pricing from my competitors so I can compare the scope against mine. A simple unflatten reveals the price along with the scope.
To be fair handling Word documents is much more complex than redacting a PDF properly.
Yup. I’ve gotten documents from an Asian country’s government. One known for its good governance and meritocracy, that had hidden sheets with competitor data.
Don’t underestimate work shoved onto a university intern.
The most likely explanation when hundreds of people make the same fuckup is the tooling and/or process sucks. Not that hundreds of people lack basic competence.
The most recent analogy I have is field techs in IT work. A company sends out "truck roll" tickets, and then complaints when there is a 40% failure/re-work rate on said truck rolls.
A single or handful of techs with said failure rate? Yep, perhaps incompetence.
A global failure rate across dozens of cities/countries and 40+ technicians total? No longer incompetence. At least at the field tech level. That's a documentation, process, and standards problem 100% guaranteed.
That some above average highly competent "hero" technicians are able to compensate for it is irrelevant.
I think it's more that the analogy is broken.
If I have a sheet of paper and I color a section black. That's it. It's black. No going back.
So I can see people thinking the same for PDFs. I drew the black box. It's black. Done. They don't realize they aren't dealing with a 2D sheet of paper, but with effectively a 3D stack of papers. That they didn't draw a black box on the page, they drew a black box above the page over the area they wanted to obscure.
The fact that this happens a lot is an indication that the software is wrong in this case. It doesn't conform to user expectations.
Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.
Doesn’t having lots of people involved also raise the chance of incompetence?
You’re more likely to get at least one inept agent in a random sample of 1000 than a sample of 10.
Yep - I think they're both likely.
I'm sure not all those hundreds have been involved with every document.
I'm kinda surprised (and disappointed) nobody has done a Snowden on it though.
> Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Hundreds of people might be involved, but the only key factor required for a single point of failure to propagate to the deliverable is lack of verification.
And God knows how the Trump administration is packed with inexperiente incompetents assigned to positions where they are way way over their head, and routinely commit the most basic mistakes.
And here we are again rediscovering Hanlon's Razor.
It wouldn't be malicious though. Well, it's malicious towards the Trump administration, but not towards the people. Quite the opposite.
The maliciousness is always towards the compliance.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
See also “weaponized incompetence”, which usually has to do with getting out of work but in this case could easily be used to get away with “bad” work for longer.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/weaponized-incompe...
The other side of that same coin is to never admit to malice if your actions can be adequately excused by stupidity.
In 2025, never attribute to incompetence what you could to a conspiracy. [sarcasm]
They fired/drove away/reassigned most of those who are competent in the executive branch generally, it is pretty easy to believe that none of those managing the document release and few of those working on it are actually experienced or skilled in how you do omissions in a document release correctly. Those people are gone.
> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?
Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
> What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?
Typically, two copies of a redacted document are submitted via ECF. One is an unredacted but sealed copy that is visible to the judge and all parties to the case. The other is a redacted copy that is visible to the general public.
So, to answer what I believe to be your question: the opposing party in a case would typically have an unredacted copy regardless of whether information is leaked to the general public via improper redaction, so the issue you raise is moot.
My guess would be that if the benefitting legal party didn't need to declare they also benefitted from this (because they legally can't be caught, etc.) they wouldn't.
I know and am friends with a lot of lawyers. They're pretty ruthless when it comes to this kind of thing.
Legally, I would think both parties get copies of everything. I don't know if that was the case here.
> strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth)
If it's worth so little to your eyes/comprehension you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...
That snide remark is used to discredit a profession in passing, but the reason you won't find a lot of examples of this happening is because the trust clients have to put in lawyers and the legal system in general is what makes it work, and betraying that trust is a literal professional suicide (suspension, disbarment, reputational ruin, and often civil liability) for any lawyer... that's why "strict" doesn't mean anything "little" in this case.
> you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...
There are almost 2000 disbarments annually in the US.
The california bar recieves 1 compliant for every 10 law licenses in the state every year.
There's a wikipedia page on notable disbarments.
Legal malpractice suites are on the rise.
If you are going to assert that legal malpractice is not legitimate concern, I think the burden of evidence is on you.
I’m not a lawyer, but I did watch every episode of Better Call Saul and I’d point out that a lawyer who generates one complaint likely generates multiple complaints so that 1 complaint/10 law licenses number is misleading about the scope of the issue. Similarly, 2000 disbarments sounds high until you realize that there are roughly 1.3 million lawyers. What’s more, when I was checking to see what reasons for disbarment might be, I found an article (https://law.usnews.com/law-firms/advice/articles/what-does-i...) which cited a number much lower (less than 500) and that pointed out that reasons other than professional misconduct can lead to disbarment including DUI and domestic violence. The following gives some reasons for disbarment:
> … disbarment is the presumptive form of discipline for an attorney who steals clients’ money, Best says.
> Disbarment is more likely when the attorney committed fraud or serious dishonesty, particularly in front of a tribunal or to a client. Similarly, priority may be given to cases where an attorney is convicted of a crime of moral turpitude, Levin says.
> Priorities also change in response to society’s changing values and when there’s a belief that tightening down on types of cases will help the profession as a whole, Best says.
> For example, in Massachusetts, there has been an increased focus on violations relating to the administration of justice, such as when prosecutors engage in racist behavior.
> And while, in the past, an attorney’s drunk driving or domestic violence would probably not have led to sanctions (because they were seen as unrelated to the attorney’s legal work), they now might result in discipline, Best says.
Well, also the lawyer would have to really badly fuck up for it to become public news that they had actually used the information.
> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.
My recollection is that it varies quite a bit between jurisdictions. The ABA's model rules require you to notify the other party when they accidentally send you something but leave unspecified what else, if anything, you might have to do.
A famous case where this came into play was one of the Infowars defamation suits. Alex Jones’s lawyer accidentally sent the families’ lawyer the full contents of a phone backup. They notified Jones’s lawyer, and gave him some time to reply. After that time elapsed, the whole dump was considered fair game.
This is the moment when that mistake was revealed in court: https://youtu.be/pgxZSBfGXUM and this is the hearing for the emergency motion to suppress that data: https://youtu.be/dKbAmNwbiMk
I’m unclear why this is downvoted given the below. While it would theoretically be jurisdiction-specific, if the ABA model rules don’t provide some specific guidance, it’s clear that the lawyers would be ethically obligated to use whatever info they obtained if it helped their client and as otherwise consistent with their ethical obligations in the jurisdictions that follow those. I’m admitted in New York, and I don’t recall any kind of bar on the usage of this type of info there. Seems like in a lot of jurisdictions they’d have a duty to notify, but that may not even be the case in all.
Here in NL if confidential information about offenders leaks from court documents, it usually leads to a reduction in sentencing because the leak of classified information is weighed as part of the punishment. If the leak was proven to be intentional, it might lead to a mistrial or even acquittal. Leaking of victims' information usually only results in a groveling public apology from the Minister/Secretary of Justice du jour.
What a joke…
Given the context and the baldly political direction behind the redactions, it's not at all unlikely that this is the result of deliberate sabotage or malicious compliance. Bondi isn't blacking these things out herself, she's ordering people to do it who aren't true believers. Purges take time (and often blood). She's stuck with the staff trained under previous administrations.
Or it is just the result of firing people who were competent and giving insufficient training to people who had never done this before.
This has happened so many times I feel like the DoJ must have some sort of standardised redaction pipeline to prevent it by now. Assuming they do, why wasn't it used?
I am happy with their lack of expertise and hope it stays that way, because I cannot remember a single case where redactions put the citizenry at a better place for it.
Of course if it's in the middle of an investigation it can spoil the investigation, allow criminals to cover their tracks, allow escape.
In such case the document should be vetted by competent and honest officials to judge whether it is timely to release it, or whether suppressing it just ensures that investigation is never concluded, extending a forever renewed cover to the criminals.
Of course there is a process.
There was also a process on how to communicate top secret information, but these idiots prefered to use signal.
I'm completly lost on how you can be surprised by this at all? Trump is in there, tells some FBI faboon to black everything out, they collect a group of people they can find and start going through these files as fast as they can.
"When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king; the palace instead becomes a circus."
Here in the UK we have a thing called the civil service. They are not immune from government meddling but if they are good at anything it's writing and following processes, even under duress.
> some FBI faboon
I'm not familiar with the term, and Urban Dictionary only has "fake babboon" which I suspect is not the intent here - what does it mean?
I wanted to write FBI Baboon
Secure systems are not exactly the right environment for quick release and handling. So documents invariably get onto regular desktops with off the shelf software used by untrained personnel.
there are FOIA lawsuits seeking the redaction training videos, one by https://bsky.app/profile/muellershewrote.com so maybe one day we will know more.
They probably fired that department.
DOGE
Not to mention when the White House published Obama's birth certificate as a PDF. I remember being able to open it and turn the different layers off and on.
Are you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1].
You can still open it with Illustrator if you want to see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss...
[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/
Yeah, the idea that proves it's fraudulent has been debunked, but the alternative hasn't been proven, either. Nobody has named the specific OCR software that does this destructive replacement. It's a case of "well, there's an alterastive theory, and that's good enough" debunking.
I just took a look at the layers. In some cases, e.g. the 2nd letter in the Local Registrar's signature, a single letter is partially in the background layer, and partially in the upper layer.
This is easily explained by the character separation software being not 100% accurate.
It's not at all explained if someone is fraudulently adding text. Why would someone put half of the character in 1 layer and half of the character in a different layer?
Not sure what you mean by destructive replacement, since nothing is destroyed.
So I just looked into this, and it's specifically Mixed Raster Content pipeline (ISO/IEC 16485) used in lots of different scanners. There's no need to find which specific software generated it because it's used by lots of them.
It's a technique used to attempt to isolate font characters of the same size and style as separate layers before OCR-ing to make OCR more accurate.
ABBYY FineReader, for example, is mentioned as producing the exact same type of results. But there's no guarantee that was the actual software because lots of scanning software does it -- it's a general technique. Plus it won't even be deterministically reproducible if it was e.g. scanned and OCR'd at higher resolution and then saved at a lower resolution, as is generally considered best practice for maximizing accuracy while keeping file sizes lower.
https://www.obamaconspiracy.org/2013/01/heres-the-birth-cert...
So this is very much a nothingburger. It's not an "alternative theory", it's a complete and total explanation.
So this program really doesn't keep the original image of the document as a raster layer? That's kind of surprising, especially if it's used in the legal world. Personally, I'd always want to be able to recover the original document from the OCR layers. Or, are you saying you can? Then you should tell snopes, because it'll make the snopes article a lot shorter if they can just lead with that.
I think you are misunderstanding. The pipeline is e.g.:
Scan (600 dpi) > MRC (600 dpi) > OCR (600 dpi) > Downsample (150 dpi) > Save to PDF (150 dpi)
The image is saved in raster format at 150 dpi. That's the document, but not at the original scanning resolution. If you performed MRC and OCR at the 150 dpi level, you'd get different/worse results than were originally gotten at 600 dpi. Which is why you always OCR before downsampling, and you downsample for smaller files.
This isn't changing anything about the Snopes article. It just explains why if you run MRC/OCR at the PDF resolution, you won't deterministically reproduce it because it's not the resolution it was originally run at.
You do understand that this OCR is only for being able to search and highlight text? It's not changing what's displayed. That's still the pixels.
I didn't see the original pixels in the document at any resolution though. That's the point.
You don't see the pixels when you zoom in? Try again:
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss...
If you don't see jaggy pixel edges to the letters and form elements, what do you see?
Are you saying that I'm saying that there are no pixels in the document? Like, do you think that I think that scanners have come to operate on pure platonic forms and no longer use the concept of pixels? That would be really cool, wouldn't it. But no, I don't believe that. Hm. Where did this conversation go wrong. I think I was unclear in my last statement. I have yet to see someone show the original scribbles or ink marks that these OCR layers were generated based on. That's what I meant by "destructive". Now, I'm no expert on documents, so you might want to just cut your losses and stop trying to educate me and let me be uneducated in this matter. I'll accept that I don't know what I'm talking about, and reduce my criticisms of this whole thing to pointing out that the explanations don't make sense to me.
> Are you saying that I'm saying that there are no pixels in the document?
I genuinely don't know what you're saying.
> Like, do you think that I think that scanners have come to operate on pure platonic forms and no longer use the concept of pixels? That would be really cool, wouldn't it.
Yes, because that is absolutely a thing. That's what Adobe ClearScan does, converting pixels to smooth vector outlines. Zoom in, and zero pixels in OCR'd text. That's not the case in this file though.
> I have yet to see someone show the original scribbles or ink marks that these OCR layers were generated based on. That's what I meant by "destructive".
I still genuinely don't know what you mean. The original scribbles and ink marks are a physical piece of paper. The MRC layers are generated from the scan and don't destroy anything, they only separate. The resulting layered bitmap is identical, pixel-for-pixel. My best interpretation of what you're saying is you want a higher-resolution scan? But why? Again, nothing "destructive" has happened except maybe reducing the resolution. But "destructive" is not a word people usually use for that.
> so you might want to just cut your losses and stop trying to educate me and let me be uneducated in this matter
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not. I am genuinely happy to help you understand, but if you really don't want to then obviously I won't spend any more time replying. But if you're going to publicly throw suspicion on the validity of the birth certificate, I feel it's important to correct the record here on HN simply for other people who might read this exchange.
I'm starting to understand where this conversation diverged. I'm coming from a place of having read the Snopes page and watched the videos linked there. I think understanding where I'm at, is a good place to start trying to explain it to me. To put it more clearly, at this point I've seen a video that seems to show that the PDF has a collection of layers, some contain text and one contains the page below. Now, it seems like you were saying that the text layers are just the pixels from the page moved up to a new layer. I said that I think that's surprising. Then we got caught up on the meaning of the words "original pixels". I probably should have said: a full buffer of pixels from the CCD sensor, perhaps with resolution reduction or compression, but nothing moved to new layers (whether that's normally considered "destructive" or not is another issue).
OK, well hopefully you understand now! This part is key:
> Now, it seems like you were saying that the text layers are just the pixels from the page moved up to a new layer. I said that I think that's surprising.
That's indeed all it is. It may be surprising, but that's how it works. Absolutely nothing about the pixels are changed as part of the process of that text layer separation. Later when saving the final PDF there's normal lossy compression, same as any JPEG, but the layer process actually preserves the text edges better than JPEG.
So I do hope you're satisfied now that everything about this is just normal image processing, and that nothing has been destroyed, there's no "missing evidence" or anything. And that the whole idea that the layers imply some kind of manipulation or forgery is false. What you're seeing is just the scan itself, saved (presumably) at a lower resolution and with the normal image compression scanners produce. The layer separation process is completely non-destructive and doesn't manipulate pixels at all.
Yes, signed by “U.K.L. Lee” himself. Did you actually look at it? These FBI goombas aren’t even trying.
If you're going to promote conspiracy theories here, you should at least explain them. The rest of us can't really be bothered to look them up.
"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.
The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-r...
> made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page
That's not very competent.
> going analog is foolproof
Absolutely not. There are many way's to f this up. Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text.
> Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text
Sure. But anyone can visually examine this. That means everyone with situational context can directly examine the quality of the redaction.
Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works. Or you have to separate the folks with context from the folks with techical competence. (There is the third option of training everyone in the DoJ how to examine the inner workings of a PDF. That seems wasteful.)
> But anyone can visually examine this.
Can they? In principle it could be the difference between RGB 0.0,0.0,0.0 and RGB 0.004,0.0,0.0, that could be very difficult to visually see, but an algorithm could unmask the data with some correlation.
If you do it digitally and then map the material to black-and-white bitmap, then that you can actually virtually examine.
> Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works.
While true, I think the key problem is that the tools used were not made for digital redaction. If they were I would be quite a bit more confident that they would also work properly.
Seems like there could be a product for this domain.. And after some googling, it appears there is.
> While true, I think the key problem is that the tools used were not made for digital redaction. If they were I would be quite a bit more confident that they would also work properly.
Adobe Acrobat's redaction tools regularly feature in this sort of fuck-up, and they are (at least marketed as being) designed for such use
Just scan it with black/ white setting.
It's probably fine, but certainly better than what's being discussed ITT.
The larger point is that the "usual" redaction involves a tape pen or paint-style ink (dries opaque), IIRC, then photocopy, because the blocked out area is opaque. Scanner is probably no different than photocopy for these purposes.
> anyone can visually examine this.
They can't, if the variations are subtle enough. For example, many people are oblivious to the fact that one can extract audio from objects captured on mute video, due to tiny vibrations.
Analog is the worse option here. Simple screenshot of 100% black bar would be what a smart lazy person would do.
Case study: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
I suppose the best process would be this, and then after rescanning putting a black bar over each redacted text with image editing.
Or if the document is just text, simply scan it in black and white (as in, binary, not grayscale).
Perhaps an imagemagick pipeline dumping each page out as a png then blanking areas associated with a list of words (a pixel level concordance of the coordinates of all the words having been compiled from a text dump? Hand-waving here).
I'm probably overthinking this one but the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps? So three conspirators with names like Stonk, Hephalump and Pragma-Sasquatch would be sort of easy to distinguish between if the public had a limited list of people who might be involved?
> the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps?
Absolutely. It’s why officially-redacted documents typically take out entire sentences and paragraphs, wiping just names only sparingly.
> I'm probably overthinking this one but the various lengths of the redaction bars would provide some information perhaps?
You're definitely not overthinking this. Fitting words by length is the attack vector if the blanking itself has been done correctly.
It's like Russian spies being caught in the Netherlands with taxi receipts showing they took a taxi from their Moscow HQ to the airport: corrupt organizations attract/can only hire incompetent people...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/russian-spies-chemical-weapo...
Anyone remember how the Trump I regime had staff who couldn't figure out the lighting in the White House, or mistitled Australia's Prime Minister as President?
Yes I remember that incident. It was big over here.
However I'm 100% sure that that was not a real spy incident. But rather just a 'message' to be sent from the Russian govt. The same way they have infiltrated our airspace with TU-95 bombers nearly every month for decades. Just a message "Hey we are still watching you".
When you see how ridiculously incompetent they were, not just their phone history but also the gear they had with them. It amounts to nothing more than a scriptkiddy's pineapple. There's no way they would have been able to do any serious infiltration into any kind of even remotely competent organisation.
Also the visible fumbling about in a carpark with overly complex antennas instead of something more hidden (e.g. an apartment across the street, a cabling tent or something). IMO the objective here was to get caught and stir a fuss.
Reminds of the time Russian security services showed copies of the Sims as evidence of an Ukranian Nazi plot.
Or the passports discovered intact after a particularly heinous terrorist attack.
This wasn't a fuck-up though was it?
Knowing they would die in the attack, the terrorists just didn't care if their identities were known.
> with taxi receipts
Please tell me they were saving them for expensing.
Europol is nothing next to Natasha in accounting
Yes.
It's not fool proof:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
Nothing is. The point is it’s highly precedented, surprisingly robust and far more competent than half the armchair suggestions being raised in this thread.
I would just do the digital version of that: add 100% black bars then screenshot page by page and probably increase the contrast too.
The bigger difference from my perspective is that they have competent people doing the strategy this time. The last Trump administration failed to use the obvious levers available to accomplish fascism, while this one has been wildly successful on that end. In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country, and unfortunately more and more competent people will choose to work for them in order to receive the benefits of doing so.
His last administration was filled with traditional Republicans.
I may have disagreed with them on virtually every policy point, but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well.
We would have never agreed on the right policy, but we definitely agreed that his policy was not the right one.
> but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well.
I imagine Republicans such as this still populate a majority of the house and Senate. If they disagree, they are sure making an effort to do so silently.
The amount of things Trump did circumventing Congressional approval might suggest that he does not a clean pass even though Republicans have majority in both the house and the senate.
They have (had?) the power to impeach the president for a lot less than he's already done. Yet they don't.
That's on Congress for allowing Trump to repeatedly circumvent their approval.
>In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country
I disagree. It felt that way for the first few months, but the wheels are coming off. Trump is too old and unpopular to steal a 3rd term. Therefore everyone around him has to worry about what will happen in 3 years, and plan for post-Trump rather than forever-Trump.
> they have competent people doing the strategy this time
They had a great playbook in Project 2025. I'm not convinced Trump ever had the smartest people executing it.
You don't need to be the smartest person when you're pointing a big gun at someone.
[flagged]
> Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit.
Are you talking about the same Bill Barr? "Eager to win accolades from liberals" is a hilariously Trump-after-he-fired-someone thing to say.
Have you read his Wikipedia page? Do you know who he actually is?
I'm not talking about paper credentials, I'm talking about accomplishments. 90% of lawyers in DC are liberals. Conservative lawyers can get credit for being "one of the good ones" so long as they don't attack the core tenants of liberal universalism or advance conservative social change in any meaningful way.[1]
Obama's DOJ did stuff like go after Catholic nuns to make them offer birth control, to vindicate liberal principles like supremacy of secular values over religious values. Guys like Barr never did anything like that. Trump and his merry band of chuckleheads have achieved more legal wins for conservatism in a year than anyone in the Bush administration did in eight years.
[1] It's not necessarily apparent from the outside where those lines are drawn. Bush's $8 trillion effort to blow up the Middle East was far less controversial among D.C. lawyers than Trump's effort to restrict immigration from the Middle East. Liberal universalists agreed with Bush's fundamental premise, if not his approach. Both believed that Iraq was the way it is due to external factors like Saddam, not internal factors like Iraqi culture. Even if liberals thought it was a terrible idea to go to war to topple Saddam, they didn't disagree with the core premise that Saddam was the barrier to Iraq becoming just like Iowa.
So you haven't read his Wikipedia page then, and you are too young, I guess, to remember Iran-Contra. You apparently don't even remember how Barr got the job from Trump.
Iran-Contra is a perfect example. How did that advance conservative principles? Whether Nicaragua is communist doesn’t affect anyone in America. Precisely because it has no consequences domestically, you won’t get disinvited from Georgetown parties for trying to overthrow Latin American governments. In fact, there’s an upside for liberals in such policies. The resulting chaos facilitated mass migration and cultural transplantation to the U.S. from places where socialism and communism found fertile soil.
This is… an insane argument. But just the idea that Bill Barr gives a shit what liberals think makes me laugh.
DC is full of trad cons who are sensitive to what liberals think. More specifically, the type of liberal that dominates the professional class in DC—folks who will happily represent Phillip Morris but consider immigration and affirmative action to be moral imperatives.
It’s just the math of the city. The DOJ is more democrat-leaning than most college campuses: https://admin.govexec.com/media/general/2024/11/110124donati.... Trump got three times the level of support in AOC’s district than his share of donations from DOJ employees.
> William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF
You mean the guy who covered up for Epstein's 'suicide' and expected us morons to believe it?
> You mean the guy who covered up for Epstein's 'suicide' and expected us morons to believe it?
Let's assume that's true. How does it clash with him being "contemptible...but smart AF"?
Yeah I mean, orchestrating an assassination in a federal prison of a guy the whole world is watching, and never even so much as a whiff of a leak? Because how do you contain that without whacking everyone involved (which we would know about)? You don't. Not without teleportation, time-travel, or at the very least post-hypnotic suggestion.
Oh he's smart AF, all right.
There were some leaks. Some of the events I would need to check my offline documents for more specific references but, for example, the Reddit leak with a person who was working at the jail saying that he had to let in someone associated with the military and they left shortly after Epstein was killed.
> but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file.
This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position
>exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence
Being aware of one's limitations is the strongest hallmark of intelligence I've come across...
I'm not so sure it's about knowing his own limitations, rather it's about building a reliable process and trusting that process more than either technology or people.
Any process that relies on 100% accuracy from either people or technology will eventually fail. It's just a basic matter of statistics. However, there are processes that CAN, at least in theory, be 100% effective.
So following that strange logic if a dumb person knows he's dumb, he's suddenly become intelligent? Or is that impossible by your peculiar definition of intelligence?
Knowing your limits has to be a sign of intelligence.
"Dumb" people (FTR the description actually refers to something rather than that which you think it does...) run around on the internet getting mad because they haven't thought things through...
It's an interesting question though. I know quite some "smart" people who lack self awareness to an almost fatal degree yet can outdo the vast majority of the population at solving logic puzzles. It tends to be a rather frustrating condition to deal with.
I think that you are conflating things.
Knowing your limits is a sign of intelligence, but it's not the only one, and it's not a requirement. Meaning that not having that understanding doesn't exclude you from being intelligent.
Yeah that sounds like wisdom, not intelligence.
Wisdom would be knowing not to try and exceed those limits
Intelligence would be knowing they exist (I know that I cannot fly by flapping my arms, it took intelligence to deduce that, wisdom tells me not to try and jump from a height and flap my arms to fly. Further intelligence can be applied, deducing that there are artificial means by which I can attain flight)
Not at all. It's a procedure that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. Sometimes that's what you want.
> you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.
>Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.
I suppose a global search/replace to mark text for redaction as an initial step might not be a bad idea, but if one needs to make sure it's correct, that's not enough.
Don't bother with soft copy at all. Print a copy and have multiple individuals manually make redactions to the same copy with different color inks.
Once that initial phase is complete, partner up persons who didn't do the initial redactions review the paper text with the extant redactions and go through the documents together (each with their own copy of the same redactions), verbally and in ink noting redactions as well as text that should be redacted but isn't.
That process could then be repeated with different people to ensure nothing was missed.
We used to call this "proofreading" in the context of reports and other documents provided as work product to clients. It looks really bad when the product for which you're charging five to six figures isn't correct.
The use case was different, but the efficacy of such a process is perfect for something like redactions as well.
And yes, we had word processing and layout software which included search and replace. But if correctness is required, that's not good enough -- a word could be misspelled and missed by the search/replace, and/or a half dozen other ways an automated process could go wrong and either miss a redaction or redact something that shouldn't be.
As for the time and attention required, I suppose that depends upon how important it is to get right.
Is such a process necessary for all documents? No.
That said, if correctness is a priority, four (or more) text processing engines (human brains, in this case) with a set of engines working in tandem and other sets of engines working serially and independently to verify/correct any errors or omissions is an excellent process for ensuring the correctness of text.
I'd point out that the above process is one that's proven reliable over decades, even centuries -- and doesn't require exact strings or regular expressions.
Edit: Fixed prose ("other documents be provided" --> "other documents provided").
If the word you need to redact is also an English verb there is a risk that you accidentally mark the name of person in a context where that redacted word has a clear meaning in that context and can be used as a proof that such a term has been accidentally redacted because a large scale search&mark has taken place.
According to a random dictionary I found:
To trump. Verb. Surpass (something) by saying or doing something better.
You process doesn't make sense, why wouldn't you just black box redact right away and print and scan? What does underline then ink give you? But it's also not the process described in the blog
> that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up.
You've already screwed up by leaking length and risking errors in manual search&replace
> why wouldn't you just black box redact right away and print and scan? What does underline then ink give you?
These are roughly equivalent. The point is having a hard copy in between the digital ones.
Absolutely. The other comments replying to your original comment that are nitpicking over implementation details miss the purpose and importance of this step.
The fact that this release process is missing this key step is significant too imho. It makes it really clear that the people running this didn't understand all of the dimensions involved in releasing a redacted document like this and/or that they weren't able to get expert opinions on how to do this the right way, which just seems fantastical to me given who we're talking about.
In other threads people are discussing the possibility of this being intentional, by disaffected subordinates, poorly vetted and rushed in to work on this against their will. And that's certainly plausible in subordinates but I have a hard time believing that it's the case for the people running this who, if they understood what they were tasked with would have prevented an entire category of errors by simply tasking subordinates to do what you described regardless of how they felt about the task.
So to me that leaves the only possibility that the people running this particular operation are incompetent, and given the importance of redacting that is dismaying.
Regardless of how you feel about the action of redacting these documents, the extent to which it's done and the motives behind doing it, the idea that the people in charge of this aren't competent to do it is not good at all.
This is one of the biggest document collections ever released to the public (...or will be when it's finally done) and the redactions were done in a hurry by a government agency with limited resources which would usually be doing more useful things.
So it's likely there simply isn't the time to do extended multi-step redactions.
What's happening is a mix of malicious compliance, incompetence, and time pressure.
It's very on-brand for it to be confused, chaotic, and self-harming.
Why would I settle for a rough equivalence? The point was about the chance of making mistakes in redaction, so sure, if you ignore the difference in the chance of making mistakes (which the underline process increases), everything becomes equivalent!
> Why would I settle for a rough equivalence?
They're equivalent in security. The digital method is more convenient (albeit more error prone). What confers the security is the print-scan step. Whether one is redacting in between or before doesn't change much.
You'd still want to do a tabula rasa and manual post-pass with both methods.
> point was about the chance of making mistakes in redaction
Best practice is humans redacting in multiple passes for good reason. It's less error prone than relying on a "smart" redactor, which is mostly corporate CYA kit.
> They're equivalent in security
They aren't, security is defined as the amount of information you leak. If you have an inferior process where you're substituting the correct digital match with an in incorrect manual match, you're reducing security
> albeit more error prone
The opposite, you can't find all 925 cases of the word Xyz as efficiently on paper without the ease of a digital text search, my guess is you just have made up a different comparison (e.g., a human spending 100hrs reading paper vs some "smart" app doing 1 min of redactions) vs. the actual process quoted and criticized in my original comment
> Whether one is redacting in between or before doesn't change much
It does, the chance to make a mistake differs in these cases! Printing & scanning can't help you here, it's a totally set of mistakes
> Best practice
But this conversation is about a specific blogged-about reality, not your best practice theory!
The blog has no relevance to your claim that the print and scan procedure somehow fundamentally precludes automated search and replace. I refuted that. You remain free to perform automated search and replace prior to printing the document. You also have the flexibility to perform manual redactions both digitally as well as physically with ink.
It's clearly a superior process that provides ease of use, ease of understanding, and is exceedingly difficult to screw up. Barr's DoJ should be commended for having selected a procedure that minimizes the risk of systemic failure when carried out by a collection of people with such diverse technical backgrounds and competence levels.
Notably, had the same procedure been followed for the Epstein files then the headline we are currently commenting under presumably wouldn't exist.
> The blog has no relevance to your claim that the print and scan procedure somehow fundamentally precludes automated search and replace.
It has direct relevance since it describes the process as lacking the automated search and replace
> I refuted that
You didn't, you created a meaningless process of underlinig text digitally to waste time redacting it on paper for no reason but add more mistakes, and also replaced the quoted reality with your made up situation to "refute".
> and is exceedingly difficult to screw up.
It's trivial, and I've told you how in the previous comment
> Notably, had the same procedure been followed for the Epstein files then the headline we are currently commenting under presumably wouldn't exist.
Nope, this is generic "hack" headline, so guessing a redacted name by comparing the length of plaintext to unmask would fit the headline just as well as a copy&paste hack
It gets you the non-existance of a PDF full of reversible black boxes.
Can't leak a file that doesn't exist.
But you can leak the content of a file that you printed out and couldn't redact properly by using an inferior method
But such a document is obviously unredacted. A black boxed PDF appears to be redacted, but isn't. Accidents happen.
Now that you've shifted the goalposts back closer to the original discussion, what's your point? Yes, you can leak the "nonexisting" file in multiple ways, including the printed one, and yes, "accidents" happen. So are they more likely to happen if you ban digital search and force paper and ink redaction instead? Are they more likely to happen if you black out digitally before printing or underline digitally and ink out physically?
And the "obvious word needle in a haystack of many thousands of pages" isn't as self-healing as you appear to think it is.
> This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with.
No, this is an example of someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful outcomes.
"Smart" people like to believe that knowing enough minutiae is enough to result in a successful outcome.
Actual smart people know that the process is more important than the minutiae, and proceed accordingly.
> someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful
Oh, man, is he the only smart person in the whole department of >100k employees and an >x contractors??? What other fantasy do you need to believe in to excuse the flaws? Also, if he's so smart why didn't he, you know, hire someone smart for the job?
> even a very dumb person still has successful
Except it's easier to make mistakes following his process for both smart and dumb people, not be successful!
> Actual smart people know that the process is more important
So he's not actually smart according to your own definition because the process he has set up was bad, so he apparently did not know it was important to set it up better?
> important than the minutiae
Demanding only paper redactions is that minutiae.
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length
This is the only weakness of Barr's method.
> it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Anyong relying on automated tools to redact is doing so performatively. At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context to sit down and read through the documents and strike out anything that reveals–directly or indirectly, spelled correctly or incorrectly–too much.
> This is the only weakness of Barr's method.
Of course it isn't, the other weakness you just dismiss is the higher risk of failed searches. People already fail with digital, it's even harder to do in print or translate digital to print (something a machine can do with 100% precision, now you've introduced a human error)
> At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context
Before the end of the day there is also the whole day, and if you have to waste the attention of such people on doing ink redactions instead of dedicating all of their time to focused reading, you're just adding mistakes for no benefit
> something a machine can do with 100% precision
Forget about typoes. Until recent LLMs, machines couldn't detect oblique or identifying references. (And with LLMs, you still have the problem of hallucinations. To say nothing of where you're running the model.)
> if you have to waste the attention of such people on doing ink redactions instead of dedicating all of their time to focused reading
You've never read a text with a highlighter or pen?
Out of curiosity, have you worked with sensitive information that needed to be shared across security barriers?
Reading through material in context and actively removing the telling bits seems very focused to me.
Furthermore, reading through long winded, dry legalese (or the like) and then occasionally marking it up seems like an excellent way to give the brain short breaks to continue on rather than to let the mind wander in a sea of text.
I am for automating all the things but I can see pros and cons for both digital and manual approaches.
The reading is focused, but that focus is wasted on menial work, which makes it easier to miss something more important
> give the brain short breaks
Set a timer if you feel that's of any use? Why does the break have to depend on the random frequency of terms to be redacted? What if there is nothing to redact for pages, why let the mind wander?
> I am for automating
But you're arguing against it. What's the pro of manually replacing all 1746 occurrences of "Trump" instead of spending 0.01% of that time with a digital search & replace and then spending the other 1% digitally searching for variants with typos and then spending the last 99% in focused reading trying to find that you've missed "the owner of Mar-a-Lago Club" reference or something more complicated (and then also replace that variant digitally rather than hoping you'd notice it every single time you wade through walls of legalese!)
> What's the pro of manually replacing all 1746 occurrences of "Trump" instead of spending 0.01% of that time with a digital search & replace and then spending the other 1% digitally searching for variants with typos
Because none of this involves a focussed reading. It's the same reason why Level 3 can be less safe than Level 4. If you're skimming, you're less engaged than if you're reading in detail. (And if you're skipping around, you're missing context. You may catch Trump and Trup, but will you catch POTUD? Alternatively, if you just redact every mention of the President, you may wind up creating a President ***, thereby confirming what you were trying to redact.)
If it doesn't matter, automate it. If you care, have a team do a proper redaction.
> Because none of this involves a focussed reading
That's not a pro, thats an incorrect rejection of the pro of the alternative. The thing is is that it does not preclude focused reading, I don't understand why you make up the "skipping around/skimming" alternative when I've expclitily mentioned that the is that 99% of time you spend on focused reading. It's just when you do that focused reading, you don't have to waste time on trivial redactions that you've already done automatically, and instead you can dedicate that time to catching POTUDs. So in total, you can spend more time on focused reading.
> may wind up creating a President **
How? Even if your 1% on digital alternatives somehow doesn't include this obvious combination, why would the word "President" in "President **" be harder to redact during focused reading?
> If it doesn't matter, automate it. If you care, have a team do a proper redaction.
I don't get, where is the actual option that I've described - do both while saving time???
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions
Increasing the size of the redaction box to include enough of the surrounding text to make that very difficult.
You'd need to increase it a lot, lest the surrounding text be inferred from context.
But that's a destructive operation!
I mean, sure, you can make the whole paragraph/page blank, but presumably the goal is to share the report removing only the necessary minimum?
Also the pedophile that tried to obscure his face in pictures with a swirl effect that they were able to reverse enough to identify him:
https://www.minnpost.com/politics-policy/2007/11/you-can-swi...
IIRC there was a Slashdot discussion about it that went "Oh yeah, obviously you need to black out the face entirely, or use a randomized Gaussian blur." "Yeah, or just not molest kids."
Typically these folks use standard redaction software. Has anyone explored the fact that the software is just a buggy, silly mess?
Follow the letter of the law, but not the spirit.
It already seems that they blacked out more than the law allowed, so following neither.
Not that it matters much what the law says if the goal is to protect the man who hands out pardons...
FTC vs Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
Its befuddling you think theres mechanisms to incentivize competency over loyalty in some of these organizations
Based on the prose style, I'm assuming you copy-pasted a ChatGPT "deep research" answer?
The prose style and the fact that it was super repetitive. Every bullet re-described the copy-pasting. Definitely LLM slop.
similar to pressing delete or emptying recycle bin, in that all that happens is the operating system is told that section of the hard drive is now blank, but the underlying files are still there and available to recover
Befuddling you are befuddled by non-tech obsessed people failing to grasp tech.
The covid origins Slack messages discovery material (Anderson & Holmes) were famously poorly redacted pdfs, allowing their unredacting by Gilles Demaneuf, benefiting all of us.
[flagged]
You mean the layers that were, in fact, just side effects of scanning the (non-authoritative) short form certificate?
Not proven yet.
It wasn't his actual birth certificate! It was the short form!
The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose.
The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as DOJ lawyers regularly tell courts) by the need to “protect the information of innocent U.S. citizens.”
But the “bad at redactions” part isn’t an accident. It functions as a litigation tactic. Makes production slow, make FOIA responses slow, and then point to that slow, manual process as the reason the timeline has to be slow. The government could easily buy the kind of redaction tools that most law firms have used for decades. Purpose built redaction tools speed the work up and reduce mistakes. But the government doesn't buy those tools because faster, cleaner production benefits the requester.
The downside for the government is that every so often a judge gets fed up and orders a normal timeline. Then agencies go into panic mode and initiate an “all hands on deck.” Then you end up with untrained, non-attorney staff doing rushed redactions by hand in Adobe. Some of them can barely use a mouse. That’s when you see the classic technical failures: someone draws a black rectangle that looks like a redaction, instead of applying a real redaction that actually removes the underlying text.
This is an extremely interesting perspective. I haven't really heard it before, but I once worked for the state in a technical capacity and watched as they spent entire workdays and scheduled multiple meetings with the sole purpose of figuring out ways to slow down or narrow FOIA requests.
I didn't really know how they slept at night, but I don't know how a lot of people sleep at night. I only had to be involved because I had to do the actual trawling through the emails. They spent their time trying to narrow the keywords that I'd have to search, and trying to figure out new definitions of the words "related to."
There’s a great Australian comedy called Utopia about a government department that has a whole episode B-plot of the characters working on the Aussie equivalent of a FOIA request. It’s pretty funny and in the end one of the workers just finds it easier to leak the document to the requesting journalist rather than deal with the official process, even though it was mundane contract details on a carpark that came in ahead of schedule and under budget.
In another episode they’re trying to find out the length of a stealth submarine for construction planning purposes of a port or something, and they have to go through endless layers of security checks with the military that lead nowhere. In the end a reporter filming a documentary episode on the government agency tells them the length because they were allowed to film the submarine on another program.
Definitely recommend the show and my friends in government say it’s scarily accurate.
Imagine if society were a program and laws, policies and procedures were its codebase. The scary thing is that the way it gets patched in reality isn't very different from the way agentic LLMs perform on actual codebases today. Bug in this department? Delete it. People abuse this system? Add more friction for legitimate users. Society has a need? Greenfield a feature that works great but doesn't fit in with existing systems at all. This didn't used to be so on the nose. I can't decide if we should welcome our new robot overlords or even what is a reflection of who anymore.
Please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
No, there isn't an enormous cohort of bureaucrats going to work every day, collectively wringing their hands and saying "haha, we're going to be STUPID today!"
You ought to re-read GP. They aren't saying there's a decision to be stupid, but that it's a byproduct of their process.
I'm not so sure.
> Some of them can barely use a mouse.
How/why are they employed for that position then?
It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF.
I always felt paranoid (without any real evidence, just a guess) that there would always be a chance that anything done in software could be reversed somehow.
If it's not done properly, and you happen at any point in the chain to put black blocks on a compressed image (and PDF do compress internal images), you are leaking some bits of information in the shadow casted by the compression algorithm : (Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/jpguncrop )
And that's just in the non-adversarial simple case.
If you don't know the provenance of images you are putting black box on (for example because of a rogue employee intentionally wanting to leak them, or if the image sensor of your target had been compromised to leak some info by another team), your redaction can be rendered ineffective, as some images can be made uncroppable by construction .
(Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/uncroppable )
And also be aware that compression is hiding everywhere : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
>Let's crop it anyway
That is not cropping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cropping_(image)
>Cropping is the removal of unwanted _outer_ areas from a photographic or illustrated image.
Please forgive my outside the box use of word.
I used it at the time as a reference to the "PNG aCropalypse" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35208721 where I originally shared it in a comment).
The algorithm does also work if you remove the outer areas of the photo.
Right, using stenography to encode some parity bits into an image so that lost information can be reconstructed seems like an obvious approach - all sorts of approaches you could use, akin to FEC. Haven't looked at your site yet, will be interested to see what you've built :)
Edit: I checked it out, nice, I like the lower res stenography approach, can work very nicely with good upscaling filters - gave it a star :)
steganography — stenography is courtroom transcription
People protect their secrets from stenographers with steganography.
Somewhat related, I once sent a FOI request to a government agency that decided the most secure way to redact documents was to print them, use a permanent marker, and then scan them. Unfortunately they used dye based markers over laser print, so simply throwing the document into Photoshop and turning up the contrast made it readable.
I remember noticing that a teacher in high school had used white-out to hide the marks for the correct multiple choice answer on final exam practice questions before copying them. Then she literally cut-and-pasted questions from the practice questions for the final. I did mediocre on the essay, but got the highest score in the class on the multiple choice questions, because I could see little black dots where the white out was used.
I was thinking I understand what's going on but then I came to the image showing the diff and I don't understand at all how that diff can unredact anything.
It's not that you can unredact them from scratch (you could never get the blue circle back from this software). It's that you can tell which of the redacted images is which of the origin images. Investigative teams often find themselves in a situation where they have all four images, but need to work out which redacted files are which of the origins. Take for example, where headed paper is otherwise entirely redacted.
So with this technique, you can definitively say "Redacted-file-A is definitely a redacted version of Origin-file-A". Super useful for identifying forgeries in a stack of otherwise legitimate files.
Also good for for saying "the date on origin-file-B is 1993, and the file you've presented as evidence is provable as origin-file-b, so you definitely know of [whatever event] in 1993".
Ok thanks. That sounds reasonable.
>... and therefore you can unredact them
from that readme is just not true then I guess?
I mean, even the "crop" isn't used at all correctly, is it?
I think the word should be "redact".
I'm trying to understand this cause it sounds fascinating but I don't get it. I don't have an advanced understanding of compression so that might be part of why.
If you compare an image to another image, you could guess by compression what is under the blocked part, that makes some sense to me conceptually, what I don't get is for the PDF specifically why does it compressing the black boxes I put have any risk? It's compressing the internal image which is just the black box part? Or are you saying the whole screenshot is an internal image?
I'll just send an image and not bother with a PDF.
(Note there's also other metadata in a PDF, which you may not want your recipient to know either.)
There's also metadata in the image files. What specifically would be sensitive in the pdf with screenshots metadata that is also not present in the sceenshot image metadata?
PDF has something called an "info dictionary", which most mainstream PDF-writing software will fill out with various bits of info that you might not want known.
Image files usually have substantially less metadata by default, unless it's one taken by a camera.
Screenshots specifically tend to have very little metadata
it's absolutely bewildering how ridiculous everything has been so far in terms of competence and this really takes the cherry on the top near Christmas too.
how much lower can they go ?!
USA is still very high, so they can go much much lower, but I think they might go to some still lower places, finding them where we didn't even know such places could exist. Some ideas:
- Leave NATO
- Start openly supporting Russia and North Korea
- Arrest whole International Criminal Court
- Preventively invade China
I'm convinced slavery will be reintroduced before 2028
It never fully went away:
• https://www.hcn.org/articles/agriculture-farmers-turn-to-pri...
• https://www.law.georgetown.edu/environmental-law-review/blog...
Fully enshrined in the constitution with massive support for the document. Just need to imprison them for something first.
Slavery has never been illegal in the US. The 13th amendment leaves slavery legal as punishment for a crime. The US has the highest rate of crime punishment in the world (higher than places like North Korea), an industry that profits by selling slave labour of those punished criminals, and known ties between those who profit from selling slave labour and those who decide how many things should be crimes.
Oh also this isn't some quiet conspiracy or anything because the Union of correctional facility officers will openly say that things like legalizing recreational marijuana will hurt them, so they oppose it.
Same with cops.
They also oppose removing things like three strikes laws that haven't done a damn thing to make our country "safer" or better.
I know you’re joking, but grievance over the loss of slavery after the civil war is privately one of the major drivers behind Trumps extremely loyal core supporters.
It's not a slave if you just rent them from the cartels. /s
Reintroduce witch burning.
Reintroduce death penalties on public squares.
Taking Greenland and Venezuela is given, as they took most of Latin America already. Just the new Mexican president looks like the next thorn in their eyes. Too competent, too social, too anti-corruption.
They had one in bangladesh the other day.
They effectively already left NATO and openly support Russia already. ICC members are already under fire and some had their microsoft account banned by Trump. Trump will invade Greenland and Canada first. China is less of an priority.
> They effectively already left NATO
What the fuck are you talking about? Someone should tell Russia.
NATO works by projecting a united force. Nations unconditionally backing each other up. The USA is now clearly no longer a part of that. That's not to say that the USA will do nothing if a NATO member is attacked. It might. Or not.
One can only imagine what America not fighting an attack on NATO member would have on nuclear proliferation.
We're currently in the position of the USA threatening to attack a NATO member (Denmark)
Limiting Nuclear proliferation was already fucked.
Trump tore up Iran's "we won't do nukes" deal, doesn't matter whether you think they were genuine or not, it demonstrates we will go back on a deal so our word isn't worth anything.
Ukraine shows that the west will not actually protect you like they claim, so your only option is getting nukes to really deter people.
North Korea and Pakistan demonstrate that you can pretty much do whatever you want with just a couple nukes, the west will cower in fear over idle threats.
No country would look at any of this and conclude that they have any choice but to build nukes to protect themselves.
Any country without nukes, that is not currently developing them, is stupid imo.. Nukes are the only thing that can guarantee sovereignty now. Ukraine gave up their nukes.
Do you believe the existing nuclear powers will just allow any country to join their ranks without a fight?
Europe is already considering to have a nuclear shield.
This is because if Trump
No need to consider. The UK and France have nukes. France even has a two-tier response. Not enough to vitrify Russia or China five times over, but enough to make them reconsider.
For much of NATO history, the US is NATO. The US doesn’t want it to be like that anymore because it needs to strategically shift to the other side of the world. So, the US says “What if Europe can be NATO? If we can force them to meet the GDP commitment then maybe we don’t need to worry about them too much and commit less of our own resources to this theater.” But of course people interpret this as if the US is abandoning the alliance. No, the US just has other problems to deal with in the world.
That is the rationalization, but don't be surprised if the US would not confront China at all.
The main flow of capital in the US had been going to the mil.industry, but that is not the case anymore. It is mainly surveillance tech that is receiving capital. In a very unhealthy economy, this all looks eerily pre-'30s.
The US, right now, is only threatening weak countries, they don't have the industrial power to confront China, nor do they want it. This shouldn't be a surprise, some ideologues behind this maga-project belief in an America from one pole to the other. They believe in "spheres of influence", and as such China has their own sphere of influence. A sphere of influence means a kind of colony, where natural resources, people and industry are all resources to be extracted by them. It is the Russian model, it is the model of criminal mobs, it is might makes right, it is a multi-polar world.
Meanwhile, re-industrialization projects have been scrapped, partners have been scared of, and tariffs have hit the industry that was still left in America.
Monopolists are parasites on the economy, and the US is already very weakened from that. As the Japanese said, the US is still a great power, but the throne is empty. I suspect there will be skirmishes with other "great powers" over exploitable resources like Africa, Middle East, Europe, but I don't expect the current crop to go all-in on China.
The US has been the biggest opponent to a European (or EU) army, fearing loss of influence and control. It was very much in US interest at the time.
Yes, the US has always been the driving force behind NATO. It provides close to 40% of the combined military personnel, and an even higher portion of military spending.
No longer committing to defend other NATO countries, even if their military spending exceeds the target, is abandoning the alliance though. NATO is little else than that commitment.
Well, the very fact that we are even discussing it means Trump already weakened NATO as an alliance.
There's a left wing cooker conspiracy theory that the guy who gave Ukraine the Javalin anti tank missiles and forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP is actually a secret Russian agent.
You literally just used NATO for a grouping that does not include the US.
Can you rephrase what I said without "literally using NATO for a grouping that does not include the US"?
I didn't even mention the US lol, I think you're paranoid but please, correct me ...
I mean, I didn't phrase it as Trump being a part of NATO, but he's not actually a country.
Oops I guess if this is as much sense as you can make then there wasn't much point in my trying to parse your comment in the first place.
I didn't group NATO and the US separately. You thought I did, but I didn't and you just hadn't read properly.
I waffled a bit in my reply to not rub it in too hard.
And do you want to contribute with something other than nitpick or insult?
Do YOU think that an informed and intelligent person can conclude that Trump is secretly a Russian agent, given he was the driving force behind a massive hike in NATO spending (which Putin really hates)?
I'm not calling Trump competent, or consistent, or benevolent. You can say he has a weird crushed on Putin and is easily manipulated and corrupt.
You can even suggest a lot of the MAGA people who surround Trump are actually working for Russia, since Russia tries to influence a lot of groups and Trump's cronies (and the influencers Trump listens to) are often compromised.
But do you think Trump is actually consistently taking orders from Putin because of some kind of leverage Putin has? Because people say this constantly and it's (in my opinion) almost as embarrassing as Republicans and the Pizza conspiracy. Trump has done some things that are increadibly damaging to Russia, and blackmail doesn't work on a pathological liar with no sense of shame.
I'm sure you're smart enough to agree with pretty much all of this. But you disingenuously attack me because I'm attacking people who are on your side, even if you would privately admit they are dumb.
This is what I read in your comment: that Trump "forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP". Are you talking about the US there? No, tautologically, you are talking about those parts of NATO that Trump forced to increase military spending to 5% of GDP. So what is controversial about my observation that you used the term NATO to stand for a NATO without the US?
My point was that by doing so you yourself add weight (a very little weight) to the thesis of the grandparent that, at least in people's perceptions, the US has left NATO. It wasn't just a nitpick, but at the same time I did not intend to join this side or that side in some mad argument that is playing out in your mind. I freely admit that at this point I am not reading all your output.
Yes the US is forced to meet the 5% target, as it is a part of NATO. What is your point?
Trump is the person who demanded the 5% target; Trump forced NATO to adopt a 5% target.
Trump also ordered ICE to deport more illegal / undocumented migrants, does this suggest that ICE is not a part of the US?
Trump forced the US to impose sanctions, does this suggest the US is not a part of the US?
How else would you phrase "Trump forced organisation x to do y"?
> Trump is secretly a Russian agent,
Russian asset, not necessarily agent. At least that's the commonly spread idea, for which there is at least some circumstancial evidence: commercial projects in Russia for several decades and well documented links to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs under Trump I just to name two.
Support for NATO within the US is Isreal-lite for different demographics. Pouring resources into it isn't without downsides.
Trump is a born banana Republic dictator...
I like to refer to MAGA as Banana Republicans.
>Start openly supporting Russia
Already done.
I'm not too concerned about the US. They've made their bed.
I'm more concerned with them dragging everyone else down, and someone much worse taking their place.
Pray tell what western country right now isn’t in the same position?
This low https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse_in_Pakistan aka a society where child abuse is simply accepted and mainstream, with the child abuse of child labour and dhijhadism being just additional nightmare fuel on top.
If we survive long enough I do believe historians will look back on this period and state as a matter of fact, rape and child abuse were completely acceptable, because it seems it’s totally fine with our elected leaders. If these leaders were democratically elected there is only one conclusion to draw from it…
Maybe it was always part of the plan. Plausible Deniability.
Good Soldier Svejk working at the FBI decided to follow an illegal order as badly as possible.
The really interesting bit is whether they can go another term.
They seem to be ahead of schedule abolishing a working democracy before the midterms.
Maybe the person tasked with the redacting didn't agree so they chose the worst possible way to do it.
Normally, I'd never attribute to intention what can be blamed on incompetence. Especially if the government is doing it. But sure, if I were the intern tasked with this job...
> Especially if the government is doing it.
Also if doing it right means more work?
My personal guess is that only 10% of people love their work, and don't object to doing more of it - governmental or private sector. But the efficacy of those people is amplified in the private sector and nullified in government.
Source: I'm the guy everyone wanted on their group science project in high school, because I'd feel responsible for doing all the work while they smoked weed. I have brothers both in and out of government who work equally hard at similar jobs, and I see the dispatity of motivation.
I learned that a long time ago when I was a student and wanted to submit a pdf generated by a trial version of some software as an assignment and was trying to be clever and cover the watermark that said unregistered with a white box.
When opening the file in my slow computer, I could see all the rendering of the watermark happening in slow motion until the white box would pop up on top of the text.
When I was a student, and using a shareware or trial version of some software and wanted some printed output from it without a watermark, I printed to postscript (chose a printer that supported postscript and the driver used it instead of rasterized images), but using a file instead of a printer.
I could then open up the postscript, delete the commands that rendered the watermark, save it, then I converted it to PDF so it would be easy to print.
You don't need PostScript for that. The PDF text commands are Tj and TJ, and rarely ' and ". They are easy to delete without going through PostScript. Tj means showing a simple text string. TJ means showing an array of strings possibly with space adjustments. ' means moving to the next line and showing a simple string. " means doing that and setting character spacing.
Perhaps, but it's easier to open up and edit a .ps file in a text editor than a PDF. PDF is a binary format with compressed streams, while postscript is just a stack-oriented programming language.
Tools like qpdf makes it easy to edit a .pdf file in a text editor too. I’d argue using such tools is easier than and simpler than printing to postscript.
Sure. I've not tried it. Was it around in 2002? Because that's when my story occured.
It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title.
Randomly removing these by trial and error will usually quite easily allow you to find the watermark and nix it, with the advantage that even a sophisticated recipient will not be able to find out from the pdf file what the watermark was.
I then convert the image to grayscale only. Then I apply a filter so that only 16 colors are used. And I then adjust brightness/contrast so that "white is really white". It's all scripted: "screenshot to PDF". One of my oldest shell script.
16 shades of grey (not 50) is plenty enough for text to still be smooth.
I do it for several reasons, one of them being I often take manual notes on official documents (which infuriates my wife btw) but then sometimes I need to then scan the documents and send them (local IRS / notary / bank / whatever). So I'll just scan then I'll fill rectangle with white where I took handnotes. Another reason is when there's paper printed on two sides, at scan times sometimes if the paper is thin / ink is thick, the other side shall show.
I wonder how that'd work vs adversarial inputs: never really thought about it.
care to share the script?
Personally, I only trust an image manipulation tool to put down solid colored blocks, or something that does not involve the source pixels when deciding on the redacted pixel. Formats like PDF are just so complicated to trust.
And even being this careful, if the opacity is slightly off it could be undone
The one that was crazy to me is undoing a blur effect (based on its algo), so yeah I also will layer and screenshot something
This is what I do while sharing such images. I crop out those parts first and then take another screenshot. I do not even risk painting over and then take another screenshot. I have been doing this forever.
In practical terms, a more convenient way to achieve this is just printing the document to a PDF, which rasterises the visible layer into what the printer would see. Most pdf tools support this.
That seems like a dangerous approach. Though printer drivers do often use rasterization, especially when targeting cheap printers, many printers can render vector graphics and text as well. Print-to-PDF will often use the later approach, unless of course the source program always rasterizes it's output when sending it out to the printer driver, or the used Print-to-PDF driver is particularly stupid.
You can, but I don't trust software for these types of niche but critical tasks hah. Next thing I know I'd be reading a headline about how "bug in print to PDF actually retains XYZ metadata"
I feel the same and do the same.
Me too.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte
Let all the files get released first.
Then show your hacks.
They're not 'hacks' it's the people doing the redaction making beginner mistakes of not properly removing the selectable text under the redactions. They're either drawing black rectangles over the text or highlighting it black neither of which prevents the underlying text from being selected.
Keeping that secret would require sponaneous silence from everyone looking at these docs which is just not possible.
Yes but don't tell them they're doing it wrong.
Impossible which is the point of the last sentence. Spontaneous secrecy when some people are discovering the bad redactions while publicly streaming is impossible.
Misdirection 101
The whole thing is just too suspicious. Too good to be true. What's the chance of this being some 4D chess where the government has already edited the files, and then presented them as redacted so the "unredacted (but edited)" version looks more genuine?
> What's the chance of this being some 4D chess where the government has already edited the files, and then presented them as redacted so the "unredacted (but edited)" version looks more genuine?
With how they have pushed out any career public servants who were good at their jobs in favor of sycophants and loyalists, I'm not sure government organizations are still capable of playing 4D chess, if they ever were.
Please share your redacting tricks as loudly as you can, but only the ones that allow retrieving the original text. I'd love Google and the AIs to spout bad censoring tricks as much as possible.
There's enough people who would do it for the clout and don't really care what is in the documents one way or the other.
Also don’t assume the mistake wasn’t intentional.
This was my initial reaction to this news. I mean think about it
The Trump team knows that nobody is gonna buy whatever they put out as being the full story. Isn't this just the perfect way to make people feel like they got something they weren't supposed to see? They can increase trust in the output without having to increase trust in the source of it
And as far as I've heard there hasn't been anything "unredacted" that's been of any consequence. It all just feels a little too perfect.
No, it's the opposite, it's fairly damaging. Previously they could claim, dubiously but plausible, that all redactions were about protecting victims (the only redactions allowed under the act). A lot of the "undone redactions" are solely about protecting the abusers, illegal under the law.
Whether breaking a law actually matters anymore is another question though, as crime is legal now.
Crime may go unpunished by this is why statues of limitations exist. The window on some crimes stays open for a very long time.
"Some" is 99% crimes against the state with the occasional bone they throw the peasants to look like they care. Heck, murder probably wouldn't even be unlimited if not for the fact that it thumbs it's nose at the state's monopoly on violence.
That's seems like some rather bleak hyperbole. If the goal of a conversation is to seek some improvement above the status quo then this is a solid impasse.
The problems we face can't be accurately assessed let alone solved if we are limited to thinking and reasoning about the government (and large institutions generally) the way we are taught to by our grade school civics class.
> as crime is legal now
If they do it, it's not a crime.
It's the same government that invited a journalist to a signal discussion about ongoing military strike in Yemen.
Maybe that was just a ploy to get us to underestimate them.
consider Hanlon's Razor
As others have mentioned, the administration is staffed and run by loyalists, whose primary skills are flattery and obedience.
Back in the day they had true masters of the Dark Arts. The forged letters about Bush's service were incredibly convenient in helping Bush beat Kerry. I am not alone in thinking it to be masterminded by Karl Rove.
This is probably one of those events where everyone on the inside has their own story that won't fit into a neat overarching narrative of how the files are handled because they only gets to feel part of the elefant each.
That was my thought. Just happen to leak some info for people you are interested in hurting but claim it was an accident.
And in terms of no big news in “unredacted”, it’s likely names that don’t mean anything to the average voter but damaging material for K Street.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
Exactly my thoughts as well.
Too late. The data has been touched far too many times. The chain of custody and any accountability will never happen.
I wonder if any of this is a conscious act of resistance vs. just incompetence.
And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Black square vs redaction tool difference is well known if someone's job involves redacting PDF or just working with PDF. It's most likely that additional staffs were pulled in and weren't given enough training.
Colleagues whose full time job is doing this sort of thing for various bits of the government have told me this is exactly the case here. People from all over the government have been deputized to redact these documents with little or no prior training.
If there's that many people who have access to these files, I'm shocked there hasn't been leaks until this point.
Why risk leaking it and potentially getting caught, when you can do a bad job redacting instead :)
I'd want them to leak their instructions given to them for this assignment.
When other people close to the case end up dead you have a pretty decent reason to not leak.
If loyalty is the metric and not competence they were selected for ..
CUaaS. Cover Up as a Service.
With a sister website BAEaas (Backup and Extort as a service).
I wonder if this activity is being used as a kind of loyalty test. Keep track of who is assigned to redact what, and then if certain files leak or are insufficiently redacted, they indicate who isn't all in on Dear Leader.
It's not like a few more stories of Trump raping $whomever are going to move the needle at all, especially with how the media is on board with burying negative coverage of the regime.
Also if you're wondering how this activity isn't some kind of abuse of government resources, keep in mind that thanks to the Supreme Council's embrace of the Unitary Executive Theory (ie Sparkling Autocracy), covering up evidence about Donald Trump raping under-aged sex trafficking victims is now an official priority of the United States Government.
I guess they might try, but given all the other nonsense I certainly don't think the admin is organized enough to execute that plan.
Let people believe it's deliberate sabotage. Unfortunately, in real life, minions of a dictator serve the dictator; they don't risk their live or safety for a noble cause. Any screw-ups are a result of gross incompetence that is typical for every dictatorship.
Maybe because facism favor loyalty over competence.
Arendt:
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
>Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Same reason unions always work hardest when fighting on behalf of the worst workers. If you go to bat for a man who can't do better elsewhere he'll go to bat for you in return.
But wait, the situation is more complicated than that you say? Why yes, that's exactly the point. Two of us can play at the stupid smug oversimplification game.
While the effect being described is real to an extent, distilling it to the point you did is useless because there is so much more nuance. Why assume the place was staffed with first rate talent to begin with? And even if there is a lot of first rate talent many will stick around because they don't care who they serve (people not like this don't tend to make careers in government TBH).
Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
A man who tried to overturn an election is in power and is disappearing people on the streets without due process.
The other day there was news about some ICE members who blew up the door to a family's home in order to detain a man. The man was a citizen. They knew that. They came to intimidate him because a few days earlier he tried filming their cars on a public street. That's just one example but these cases are only becoming more common.
One thing that's clear is that if he tries to overturn an election again, he is way better positioned to succeed this time. ICE is now the 5th most heavily funded military in the world and the whole point of DOGE[0] was to centralize the government and fill only with loyalists.
[0] NYT investigation recently proved there were little savings https://archive.ph/y5guv
> disappearing people on the streets without due process.
Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process.
What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense.
When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law.
The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dictatorship, but it’s definitely trending toward authoritarianism.
Wasn't too hard to put together a quick graph of the past decade for the U.S. using the World Press Freedom Index (relative ranking and score) - an annual ranking of 180 countries published by Reporters Without Borders that measures the level of press freedom.
https://imgur.com/a/4liEqqi
what is the US exactly currently if not dictatorship? is there a single thing “President” cannot do right now and if so who would be stopping him? so perhaps on paper US is not dictatorship much like Russia and China are not… We spend decades trying to fight these regimes and lost so much that now we are worse than them :)
> is there a single thing “President” cannot do right now
Stand in the middle of fifth Avenue and shoot someone :)
Have political enemies executed
Get his face on Mount Rushmore
Disband congress
Disband the Supreme Court
Keep Jimmy Kimmel off air
Get Jon Stuart to shut up
Get James comey indicted
Get a national holiday named after him
Etc.
Even when we focus on things he tried to do, there is a lot he couldn’t. Let alone when you look at things he didn’t try to do.
we are 11 months in, please be patient while the process is taking place, be right with you with your list :)
lots of these are of course also just a distraction to discuss at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner vs you know, other things
You said "right now". If you want to change to "will be able to do in the near future, before the end of his second term", that's a (slightly?) different list. But it's also a different comment.
You said "anything", in the context of dictatorship. I only used items in this list which IMO you can reasonably say Putin, an actual dictator, can do. Right now. Except the first one! Because that was a joke, a reference to something he himself said he could do.
If you want to change to "anything which has backroom deal importance, not just bread and games for the masses, but the real things, if you know you know", that's a (slightly) different list.
But, it's also a different comment.
He has functionally neutered Congress. It is almost completely meaningless and it is operating without an independent Speaker.
I think he could succeed in principle re: Mount Rushmore, to be honest. I think eventually people will cave in and agree to do it, and then they will just pray to cholesterol that they can wait it out.
Well he did get Ellen Degeneris to self-deport
The supreme court did just stop him for the moment putting the national guard into chicago
bookmark this for a few days and then come back to it… the story is “… for now” :-)
"rare setback"
it is not a setback, they have to play a little game now and again to entertain the masses. scotus as it was before doesn’t exist anymore and won’t for decades, it now just rubberstamps
I quoted the media. The main point in this context is the "rare" part. I'm well aware of the nature of the GOP operatives on the SCOTUS. Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch all voted in Trump's favor. That Beerhead, Ms. IDreamOfGilead, and "Citizens United/I hate the VRA/worst chief justice since Taney" voted to temporarily uphold the stay actually surprised me (Bart O' said he would have given Trump more leeway) but yes, it's theater.
[flagged]
I hope you are just trying to be funny cause if you are it is good
Not even believable conspiracy slop for 2023, let alone in almost 2026.
> Ukraine jailed all opposing politicians during the war with Russia and stopped having elections.
No, they did not jail "all" of the opposition. Fair elections cannot be held during an invasion, especially at the rate Russia frauds votes and candidates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusations_of_Russian_interfe...
It's pretty clear he can barely do anything policy wise. Limited tariffs and immigration / border stuff is pretty much all that he is getting done.
And killing so many sailors in South American waters.
> so many
To be exact, CNN reports that for the period Sep - Dec there have been ~30 boats destroyed in ~26 attacks, with at least ~105 deaths in these operations.
The US govt is of course claiming narcotics smugglers ("narcoterrorism") while others say they are not. The truth is probably somewhere inbetween, though who knows one which end of the spectrum.
What I think is maybe more interesting is the general pressure being applied to Venezuela by the US and the EU.
you don’t need policy, policy is what his predecessors were doing and are now going “wait, we could have done whatever the F we wanted??! damn!!” :)
How would the roadmap for turning a democracy into a one party dictatorship differ from the trajectory we are on?
Which democracy? The USA isn't one for decades already
I've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries.
Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap.
Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not observe significant, active regression and effort by the government to replace it with something else.
Unfortunately this is unrealistic as we cannot travel to both countries easily.
It's not so simple a binary. We're definitely much less democratic than a year ago, and the bar was low then.
I truly believe we're headed that direction. I've lived long enough to have seen a wide variety of presidents, both good and bad. This one is easily the worst one, in terms of bare naked power grabs.
I believe Trump will manufacture a crisis before he's out of office in a bid to maintain control. I believe he will have learned from Bush Jr. that a simple war isn't good enough, and it needs to be a genuine emergency.
I believe he'll do whatever he can to make that happen. Native born terrorist, or war with a close country, or absolutely over the top financial crash. Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval - he'll just skip the congressional approval part like he already does.
> Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval
There is literally no such obscure rule, and a new Congress will be seated two weeks before the 2029 Presidential Inauguration.
Elections, and the compulsory ends of terms, inauguration of new Congresses, etc, happen on schedule without regard to any exceptional cases, including Civil War.
If he can get a majority of the Electoral College for a third term, and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2028, then things get much more complicated.
But there is no other path. Elections matter, and don't let anyone discourage you from believing that they don't matter enough to vote.
This is one of those instances where I with hn had some kind of remindMe feature.
Hopefully it is not an instance where you won't need it.
I hope I'm wrong, but I legit believe that will happen.
See you in about 2 years.
The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
I have very little faith that scotus will have any consistency in their decisions going forward - they seem to be nakedly political, and backing trump. If the elections swing the other direction (despite their aid in gerrymandering), expect them to cry about the power of the presidency and start rolling it back as fast as they can push decisions through the shadow docket.
> The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
That sounds reinsuring, but it is completely false. The idea that the pendulum swings is just regression to the mean: sure, after a terrible president, the next one is likely to be less terrible. But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
> If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre. The American culture hasn’t changed that much and American leftists did not suddenly become competent at getting popular support.
> But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would? The Cold War may have been a factor.
> Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre.
The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left. There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
> Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would?
In western democracies, I can think of a couple. For example, the wave of left-wing intellectualism that was prevalent up until the 1980s got somewhat lost and lost contact with the lower classes, which left an opening for far-right populists.
> The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left.
You’re right. In that frame of reference, it might indeed regress to the far left, but that would still be slightly to the left of Bill Clinton. The US don’t strike me as having a particularly strong left-wing culture and I don’t see it appearing any time soon.
> There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
I don’t think the word exist, but the concept proved very useful to a lot of dictators.
> And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
They will find excuses to reverse. There will be some technicality, made up historical precense or some actually untrue fact about the world that wil totally make the situation different.
Conservative heretage foundation group has outcome in mind ... and "opposition" is not their preffered outcome.
> science based policy making
One of my favorite trivia questions is: how long has it been since Congress has had staff scientists?
Well, I'd do a guess and say at least since the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment got deep-sixed back in the 95. Either that or they never had them.
Oh the horror!
Tell us more about the sane (“common sense”?) gun laws!
I love these.
I'd love to limit the semi-auto rifles like the infamous AR-15. Useless for hunting, useless for self-defense. In exchange for country-wide reciprocity for concealed carry and firearm transportation.
> Useless for hunting, useless for self-defense.
I'm not a 1A guy, I think that for instance people with a history of domestic violence shouldn't be armed (that is what I would cite as "common sense"), but this statement really damages your credibility. Of course semiautomatic rifles are useful for both hunting and for self defense. They are effective weapons. That's the problem.
> I'm not a 1A guy, I think that for inference people with a history of domestic violence shouldn't be armed
Whut? How the fuck did you make that jump?
AR-15 rifles are useless for hunting. They are too small to reliably kill large game (deer) and too large for small game (rabbits). Sure, they're fine for coyotes, but if you're buying an AR-15 to hunt coyotes, then you should just stop.
AR-15s are also useless for self-defense. They are too bulky for indoor use, and the bullets can penetrate multiple walls. A regular semi-auto handgun is far superior if you're looking to protect yourself against domestic violence.
The domestic violence thing was about a potential gun regulation, not a scenario. People with domestic violence convictions are overrepresented among murderers and mass shooters. So it would make sense to prevent them from obtaining guns.
It's useless for hunting, but you identify circumstances it's useful in. You say it's useless for self defense because it's bulky, I've heard a hundred people say it's ideal because it's easier to be proficient with a rifle than with a pistol.
Say whatever you want, but when you make absolute statements like that, it damages your credibility. That's my feedback for you.
I think you may have very differing views of what "self-defense" situations you and the other poster are talking about.
Could you describe a specific scenario one of those hundred people might be imagining?
I don't really care to have an in depth discussion of self defense scenarios because I don't think that helps us understand common sense gun regulation any better. I'm sure you can find people making that argument if you are curious. My point is not that the AR-15 is an appropriate self defense weapon but that there are better arguments you could have made, and that the one you did make lost someone who is already sympathetic to your position.
I did find someone making that argument, you. I don't think asking for one example out of a hundred is asking for an in depth discussion, but if you claim this is too much for you then I won't push the issue.
It's just not what I'm talking about it the point I'm trying to make. I wasn't making that argument.
You're a bot, likely.
I guess what I'm saying doesn't compute.
"it's ideal because it's easier to be proficient with a rifle than with a pistol"
So a shotgun then?
I could cut-n-paste a bunch of them and you could copy back all the arguments against them, if you want to do that.
Or post a link to a tiresome comment sections where it's been done countless times.
But until 2A is amended there's nothing we can do.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...
For record:
That’s why I love the conversations.
You act like Trump’s policies don’t have broad support with a majority of voters.
Polls can be capricious, but Trump's recent numbers with some groups have seen big drops.
I’m still always surprised that there are adults who think it is not.
The CIA, for example, is entirely above the law.
That's different from a dictatorship, though, especially if the CIA is not answerable to a supposed dictator.
> That's different from a dictatorship,
Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA, unless the CIA is effectively answerable to some other authority despite not being answerable to the law, and then it is equivalent to a dictatorship by that higher authority.
The CIA can’t rule by edict.
Being above the law is necessary but not sufficient to be a dictator.
We also don’t know enough about the internal politics of the CIA to assert much about the head of the CIA.
From what I gather, it's so tight that when a clandestine company has served its purpose and winds down, anybody who managed to become a shareholder gets to cash out.
Anything else could blow the cover for next time.
> Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA
No it's not. I can commit all manner of illegal acts in my home unnoticed, that doesn't make me a dictator.
Yes, and if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes, then the conclusion would be different (even though an agency the scale of the CIA would still have different implications than an individual even then), but that wasn't the hypothetical under discussion, which had much fewer—as in zero—qualifications on the CIA’s lack of accountability.
Analogies don't work when they aren't analogous.
> if the hypothetical were that the CIA was effectively outside of control of the law for actions committed in private by CIA personnel in their homes
My point is their actions are committed outside the law. They've just been able to avoid punishment by covering it up. What they are not is above the law, at least not in the long run. (There are absolutely short bouts where the CIA acts above the law overseas, and rare cases where it has done so domestically. But the fact that they're covering it up betrays that they're crafty bastards, not invincible ones.)
The CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture.
Then they got caught hacking congressional computers to delete evidence.
Nothing happened to them.
They are above the law. You are not.
> CIA ran torture prisons, got caught, then there was a congressional inquiry, and they hacked into the computers of the congresspeople to delete the evidence of torture
One, source?
Two, this above reproach. Not above the law. They deleted the evidence, they didn't just blow the scandal off. (Historically, our IC was popular. Right now, it's the deep state. You're seeing political appointees at the FBI and CIA exert control.)
The country as a whole, no. But within the regime? Yeah.
Yeah — don't attribute to resistance what can adequately be explained by idiocy.
It seems insane that nobody at the other end runs something as simple as MAT or imagick (twice) over it to take the text layers out before uploading though. I hope this is at least partially intentional.
My understanding is that many people were fired and replaced by loyalists at the FBI. I think there are a lot of incompetent people working there right now.
A third possibility is diversion, while the most damaging evidence would be suppressed a different way.
There's a third option: Ambivalence.
Any major documents/files have been removed all together. Then the rest was farmed out to anyone they could find with basic instructions to redact anything embarrassing.
Since there's absolutely zero chance anyone in the administration will ever be held accountable for what's left, they're not overly concerned.
The thing that I've been waiting to see for years is the actual video recordings. There were supposedly cameras everywhere, for years. I'm not even talking about the disgusting stuff, I'm talking security for entrances, hallways, etc.
The FBI definitely has them, where are they?
What about Maxwell's media files? There was nothing found there? Did they subpoena security companies and cloud providers?
The documents are all deniable. Yes video evidence can now be easily faked, but real video will have details that are hard to invent. Regardless, videos are worth millions of words.
Reporting is that they had a basically impossible deadline and they took lawyers off of counterintelligence work to do this. So a conscious act of resistance is possible, but it's a situation where mistakes are likely - people working very quickly trying to meet a deadline and doing work they aren't that familiar with and don't really want to be doing.
It seems like a common tactic by this administration is to just not do what they are required to do until they have been told 50 times and criminal charges are being filed. I suspect the actual truth here is 'don't do this' turned into 'you have 1 day to do this and keep my name out of the release' which led to lots of issues. They probably spent more time deciding the order of pages to release, and how to avoid releasing the things damaging to the administration, than actually doing the work needed to release it. Now they will say 'look, see! You didn't give us enough time and our incompetence is the proof'
Considering the Comey, James, and Adams debacles, seems quite likely they're purged most people with a shred of competence.
Another option: also change some of the text underneath.
Given the sheer number of people they had to pull in and work overtime to redact Trump's name as well as those of prominent Republicans and donors as per numerous sources within the FBI and the administration itself, incompetence is likely for a chunk of it.
It’s funny that this effort, the largest exertion of FBI agents second only to 9/11, seems to be unprepared to redact. Cynically, I’m prepared for it to be part of a generative set of PDFs derived from the prompt “create court documents consistent with these 16 PDFs which obscure the role of Donald Trump between 1993 and 1998.”
Generative subterfuge aside, the information being "uncovered" through copy-and-paste could have been modified and we would never know.
I'm leaning towards negligence though.
It's a good question.
For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's relevant to the subpoena, it's marked as responsive, given an identifier and handed over to the other side. Non-responsive communication might not be eg attorney-client communications.
It can go further and parts of documents can be viewed as non-responsive and otherwise be blacked out eg the minutes of a meeting that discussed 4 topics and only 1 of them was about the company purchase. That may be commercially sensitive and beyond the scope of the subpoena.
Every such redaction and exclusion has to be logged and a reason given for it being non-responsive where a judge can review that and decide if the reason is good or not, should it ever be an issue. Can lawyers find something damaging and not want to hand it over and just mark it non-responsive? Technically, yes. Kind of. It's a good way to get disbarred or even jailed.
My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts, particularly when the only incentive is keeping their job and the downside is losing their career. It could happen.
What I suspect is happening is all the good lawyers simply aren't engaging in this redaction process because they know better so the DoJ had the wheel out some bad and/or unethical ones who would.
What they're doing is in blatant violation to the law passed last month and good lawyers know it.
There's a lot of this going on at the DoJ currently. Take the recent political prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, etc. No good prosecutor is putting their name to those indictments so the administration was forced to bring in incompetent stooges who would. This included former Trump personal attorneys who got improerly appointed as US Attorneys. This got the Comey indictment thrown out.
The law that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey co-sponsored was sweeping and clear about what needs to be released. The DoJ is trying to protect both members of the administration and powerful people, some of whom are likely big donors and/or foreign government officials or even heads of state.
That's also why this process is so slow I imagine. There are only so many ethically compromised lackeys they can find.
Fine, but the teeth of this act belong to some future justice department. I predict Trump will issue blanket pardons for everyone involved, up to Bondi; and that none of them will respect a congressional subpoena.
There's already bipartisan talk of inherent contempt being applied in the House, so the teeth might not wait for a future justice department.
The discharge petition to all the bill that forced this release was going nowhere until President Trump declared that he was onboard, and then it happened. Until then it was going nowhere.
My guess is that someone suggested to Trump that they could redact most of the bad bits and plausibly deny that they were doing that, and he decided that this was the path of least resistance.
So I don't think there is any chance that he will easily allow any more votes to go the way of putting more pressure. Unless the pressure gets so bad that he has no choice (read: Newsmax and FoxNews both start pressure campaigns).
This is not correct at all.
The GOP are masters of using parliamentary procedure to avoid votes that would pass that they don't want to pass, nominations and bills that they can't defend voting against.
This was a big issue in the Obama era where Mitch McConnell was determined to make Obama a one term president and decided to "obstruct, obstruct, obstruct" on things that historically never been obstructed, or at least not to the degree they were under Obama. For example, judicial appointments would get stuck in committee and never come up for a vote because the vote would pass. The most famous example of this was the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination that was never given a vote for 11 months, which was completely unprecedented.
The GOP has a narrow working majority in the House. The House, unlike the Senate, has the discharge petition process where if a majority of House representatives sign it, it forces a vote. All the Democratic reps signed on so it only took about 4 GOP reps for it to pass.
The lengths Mike Johnson went to to avoid this were unprecedented. 3 Democratic reps have died in office this Congressional session. Texas has consistently delayed a special election to avoid a replacement. Arizona had a special election. A Democrat won and Johnson avoided swearing her in for 7 weeks because she would be the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition.
4 GOP reps signed on and the White House and the Speaker both put incredible pressure on them to change their mind. It was a big part of why Trump fell out with Marjorie Taylor-Greene (she was one of the 4).
Why go to all this effort? Because Epstein was core foundational mythology for MAGA, reps couldn't defend voting against it and everybody knew it.
Johnson then tried to use a procedure to pass a vote called unaminous consent. Basically, rather than go through a roll call of up to 435 members, the House is given the option to object. If anyone does, it forces a vote. Why would he do this? Because there's no voting record for unanimous consent. It gives members cover to say they did or didn't vote for something. A roll call is an official record. Democrats objected and thus we got an official vote with only 1 "no" vote (Rep Clay Higgins).
The SEnate passed it with unanimous consent.
This was a veto proof majority. So if it was so popular, why just not schedule a vote to begin with?
And the obstruction continues. Johnson again put the House in recess 1 day before the 30 day deadline. Coincidence? I think not.
And now we're getting illegal redactions, not meeting the 30 day deadline and a drip feed of document releases because (IMHO) they can't find enough ethically-challenged lackeys to do doc review and redact the names and images of Trump and powerful people, many of whom are likely donors.
Johnson may well lose his position over this. The Attorney General has a non-zero chance of being impeached and removed over it.
There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. It's not going away and at no point was the Trump circle comfortable they could redact their way out of it. They are in full on panic mode right now.
There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
MAGA is a cult and every cult has a mission. MAGA's mission is to uncover the elite pedophile ring. A cult can only be sustained so long as the mission is incomplete. Epstein is core foundational mythology. It's going to be really difficult if not impossible to redirect this.
You'll notice that Mike Johnson once again has put Congress in recess to avoid it taking action, this time a day before the 30 day deadline. The last time was for 7 weeks to try and get Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition to avoid all this. Republicans know what a core problem this is.
So it's politically damaging with his base for Trump to pardon attorneys involved in obstructing this. But even if he weathers that, it doesn't solve his problem.
For one, any attorneys despite any pardon are subject to disciplinary proceedings (including disbarment) as well as possible state charges.
For another, this stuff is simply going to get out. Where previously a DoJ attorney would be committing career suicide if they got caught leaking things like grand jury testimony and confidential non-prosecution agreements, now they're obligated to. So they're not leakers anymore, they're whistleblowers who are following the law.
Congress will eventually have to come back into session and Pam Bondi may actually face a real risk of impeachment. If that happens, who is going to want this job when the key requirement is being such a loyalist that you have to break the law?
Congress will also seek compliaance from DoJ and hold investigations as well as drip feed their own documents from,say, the House Oversight Committee.
And in the wings we still have Ghislaine Maxwell who is clearly operating under an implicit understanding that she will get a pardon or, more likely, a commutation. Her move to a lower security prison that isn't eligible for her type of offenses was (IMHO) clearly a move to buy her continued silence until it became politically possible to free her. I don't think that's ever going to be possible other than maybe a lame duck pardon when leaving office.
This story is only getting bigger.
> My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
> So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts,
Political redaction in this release under the Epstein Transparency Act is an overt, illegal act.
Does that reconfigure your estimation of whether DoJ attorneys that aren't the Trump inner-circle loyalists installed in leadership roles might engage in resistance against (or at least fail to point out methodological flaws in the inplmentation of) it?
The 'resistance' was not releasing them during the last administration.
I tried to reproduce this - turns out the affected files weren't in the data sets recently released, but other files on the DOJ site (now taken down).
I guess the big take-away is scrape everything ASAP when it comes out. I haven't found any meaningful differences yet, but file hashes are different in the published data set zip files available today versus when Archive.org took a snapshot a few days ago.
I did write a bit of a tool which will detect and log and dump the text of affected PDF's, since redacting via drawing black boxes as well as using dark-colored highlights are both programmatically detectable. Pretty trivial to do so. Happy Holidays for anyone else who has the day off!
I swear the top comment on every popular post is always about semantics or nitpicking and is very rarely about anything in the article itself.
As nitpicks go ( public misundersatnding based on word selection by summarizing party ), this one is valid.
Ah, you new 'round these parts? It's unfashionable to speak directly--we must fragment, hypothesize, add complexity and nuance rather than simply leave someone's slightly vague statement uncorrected. -_-
HN rewards "technical discussion" in controversial threads, even when it's not salient or intellectually gratifying. Touching on the political implications is enough to split opinion and guarantee your place towards the middle/bottom of the thread.
This doesn't seem to be the case here. Which comment is showing up top for you?
The comment by Arch-TK is currently the top for me.
Interesting. RajT88 20 minute old post is top on my end.
For me, the top comment is currently cmarschner's day-old comment enumerating a bunch of other examples of botched redaction
I noticed my most recent nitpick comment got a significant number of upvotes. I spent some time today wondering if HN needed a way to indicate something is a nitpick and cause the votes on it to carry less weight in the sorting. Because if the nitpick is valid I don't think downvotes are appropriate since people might end up seeing it and having misconceptions corrected, but it also shouldn't detract from discussions on the meat of the post.
Of course I'm probably the odd one out, wanting to apply that modifier to my own nitpick comments, so that idea probably wouldn't end up being very useful in general.
(There is also some irony in me commenting on your comment here where it's completely unrelated to the actual post...)
You'll find that in a community full of pragmatic pedants.
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Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack.
Please change the title.
If I open your laptop and guess your password then that counts as hacking you in both legal and security terms
You don't need to do some sophisticated thing for it to be considered hacking
I’m not an attorney or anything, but the relevant federal statute is explicitly about unauthorized access of computer systems (18 USC 1030).
Opening someone else’s laptop and guessing the password would absolutely fall under that definition, but I think it’s very much questionable if poking around a document that you have legitimately obtained would do so.
If someone sends me a document with text in it that they meant to remove but didn't and then I read that text, I haven't hacked anything they're just incompetent.
Hacking is unauthorised use of a system. Reading a document that was not adequately redacted can hardly be considered hacking.
Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime?
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.
Precisely. If someone wants me to sign a contract on acceptable use of resources (like an agreement not to reverse engineer their software) they send me then that's another thing.
Absent that excluding other default protections like copyright, what I do with it should fall under the assumption of "basically anything".
If this were prior to 2021, I would say the CFAA could be violated so long as the property owner's _intentions_ were for that information to only be accessible to certain users. But I think the CFAA has been sufficiently reduced in scope after Van Buren v United States [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States
Hacking is not just authorised use of a system. Hacking and hacking techniques can apply to systems you fully own or systems which you are authorised to hack. Hacking is using something in a way that the designer didn’t anticipate or intend on.
Adobe designed pdf to behave this way. Placing layers over text doesn’t remove the text from the file. They have a specific redaction feature for that purpose.
you telling me when I stick my pen up my nose I’m hacking it?
I would call that a hack, not a good one though.
If you were blind would a screen reader read the documents? Thats not a hack.
If your intent was to circumvent the redactions it would be
Placing a black box on the text isn’t a redaction any more than placing a sticky note would be. No reasonable person can expect a sticky note to permanently prevent readers from seeing text and no reasonable person can expect a black overlay box in pdf to prevent reading text because this is literally a fundamental feature of pdfs as a layer format file
But copying and pasting text of publicly released documents is not illegal. Accessing someone’s computer is illegal. While maybe it could fall under the umbrella of hacking in some general way, articles, and especially titles, should be more precise.
That actually is illegal in some circumstances, for example if the document is protected by copyright.
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You guessing my password is not the same as a know and expected behavior of a program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. PDF is a format known to have layers. Lawyers are trained on day one not to make this mistake. (I am a recovering lawyer). This is either incompetence or deliberate disclosure.
I guess but if you write something down real small and I squint at it is that still hacking?
Yes, this is the digital equivalent of sticking a blank Post-it over text and calling it “redacted”. Mind-boggling that the same mistake has been made over and over again.
Hacking is any use of a technology in a way that it wasn’t intended. The redaction is so stupid as to almost appear intentional, so maybe you’re right, this isn’t hacking because maybe the information was intended to be discovered.
Also had this first thought, but then a hack could just be a way around a limit/lack of authorization, doesn't have to be unknown/sophisticated, so copy of black boxes fits
> limit/lack of authorization
By serving up the PDF file I am being authorized to receive, view, process, etc etc the entire contents. Not just some limited subset. If I wasn't authorized to receive some portion of the file then that needed to be withheld to begin with.
That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
For starts, wouldn't it be kind of ironic to set up limits and authorization in a context that is about making some content available to the public?
I'd say any technical or legal restrictions or possible means to enforce DRM ought to be disabled or absent from the media format used when disseminating content that must be disclosed.
Censorship (of necessary) should purge the data entirely,ie: replace by ###
That's not true, you can mistakenly receive data you're not authorized to have (might even be criminal to have!)
> That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
That's not the sum total of hacks, if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack. Copy& paste of black boxes is similarly a hack around content protection
> To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
To put it even simpler, this conversation is not about you and your responsibility, but about the different meanings of the word "hack "
> you can mistakenly receive data you're not authorized to have (might even be criminal to have!)
Not the layman, at least to the best of my knowledge.
Yes, certain licensed professionals can be subject to legal obligations in very specific situations. But in general, if you screw up and mail something to me (electronic or otherwise) then that is on you. I am not responsible for your actions.
> if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack
Sure, I'll agree that the software to break the DRM qualifies as a hack (in the technical work sense). It also might (or might not) rise to the level of "lack of legal authorization". I don't think it should, but the state of laws surrounding DRM make it clear that one probably wouldn't go in my favor.
However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization as it relates to black box redaction and similar fatally flawed approaches that leave the plain text data directly accessible (and thus my access plainly facilitated by the sender, if inadvertently).
> this conversation is not about ...
You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.
That said, while we're on the topic I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context. Illegal access versus clever but otherwise mundane bit of code (no laws violated). You seem to be failing to clearly differentiate.
> Not the layman, at least to the best of my knowledge.
Are you not aware of content that is criminal to possess? Like CP is the most common example.
> I am not responsible for your actions.
I've already addressed this confusion of yours - this is NOT about your responsibility for someone else's actions, but about your own actions and whether they constitute a "hack".
> You are the only one using the term "hack" here. Please note that I had responded to your "limit/lack of authorization" phrasing. Nothing more.
Please open a dictionary for the word hack to understand this conversation! And note the word "authorization" in the definition.
> However that isn't what (I understood) us to be talking about - ie legal authorization
Understandably you're confused, the legal limit is your own making, authorization is way broader than that.
> I'll note the ambiguity of the term "hack" in this context
Exactly!!! Keep looking into the definition to resolve the ambiguity!
> You seem to be failing to clearly differentiate
No, your differentiation is wrong
You realize we just went from (the legal equivalent of) "I accidentally mailed you my tax return" to "I accidentally mailed you a bomb". Like yeah, it remains illegal to retain possession of said bomb irrespective of the fact that someone intentionally sent it. That is ... not at all surprising?
Beyond that you're clearly just trolling at this point, going to great lengths to manufacture an argument about a term that I never used to begin with. "Lack of authorization" has a clear legal meaning whereas "hack" does not.
> That is ... not at all surprising?
For the 3rd time, this conversation is not about YOU and not about what surprises you!
> "Lack of authorization" has a clear legal meaning whereas "hack" does not.
No, you've made up this limit to some "legal meaning" (also wrong here, large variety there as well but wouldn't want to endulge you further). Again, open up a dictionary on "hack", then follow the definition of "authorization" from there, if you only find "legal" in there, get a better dictionary, journalists / commenters are usually not lawyers, so they wouldn't accept your artificial legal limits on meaning!
> Beyond that you're clearly just trolling at this point
I think this is the greatest proof of the simultaneous validity of two different arguments. Disclaimer, I'm assuming (I think fairly) that you're in good faith.
The funny thing is, to me, the other commenter's arguments are quite clear/obvious to me and make sense. Not that your points are wrong - but... I'm 99% sure the other person isn't trolling in the slightest. Y'all are just talking across each other.
> Y'all are just talking across each other.
Initially, perhaps. However note that my attempts to clarify exactly that are repeatedly followed by misconstruing my position. It's not so much that we disagree as that the supposed disagreement is about things I never said. The repeated failure to respond to what was actually said coupled with the combative tone is pretty much the definition of trolling. Of course that term does assume intent to an extent - if he's just having a bad day I'm not sure that technically qualifies. The end result is the same though.
BTW if you feel I've missed some insightful point of his do please elaborate.
>Please change the title.
HN discourages editorializing headlines.
While I wouldn't call it a "hack," common usage even here on HN isn't limited to "to gain illegal access to (a computer network, system, etc.)" [0]
[0] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hack
Not the only thing hack means now, or the most common usage anymore. See "life hack" - it means unexpected technique.
But this isn’t an unexpected technique it’s literally the core design of the pdf format. It’s a layered format that preserves the layers on any machine. Adobe has a redaction feature to overcome the default behavior that each layer can be accessed even if there is a top layer in front.
Ok
It's also the meaning used in the title of this very Web site.
It's being "undone with the lamest hack known to mankind."
Still technically a hack.
It’s not a hack. It’s known, expected behavior of the program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. Color filled boxes is not it.
A dictionary definition: "use a computer to gain unauthorized access to data in a system."
This isn't about knowledge or expectations. They didn't use colored boxes to jazz up the presentation, they _intended_ to prevent you from reading it, and now you can, with this, again incredibly _lame_ almost meaningless even-my-five-year-old-could-do this "hack."
And the title should briefly describe the “hack” as well
A mafia state puts loyalists on top and can't produce anything ( smart people leave) and smart people who think for their own can't be promoted.
That's also why a mafia extorts and doesn't run complex businesses in general.
Perhaps the US can survive this administration. But somewhere down the line it will become broken.
The non-complex mafia businesses is moot since the 50ies already. They run Vegas, most of big sports leagues, politics, secret services and restaurant chains. Everything which can effectively wash money.
Or they just slap their brand on something and call themselves a genius
Rather than bemoaning the ignorance of those who can’t grasp that the text still exists under black rectangles, we should thank our lucky stars that this method of deredacting still works, well over a decade after the first time I heard of it.
May it continue to work in the decades to come!
Man if you can do this should keep it secret until they release more bad redactions...
It's quite funny really. Apparently you just cut and paste the text into Word. They just had the pdf put black rectangles on top.
Why into Word specifically?
The average office worker has it on their computer, illustrating how commonplace unredacting could be. Any text tool will work, even some designed to detect bad redactions in PDFs via drag and drop (now specifically trained on these known bad redactions). https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray
You have a better editor?
ed is the standard Unix text editor.
ed is a line editor
vi is also an editor, but sadly not the standard one, and since standard is king: ed it is.
Why reveal the trick before all the papers have been released?
Someone wanted to make sure to be the first?
IKR?!
I don't think there is a grand conspiracy here. Any schmoe can download these files, select with their mouse, and copy paste into a document.
Clout. Monetization.
Apart from the technological and procedural question, I would love to learn why the DOJ found it important to protect Indyke. He was Epstein's lawyer, and now we learn that he was personally involved. He is not a Washington person. We expected there to be politically motivated protection of certain people, but is the DOJ just going to blanket protect anybody in the docs?
Indyke works for other powerful people, runs in MAGA circles.
Two things come to mind:
* Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1]
* He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented.
[1] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_doj-f...
> It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans.
Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.
Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing).
It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.
And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
The goal (at least it appears this way to me) is less about having any sort of airtight defense or actually successfully protecting people in the docs so much as giving plausible deniability for the talking heads that support the administration to push as truth. If it’s murky, sloppy, or otherwise unclear, then “no one wins” and “no one is right,” so the event can be easily dismissed.
You can open up any popular conservative forum/watch any mainstream conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes who cares?” Then some deflection about Bill Clinton, making sure to bring up the hot tub photo.
The reason it hasn’t gone away though, despite this often being a very effective approach, is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. It made a lot of people a lot of money and catapulted more than a handful of political careers. Now they have the means to be transparent and they can’t make an acceptable excuse not to be since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
I think almost all the discussions about Epstein are incredibly crass and gross. It’s not about the victims or justice, it’s about politics. I think there are obviously legitimate reasons to redact portions because we don’t want to ruin more lives (not that this was a real good faith attempt at that). But there is still a small part of me that can’t help but enjoy watching the Trump administration simmer in the pot they so clearly made for themselves over the last five years.
Gotta be honest, I think this has just been incompetence from top to bottom. But I also think this is a fracture in the trump coalition. It may be that conservative media is trying to move on from Trump which is why the "this is a nothing burger" defense hasn't been deployed as much.
It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.
Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"
These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".
This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".
Yeah to be clear I don’t think they deliberately screwed up, I think they just don’t care because they don’t need it to be perfect. I think you’re right that at its core this is incompetence
He was Epstein’s lawyer, he almost certainly has the dirt on anyone the DoJ wants to protect, and may be the kind of person that would be inclined to burn whoever DoJ was protecting if he wasn't getting treatment at least as favorable.
..."Indyke, an attorney who represented Epstein for decades, has not been criminally indicted by federal authorities. He was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate."...
From the Guardian UK https://archive.md/lO08a
From TFA:
> [Indyke] was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate.
So I don't know about "not a Washington person", but clearly connections exist to the current administration.
All you have to do is work for a MAGA person or MAGA billionaire donor for them to protect you.
He was probably considered as a "victim" of having his crimes exposed...
He’s one of the executors of Epstein’s will. Better not piss him off.
Not complicated, he represented Trump.
Let's nobody make any fuss about this yet, lest they wise up before releasing the rest of the docs this way too!
"hacks".
This is like putting a post-it on a printed document and circulating it as "redacted" -- and calling anyone who lifted the post-it a criminal/thief.
Sounds like a different take on this Onion headline: https://theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-black-highl...
Stupid question: why is the government even allowed to redact stuff? Isn’t the government keeping secrets from the people totally antithetical to democracy?
It's not the government, it's the department of justice. To name two: protection of witnesses, protection of state secrets ("the people" is not a person who can keep secrets).
Right, I’m aware of the excuses the government uses to keep secrets.
But on principle, what right does the government have to keep secrets from its own people? I don’t believe we had that button at the founding, it was added somewhere along the way. I’m asking what is the justification for this, and whether in the grand scheme of things that outweighs the principle of the government not being a separate entity from the people.
There are multiple ways to approach witness protection. For example if we have a problem with witnesses being harmed we could make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense. We can probably think of other options besides the government being allowed to keep secrets from its own people.
>I don’t believe we had that button at the founding
Every government everywhere has and has always had state secrets e.g. names of spies.
>make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense.
People still commit capital offenses. This just makes it much easier to get to that witness and get away. We also know from empirical evidence that the death penalty is not useful for deterring crime.
Witness protection is also getting to start over without everyone in your neighborhood knowing you were a criminal. It's part of the deal.
No you are confused. People commit capital offenses for one of two reasons: either because they lack impulse control, or because they don’t think they will be caught.
If we fix the second one, we only have the first group. We can fix the second group, and the remaining first group, while it does apply to capital offenses in general, does not apply to violence against witnesses.
It seems like killing witnesses (after the fact, since witness protection does not intervene during the initial crime being witnessed to protect the witness mere moments after their witnessing) actually requires impulse control, because to do it you need to a) anticipate an abstract threat b) formulate a plan in advance c) carry out the plan. This is why it is typically executed in organized crime by bosses, and not by people engaging in random violence.
I’m not saying no one carries out capital offenses, I’m just saying that no one engages in witness directed violence due to lack of impulse control, they do it because they don’t think they will be caught, and more thorough rules enforcement does address that.
On witness protection making one’s criminal record secret. Okay? One can easily be opposed to that practice. How about we don’t make deals to hide relevant safety information from the public? It seems pretty easy to oppose. Just because the government does it, doesn’t mean it is a good reason. Are you defending the reason, or just stating what is? If you are just stating what is, I don’t see how that’s relevant.
The power/right came from national security legislation written and enacted by elected officials. Because we have a government that works by proxy, it means that the leaders we elect are effectively supposed to represent the people they serve (that's the ideal. Obviously we've fallen WAY short of that).
Pragmatically, I think it's easy to recognize that the government should be allowed to have some secrets from the public. I think the clearest and most extreme example is the details of our nuclear armaments.
But the question of where the line is is a tricky one. IMO, we definitely allow the government far more secrets than it should have.
Should the military publish plans before the battle? Should witness protection programs be public record?
Is there an enemy invader actively performing military operations inside the country? In that case, I believe it’s typical for a nation to suspend its normal procedures, we don’t need our principle to hold in case of active invasion.
Otherwise, just don’t do war. It’s pretty simple. Especially when you have zero need for land.
Witness protection is a compensation for an inadequate and overly soft criminal justice system. If the person calling the hit fully expected to die by hanging for calling the hit, he would not call the hit.
Is the Department of Justice not a part of the government?
It’s not the body which decides whether something is secret. It reactively redacts secrets and its own OIG is empowered to realign that logic.
As of February, it’s sensible to ask if there’s an OIG.
It's up to us to keep the government accountable. Democracy does if we don't put pressure on the government and participate actively in politics.
To protect innocent people for examples, or to not reveal some secrets.
Some of these don't feel like they fall into those. For example in [1], on page 41, I can't imagine how that redaction fits either.
1: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1HFqpFLOJgYLiAgjT...
Because some are allegations without proof, and some are names of people who are victims. They have a right to privacy
It's not correct that there is a legal duty to redact names of people who might be accused of wrongdoing, but where the allegations haven't been proved.
The only two reasons that redactions are allowed are a) to protect the privacy of victims and b) to protect the integrity on ongoing investigations.
The TL;DR:
- To protect victims
- Redact people that are currently under investigation
But here they are clearly blacking out potential co-conspirators, without them being under investigation or having been charged with anything.
Seems like they are just backing out powerful people not to embarrass or implicate them.
Because the redaction was only supposed to protect the victims.
Competence and possibility of malicious compliance are interesting questions, but I think the more appropriate question is if DoJ will be sued for violating the law by redacting unrelated content?
Print on paper. Physically cut out the pieces you want to send to remove. Scan.
Still suspect that someone can undo this from data may have been accidentally steaganographed across non-deleted parts of the image.
I think even after printing and scanning there could still be jpg artfacts from the original (e.g. if you scan lossless).
However, I wonder whether heavily compressing the redacted image would help remove any unwanted artefacts. But the best solution is probably to render the original file from scratch, without compression, before redacting the image.
Microdots may leak your identity this way (though I guess a really high resolution scan is needed for that)
It's no problem if they leak the fact that an FBI office printer was used to print the documents the FBI released.
Not sure but that might actually add your printer's unique dots to the scanned image.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
You can also make guesses from font/typeface kerning if it's not from a typewriter.
This has to be on purpose, right?
Redacting documents is hard for people who didn't learn how to properly do it, and don't have the right tools. But for courts, the FBI or the DOJ this shouldn't apply. They know how to do it right.
I can only imagine, that some people didn't redact the documents properly on purpose. Plausible deniability.
How it’s done from technical point?
Layers.
PDF is an absurdly complex file format. It's part of the reason there is no single "good" PDF reader, just a lot of mediocre PDF readers that are all terrible in their own way. Which is a topic for another day.
There are several ways to remove data in a PDF:
- Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
- Then you have the computer illiterate, who think changing the foreground and background color to black is good enough anyway.
This seems highly misleading.
> - Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
Compared to other formats this is actually relatively easy in a PDF since the way the text drawing operators work they don't influence the state for arbitrary other content. A lot of positioning in a PDF is absolute (or relative to an explicitly defined matrix which has hardcoded values). Usually this makes editing a PDF harder (since when changing text the related text does not adapt automatically), but when removing data it makes it much easier since you can mostly just delete it without affecting anything else. (There are exceptions for text immediately after the removed data, but that's limited and relatively easy to control.)
> - Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement.
That's actually rather tricky in PDFs since they usually contain embedded subset fonts and these usually do not have "🮋" as part of the subset. Also doing this would break the layout since "🮋" has a different width than most letters in a typical font, so it would not lead to less formatting issues than the previous option. Unless the "🮋" is stretched for each letter to have the same dimensions, but then the stretched characters allow to recover the text.
> The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
PDF does not have a concept of a background color. If it looks like a background color in PDF, you have a rectangle drawn in one color and something in the foreground color in front of it. What you usually see in badly redacted PDF files is exactly this, but in opposite color: Someone just draws a black box on top of the characters. You could argue that this is smarter since it would still work even if someone would chnage colors, but of course, PDF is a vector format. If you just add a rectangle, someone else can remove it again. (And also copy & paste doesn't care about your rectangle)
>- Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that.
>- Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions.
You're making it sound way harder than it is, when both adobe acrobat and the built-in preview app on mac can both competently redact documents. I'm not aware of instances of either (or any other purpose-made redaction tools) failing. I wouldn't homebrew a python script to do my redaction either, but that doesn't mean doing redactions properly in some insurmountable task for some intern.
I would not trust either tool to adequately redact documents, though I'm sure it works under normal levels of scrutiny.
The most reliable way is to just screenshot the document or print and scan it, effectively burning it down and recreating it in a new format that has no concept of the past. This works across basically all formats, too, and against all tools.
> Then you have the computer illiterate, who think changing the foreground and background color to black is good enough anyway
To be fair, this works if you print out those copies and then re-scan them.
Thanks for this. Really quells the urge I get every so often to just code my own PDF editor, because they all suck and certainly it couldn't be THAT hard. Such hubris!
Heh, have at it, here's the full spec: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/assets/5b...
Should take... a weekend tops? ;) PDF is crazy and scary
> PDF includes eight basic types of objects: Boolean values, Integer and Real numbers, Strings, Names, Arrays, Dictionaries, Streams, and the null object
Wait, this is more complete than SOAP. It may be a good idea to redo the IPC protocol with a different serialization format!
Well, it's a descendant of Postscript (much like JSON is a descendant of Javascript, loosely)
Society would probably never recover if we started implementing RPC-in-Postscript though.
7.5.6 "Incremental updates" from the specification is an interesting section too, speaking about accessing data people didn't think to remove from PDF files properly.
We will be able to say that AGI has arrived when we can hand that spec off to a model and tell it to build an Acrobat clone.
We will be able to say that AGI has arrived when the AI hands it back and says "no".
Or goes on strike.
Don't stop yourself before getting started. I believe in you - maybe you could write the one editor that would actually work!
Not kidding - it's a ~~~billion dollar market haha
Make an MVP/Show HN :-)
I did a bunch of work creating pdfs using a low-level API, object goes here stuff.
As far as I understand it, at its core, pdf is just a stream of instructions that is continually modifying the document. You can insert a thousand objects before you start the next word in a paragraph. And this is just the most basic stuff. Anything on a page can be anywhere in the stream. I don't know if you can go back and edit previous pages, you might have a shot at least trying to understand one page at a time.
Did you know you can have embedded XML in PDFs? You can have a paper form with all the data filled in and include an XML version of that for any computer systems that would like an easier way to read it.
The blog post about adding colour gradients to Typst dives into some of the weirdness of the format. https://typst.app/blog/2023/color-gradients
Bravo to you for recognising the load-bearing 'just' before you threw it around :)
qpdf has a redaction option. It’s routinely used to anonymize medical records for studies.
I remember reading the recommendation for journalists to redact documents is to black them out in the digital version, print it out, and re-scan it. Anything else has too many potential ways by which it might be possible to smuggle data.
Even that might leak to length attacks: one reasonable plaintext would lead to black bars of 1135 px, another to 1138 px, and with enough redactions you can converge on what the plaintext might be.
The only safe way for journalists is to paraphrase what the document said and to say "an unnamed source claims that ..." and to guarantee with your reputation, and the reputation of your publisher, that you are being faithful to what the original source said. For even better results, combine multiple sources.
Unfortunately paraphrasing things and taking editorial responsibility have both been deprecated in favour of rereleasing press releases in the house style, so it's difficult to get the actual journalism these days.
You can use constant /variable length replacement to avoid length leaks?
Mistaking redaction tool (replaces data with black square) and black highlighter (adds black square as another layer). If people doing redactions are computer-illiterate, they won't see the difference.
They drew black boxes over the text. The text is still underneath. On OCR'd scanned documents, the text you'd copy is actually stored in metadata and just linked by position to the image.
Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text.
It's a bizarre oversight.
PDF is less like an image, and more like a web page where elements can be stacked on top of each other. You can visually obscure things by sticking a black rectangle over the top, but anyone who inspects inside the pdf can remove it or see the text in the source.
There would also be a mix of text documents, and image scans. The way to censor each is different.
Perfectly censoring documents, particularly digital ones is actually surprisingly difficult.
> Perfectly censoring documents, particularly digital ones is actually surprisingly difficult.
But the difficult part is easily repeatable once it's figured out, which is why it surprises me that it's not built into Acrobat as a tool already.
In fact it is already built into Acrobat: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/protect-documents/re...
It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks.
Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function.
Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted.
Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who discovered the information, rather than on the people were put in charge of handling the redaction and screwed it up.
The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the vein of the Arthur C Clarke quote of: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").
To the journalist, it looks like "hackers at work" because the result looks like magic. Therefore their editor attaching "hacks" to the title for additional clickbait as well.
To us technical people, who understand the concept of layers in digital editing, it is no big deal at all (and is not surprising that some percentage of the PDF's have been processed this way).
I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here.
It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this…
You can find out the technical details in one quick search.
How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.
You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article.
Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.
But there is a more-powerful combo we’re beginning to see: journalists can take a story and prompt their way into a list of missing perspectives. The Lindbergh baby, for example.
You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too
> You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case.
We're already seeing this happen.
The journalist should have used the LLM to explain how this wasn’t a hack but a common mistake made by untrained workers.
And the lawyers should have used an LLM to perform a first pass of the redactions and methods of redaction.
Going forward the full stack of perpetrators, unindicted coconspirators, lawyers, judges, legislators, journalists, editors, fact checkers, ... it'll all be LLM all the way down such that nothing will be trustable save something akin to Stephenson's gargoyles and Flock cameras for which people will conduct spectacles to shape the salience landscape.
Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.
Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.
At the end of the day, we the audience reward the behavior unfortunately
Um - and not just journalists.
Most “bullshit jobs” are already being replaced. The era of bullshit jobs is coming to an end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
I wish it was true. From the bullshit jobs in the book, I can only see the box tickers being replaced. The flunkies, goons, task masters, and duct tapers will probably continue to exist.
Als unless we come up with something like UBI or a dramatic rethinking of how capitalism works in our society there will probably be __more__ bullshit jobs.
Gell Mann Amnesia ftw
My wife was a reporter with a top tier news agency in DC and I was shocked how they divvied up topics.
At best, it was "you're good with computers, go report on this hearing on cybersecurity" but more commonly, it was "who has this morning open? You do? Great. Go cover this 9am on the Israel-Palestine negotiations and what the implications are. We'll do a segment in the 11am hour."
It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age.
It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way.
They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs.
Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not enough money in what's left of that industry to do that anymore.
I agree they have no understanding of math, science or technology. But I disagree with your assessment of motivations to get "better paying jobs", most people who went into journalism I knew were in brownstones right out of college. They didn't need the money, they inherited it, it was the lifestyle they were after.. that's why we get the journalism we do..
^ This.
They're not after money. They're motivated by prestige which CAN be money (ew, tacky) but is actually measured by access to key figures, your name being in the right places with the right people, and the cocktail party circuit.
My wife was a reporter in DC and she was at the White House Correspondents Dinner and everything. Living in those circles is surreal. The namedropping is a whole other level. When I realized I was doing it too (with some legit impressive names at the time), I gtfo. I'd rather be evaluated by what I've done or can do vs who I know or knows me.
Yeah, I should have resisted speculating about the why, when the fact/assertion itself is the important part.
I think you have the source of the problem wrong. It's just rich kids who don't actually need the salary, and want to align to a point of view that gets them a contract to write a book, so they get invited to the right parties. They don't know anything, or care about anything.
Journalism school is "eye-wateringly" expensive:
> J-school attendees might get a benefit from their journalism degree, but it comes at an eye-watering cost. The price tag of the Columbia Journalism School, for instance, is $105,820 for a 10-month program, $147,418 for a 12-month program, or $108,464 per year for a two-year program. That’s a $216,928 graduate degree, on top of all the costs associated with gaining the undergraduate prerequisites. (Columbia, it seems important to say, is also the publisher of Columbia Journalism Review, the publication you’re now reading.)
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/do-we-need-j-schools.php
> It's people who are very good with words,
They are also not good with words.
State schools also offer journalism degrees.
And FWIW, in my very limited and anecdotal experience, the programs are inhabited by people who fully understand their employment and salary prospects, but believe in the work, and often have above-average family wealth to compensate for the gaps. They're good people, but they are not experts.
I don't think you have an understanding of job specialization.
I know some journalists. They are smart people. However, they are not experts in math, science, or technology. They are experts in journalism. This wasn't any different at any time in the past.
Haha. I was a journalist for many years. I went to UC Berkeley. I likely currently have a far better paying job than you and have invented technical concepts that founded the LLM.
Me thinks the fool speaks of himself.
If you had a better understanding of math and science, you'd know the difference between the concepts of "one" and "statistically meaningful".
It’s worth pointing out one contradiction to someone who passes such vast and foolish judgement.
It really isn't.
Obviously, "who becomes a journalist in this age" does not translate to "every person who is alive now who has ever been a journalist".
I'm not sure if your error lies in parsing colloquial English, or in basic statistics. Either way, I think you have fully illustrated the commenter's point.
Journalists are not reliably selected for, or demonstrative of, comprehension or accuracy.
This is dumb trying to call others dumb. This argument is not just inhumane it’s also wrong. The average of something assumed does not negate a real data point. If you did even bit of data science you’d know that. But just another HNer calling someone dumb while confidently wrong. And ironic calling others dumb because of it. So think on that.
Maybe Christmas just leaves the worst on HN … statistically.
A failure of reading comprehension, or a visceral reaction to a generalized statement that pertains to you personally, does not make one dumb.
Defending your mistakes doesn't either, but I can understand the confusion.
Happy holidays.
Again me thinks the fool speaks of himself.
(You can’t engagement logically technically or even correctly here and keep Spouting others are wrong. Think hard on how poorly you comprehension here is even when explained why you are Wrong.)
I'm struggling to find my error in this thread. Please quote my statement and your points of disagreement.
Continuous circling is tiresome troll. Just stop.
Points have been illustrated contradicting the statement. No points have been made supporting it.
Your argument boils down to “all x is bad is valid by default and all Ys that contradict are inherently ‘statistically invalid’”. Do you not get how horribly dumb your logic is?
By this logic I could state all HNErs posting on Christmas are idiots and wrong by default. This of course can’t by contradicted by any statement you make because you are just a data point of one and therefore invalid. Also the original point is supported with exactly 0 data points so in actuality data point of 1 > 0. So my guy. Jesus. Learn stats. Or anything.
Are we agreeing that neither of us can find my error in this thread?
>some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.
Journalists report, they don't analyze.
The error is consumers believing journalist news is anything but uninformed, hot take heresy; spun in the most sensationalistic way.
They are hired to get eyeballs for advertisers. Not to be accurate, thorough truthful, or unbiased.
To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
Some folks had to be taught on how folder structures work because they grew up with the appliance we called a "phone" as opposed to a real computer that also happened to be known as a "phone".
I can assure you that plenty of people who were using computers before smartphones, and who have used them every day at work for decades, also do not grasp what we could consider the very basics of file management.
I think.. the way to understand it is: levels. After all, files as the abstractions work with are not exactly there in the form of files in a cabinet. In a sense, even names are made made up fiction, BUT.. a helpful one.
> To us, it's a life skill. To a non-technical person, it's black magic.
I’m sorry, but “this text is black on black background; the actual letters are still there” isn’t “black magic” unless someone is being deliberately obtuse.
So I don't know your specialty, but I'm going to make a wild guess and assume that it isn't stage magic.
State magicians have a whole range of different ways to make something seem like it's levitating, or to apparently get a signed playing card inside a fruit that they get someone in the audience to cut open to reveal.
To a magician, these things are cute, not mysterious.
To the general public… a significant percentage have problems with paged results and scroll bars. Including my dad, who developed military IFF simulation software before he retired, and then spent several years of retirement using Google before realising it gave more than three results at a time.
Would he, with experience working with the military, have made this soecific mistake about redaction? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the level of ignorance was well within his range. (I'm not better, it's just my ignorance is e.g. setting fire to resistors).
*Our* "common sense" isn't universal.
Your analogy fails because the purpose of stage magic is concealing what’s going on. That’s not what happened here. Someone just made a really stupid mistake that even non-technical folks can accidentally discover.
There are undoubtedly some people who would be fooled by this, but you don’t have to be technical in order to not be one of them.
> the purpose of stage magic is concealing what’s going on. That’s not what happened here
That's *literally* what "redaction" is.
These people are bad at magic, were told to do magic, fooled only themselves and other people who are also bad at magic.
Please explain to me, in detail, without using an LLM how expert manifolds work.
I’m guessing to you, it is also black magic.
Most journalists are ex. English majors (or some other non-technical degree). I would not expect any (even the supposed tech. journalists) to understand the technology they report upon to the level that us here on HN understand that same technology.
Their job is to write coherent articles that gather views, not truly understand what it is they are writing about. That's why the Gell-Mann Amnesia [1] aspect so often crops up for any technical article (hint, it also crops up for every article, but we don't recognize the mistakes the journalist makes in the articles where we don't have the underlying knowledge to recognize the mistakes).
[1] https://www.epsilontheory.com/gell-mann-amnesia/
I’m my experience most posters on HN are don’t under technology either. So they both don’t understand people or technology putting them two steps behind a journalist.
You don't need to defend your entire field.
Journalists are people, like everyone else, and most people are bad at their jobs.
Plus, what even is the job? For most journalists out there, it's just writing something that draws ad impressions and clicks.
The percentage of journalists that work for outlets where the content itself is the cash source is very small (NYTimes, probably a bunch of other paid subscriptions). And even the NYTimes isn't above clickbait.
This is the must up your own ass HN comment I’ve ever seen.
“People are People and therefore dumber than HN tech master race”
It's not a hard technical concept to grasp that placing a stick-it onto some thing doesn't make the thing behind it disappear.
No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view.
When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.
This. Similar issue if you introduce someone to how you can "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website. They're like "omg haxors!"
True story: one time I used that technique to ask for a higher credit card limit than the options the website presented. Interestingly enough, they handled it gracefully by sending me a rejection for a higher amount and an acceptance for the maximum offered amount (the one I edited). And I didn't get arrested for hacking!
Using view-source to accomplish something could be considered hacking in the old school MIT sense* of curious exploration of some place or thing for clever purposes.
*: disclaimer, I didn't attend MIT, but did hang out with greybeards on 90s IRC
> "view source" and then edit (your view of) a website.
Yes, but you see it says "view source" not "edit page live". Don't really see why it wouldn't be "omg" for them.
I have helped someone get an executive job at a Fortune 500 company... by teaching them how to use the dev tools and edit the DOM to replace text and images.
They had been asked for an assignment as part of the interview process, where they were supposed to make suggestions regarding the company's offers. They showed up on the (MS teams) interview having revamped what looked like the live website (www. official website was visible in the browser bar).
The interviewers gave them the job pretty much on the spot, but did timidly ask at the end "do you mind putting it back though, for now?", which we still laugh about 5 years later
The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.
I seriously doubt the journalist doesn’t understand exactly how this “hack” worked too. Right in the first paragraph, “simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.”
A lot of people in the thread here are calling them a non-technical English major who doesn’t understand the technology. Word processors also happen to be the tools of their trade, I am sure they understand features of Word better than most of the computer science majors in this thread…
Agreed - not sure why so many are being so critical here. They probably didn't write the title and for better or worse "hack" has now become a common word casually used by many to mean "workflow trick" or similar.
As far as creating a click bait title, yep, the editor knows what they are doing, and most likely picked the word for the click bait factor.
But I'd also bet the editors technical knowledge of how this "revelation" of the hidden material really works is low enough that it also appears to be magic to them as well. So they likely think it is a 'hack' as well.
> The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge ...
You are supposing. The article doesn't read like that at all. Your post smells of exceptional tech elitism.
Typical quality of The Guardian unfortunately. Don't read their energy reporting if you're at all literate about any of those topics. Any time they do a story on fusion I just about have an embolism.
I also like to think this was maybe done as a form of malicious compliance. Someone inside the agency was tasked with redacting this, and found a way to sneak the information through but still getting it passed by their supervisors, so that the information got out.
It reminds me of the 2008 Underhanded C code contest. The subject was exactly this.
https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html
And the winner's solution is incredibly simple and clever.
To me this is the only explanation that makes sense. However wouldn’t they risk repercussions when this is inevitably found out? I assume they have records who redacted which documents
> I assume they have records who redacted which documents
(1) Considering it was a rush job (2) general ineptness of this administration and (3) the management wouldn't have defined the explicit job description ("completely black out, not use black highlighter"), the likeliness that there is any evidence that this was intentionally malicious is pretty low.
Some peopledo things acknowledging that there may be backlash for an action when they feel it's the right thing to do.
Snowden being an extreme example, I feel really sorry for what happened to him but he really did the right thing.
This happens too regularly across both minor and major issues for me to think this is entirely redactors intentionally messing up. It's just a lot of people being pulled on to the job and not all of them are competent. Maybe some of it is intentional but not all of it I'm certain.
Out of a thousand people? Where they probably have an email from a PHB that says something like "put a black box over all references to <this list of things?"?
Yes they may get fired, but it will be difficult to prove intent and very easy to claim incompetence.
So I don’t think there will be jail time if that’s what you’re referring to.
The mal-redacted file actually points to a crime itself of redacting things it shouldn't have.
Or, if there is indeed an ongoing investigation on those two, it could be leaking that fact, right?
Not in this case, this is just a cover for the guilty because this shows that Epsteins Estate also works for Trump. The rot runs deep. There is no investigation, that is the point.
Furthermore, this happens so often, so frequently, in so many high profile cases that even my 80 year old mother knows this "secret hack to unredact a pdf".
If you are CIA / FBI / Court / Lawyer or professional full time redactor of documents you should know that the highlighter doesn't delete the text underneath it.
I think the more likely cause was precisely that it wasn't a technical professional/lawyer/writer doing the redacting, but someone in the administration or close to it that has no idea how to redact information correctly.
You’re absolutely correct but I think your comment also highlights something important: we don’t have a good word to represent what it is
Unfortunately “hack” became a catch all word long ago. Just look at “life hacks”.
They failed to redact data. That's it. People just read the files afterwards, only formatting was wierd.
If you unlock a lock, that's still a lock.
Also, in light of everything that is happening, is incredible that the top comment on this thread is about some minor semantic definitions.
Yeah but there was no lock; somebody put a box around the doorknob without anything holding it there, and somebody removed the box and opened the door.
There's nothing else to say about this. Also, your comment is nested even deeper within the same semantic squabbling, so it's odd that you think that it's a waste of time in light of more important things that you are also not talking about.
And it is still a lock if it was just hanging there and not actually locked as in this case.
They're likely viewing the electronic documents by analogy to photocopies with blacked out sections where there is nothing to distinguish the text from the redacting marks and nothing you can project out. They don't know the structure of the file format and how information in it is encoded or rendered, or even that there is a distinction between encoding and rendering.
(A better analogy might be the original physical document with redaction marks. If the text is printed using a laser printer or a type writer, and the marker used for redaction uses some other kind of ink - let's say one that doesn't dissolve the text's ink or toner in any way - then you can in principle distinguish between the two and thus recover visibility of the text.)
To complicated, the people doing the redacting pasted digital stickers ontop of the text, people are just removing the stickers.
File formats are complicated. The only reliable way to redact is to reduce that complication to one which humans can manage. This is even true for software that is written by humans.
Plain text and flat images are my preferred formats for things which must be redacted. Images require a slight bit of special care, as the example in the underhanded C contest highlights, but it's possible to enforce visible redaction and transcription steps that destroy hidden information.
I think that doesn’t do the scenario justice. They tried to redact and did so in a way that looks visibly redacted (in screenshots many have seen) but can be uncovered.
If you say “they failed to redact data” to a layperson looking at a visibly redacted document they’re going to be confused.
How about "the documents were clarified" or "their contents were revealed"? Maybe "formatted for reading on your device"?
> You’re absolutely correct
They are not. They are factually incorrect. Look up the various definitions of redacted. They fit perfect for the title. Arguing otherwise suggests you are making up definitions and words, in which case, I am still correct.
Just like my friends and family call everything AI now.
Special effects in movies? AI
Some edited photo? AI
Illustration for advertising? AI
To be fair, I put partial blame on the advertisers. They've been claiming "AI" on their products on anything that has an algorithm basically for the past few years.
I'd call it a "workaround," which has less connotation of technical cleverness (or malice) than "hack."
Just look at hackernews
> It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks.
That ship sailed a long time ago. The “phone hacking scandal” in ~2010¹ was mostly calling answering services that didn't have pins or other authorisation checks set.
These days any old trick gets called a hack, heck tying your shoelaces might get called a miraculous footwear securing hack.
--------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_International_phone_hacki...
The funny part is that people with screen readers may have gone through the redaction without realizing it.
That is pretty funny. All it takes to be a hacker is to use assistive software.
I think we should all come to terms with it that "hack" doesn't mean anything anymore so we don't have to fight over words that were never clearly defined anyways. On most days this site here should be called "frontendnews".
Thank you, I came here just to verify that no "hack" was involved.
I find it funny to use a hack to argue about the misuse of words and definitions.
Regardless, redaction does not imply that data is missing. The words were censored or obscured. That's it. Simply looking at the documents proves that. Interacting with them showed how easy they were to uncensor, but the simplicity of the method doesn't change facts.
By all means, complain about definitions and words, but get it right.
I agree, but this would mean that almost anything can’t be called hacking, bc it usually relies on vulnerabilities and implementation defects. If something is poorly encrypted and you retrieve data, you didn’t hack because it wasn’t encrypted to begin with. That can’t be the standard.
There is a line, it is fuzzy, but if all you did was find something which was there for anyone to find, I would place that firmly on the not hacking side. If it was rot 13 I would put that marginally closer to hacking than this.
It also removes blame from the departments that redacted, it's not like they messed up big time, no, some resourceful brainiac hackers did things that were not allowed to undo the redaction process that was put in place to protect victims.
Here on the hacking news website we sure are persnickety about the difference.
It's true, but aren't most hacks like this? If you understand the system flaw, the hack is obvious.
Considering that only the title of the article says "hacks", I would say this is the editor decision.
It does seem to raise the risk that someone would be prosecuted for DMCA violation if we refer to it that way.
That is a very low bar. If methane's chemical representation was present in a DVD key, you could be done for DMCA violation every time you fart.
Ok, we've un-with-hacksed the title above.
Talk about missing the point. It’s almost like you’re trying to deflect the audience.
Calling everything a hack is the only way to make tech illiterate boomers and zoomers alike understand anything.
CNN has an article claiming that the botched redaction work is the fault of the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office, not the Justice Department. From https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...:
"The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021."
Part of me wonders whether they had some of the text under the "redactions" changed too.
Tell me if im too conspiritorial. Wouldnt it makes sense to have bad censorship on information thats e.g a 8/10 on a guilty scala. And make sure the 10/10s stay censored? Let People assume they can uncensor some, and what they uncensor is representative for any censored information. While the parts that couldnt be uncensored are way worse?
If you redact documents and the documents still contain the redacted content are they truly redacted?
Fun fact: Many times you can also declassify numbers by simply looking at the width of the text boxes. I wrote a blog post about it many years ago: https://jensrantil.github.io/posts/how-to-partially-declassi...
reminds me of that leaky redaction program that won the obfuscated c contest some years back
Probably the Underhanded C Contest (https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html) but yeah. Obfuscated C Contest entries usually aren't underhanded, just intentionally obscure about what they do or how they do it.
sorry, yes, that one.
Great contest. And a great entry, I had a big chuckle running it and unredacting my documents, even photos!
Ctrl-c and ctrl-v are not hacks.
They are unredacted because either those in charge are not familiar with basic office tasks, or someone wanted this stuff to leak and nobody checked thier work. Either brand of incompetance should cause heads to roll. But, just like the signal fiasco, nothing will happen. When your brand is perfection, you cannot ever admit a mistake.
Maybe someone knows law can answer this. Is it a crime to ”unredact” files in the US? You probably know that the information is classified since you are putting in the work. Where I live I believe it’s a crime if you share information that is classified even if it’s leaked. So I would not publicly brag about this online.
In the US this is protected by the first amendment. Exceptions apply only for military and government employees who agree to prosecution in such cases as a condition for employment or enlistment (getting a clearance, basically). For everyone else it is lawful.
is there an overview page somewhere just about what was redacted?
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...
I love how the entire internet thinks that this is a big deal when all that happened is that USDOJ re-posted some poorly-redacted court documents that were poorly redacted by non-USDOJ attorneys more than three years ago.
Yes, USDOJ is incompetent and dysfunctional, but this is not why. But sure, whatever, carry on...
To me is strange that for such important document they didn't print them and scan with a scanner (that way it's physically impossible that some metadata or other thing that is not on the printed piece of paper ends up in what is released).
It's the standard practice.
Can you post the document numbers, I can't find where these texts are in the original pdfs.
ah, found it - this is from the 'Court Records' part.
https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court Records/Matter of the Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, Deceased, No. ST-21-RV-00005 (V.I. Super. Ct. 2021)/2022.03.17-1 Exhibit 1.pdf
AKA https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Matter%20...
Link broken. (See reply with link that works.)
If you think mere human incompetence with documents is bad, imagine all the vibe coded apps.
When i hack something, it generally takes a bit more than just copy pasting..
This reminds me of when some government org leaked social security numbers in client-rendered html comments (or something similar) and people who discovered this were called hackers for using browser dev tools
Are you thinking of the Missouri department of education's teacher directory website?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor...
Luckily someone eventually talked sense into the governor, despite him ignoring the FBI originally when they told him it wasn't a hack
Doesn't work on any PDF's of scanned documents , for example the contacts list.
Copying and pasting doesn't work. Unless your PDF viewer does OCR. And if the redaction is just a black rectangle overlaid on top, that can still be removed.
I feel like it is some form of malicious compliance from some fbi agents
I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
Actually there are two type of comments: "it's not hacking" and "it's malicious compliance". That makes of 90% of what's here, split about 50/50.
And now we have our third! A meta-analysis of the HN comment chain!
You're welcome.
Doesn't sound like much interesting was found otherwise that'd be what's making all the headlines... Everything in that article is pretty much what I'd expect.
I did not expect the one case in other documents where a 13 year old pregnant child was raped by Trump and her baby was killed by a relative. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000250...
These rape allegations are from 2016 originally. There's already a court case about it. So, it's both already known and just allegations. That doesn't help us and shouldn't surprise us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
There was a tip revealed to be from 2020 that linked him to this case:https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1pve21d/unredacted_fbi...
Trump has openly admitted to child prostitution in official statements, so the first part of that isn’t surprising at all.
Look at the early quotes where Trump complains about Epstein being a creep. The main problem Trump had was that Epstein poached Trump’s favorite kids for prostitution years after they were hired by Trump.
Not the first time; in 2005 the US report about Nicola Calipari's death in Baghdad was redacted (and unredacted by italian newspapers) in the same way.
I "hacked" my facebook account the other day. I forgot my password and used the "forget password" link to gain access .
Shout out to Stirling PDF that can be self hosted and has a relatively robust and easy to use redaction tool. All for free.... For now....
pdf is just a computer version of laminated paper
What is the proper way to do this? I see a couple suggestions in the comments:
1. Draw a black box over it in image editor, save a screenshot
2. Crop the info out
Are there other good ways?
PDFs do have a "burn and destroy the parts/layers below" as part of the spec meant explicitly for redaction like this. Apparently they didn't use it, I guess?
It depends on what do you mean "hack". Redacting important documents can qualify as a heck of a hack.
Lots of these redaction doesn't make sense unless they're made to protect the rich and powerful. Not surprising of course.
Not hacks, (malicious?) incompetency.
I bet the width of the redacted areas also be used to determine some idea of the content too
Can you shadowprofile the redactions by length of the black box and heuristic occurance bundling?
thank you for using the old.reddit link, it’s a small miracle they keep that running…
All this agitprop makes me wonder which of your bosses is going down.
There are people here that would still vote for these evil people.
So is the data extracted the names of the victims that were supposed to be hidden to protect them? Or is there something else that might be worthy of exposing?
It seems the redactions are to protect the perpetrators.
There are pages that are nothing but redacted text. It isn’t going to be a victims name copy pasted 80 times in a row…
>It isn’t going to be a victims name copy pasted 80 times in a row…
You can't possibly know that!
(Sorry, watching Grinch, Jim Carrey spoke through me).
I'm seeing, for example, "Hyperion Air, Inc" was redacted.
Victim?
i assume the downvoters don't see the importance of the question.
The downvoters assume that it is a bad faith question. The downvoters are 99% right with that. If the 1% hit then OP is just exceedingly naive and did not followed the scandal in which case they should maybe first do some reading.
The names of involved powerful people were NOT supposed to be censored. All those names except Bill Clinton name were redacted. To protect Trump and everybody else involved in the scandal except said Bill Clinton. But especially to protect Trump.
They also obscured the male perpetrators faces and bodies in many images, illegaly.
I assume that de facto federal "law" now makes it illegal to be raped, and those men are the victims. That would be a logical conclusion of edgelord vice signalling, right?
I know what all of these words mean, but not when they're in this order.
I took the question to mean "were the easily circumvented redactions only covering victim details, and maybe suspects from Team Not-One-of-Us?" Implying the "stupidity" card was played to cover the "malice" card.
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when i first saw this, i thought it was a meme. There is no way the DOJ could be so incompetent to fumble their own cover up.
I wonder if it's purposeful misdirection
I don't think so.
They had 30 days to process 10s of thousands of documents. The rumors floating around is they had to pull in people from other departments to work on the task.
It's pretty plausible that someone thought a black highlighter was good enough for redaction.
"some" or a single file?
See also: https://x.com/FaytuksNetwork/status/2003237895897780632
This is "fake stupidity", a decoy to make the public think it is uncovering stuff that was meant to be hidden while in reality the really damning documents have been filtered and or doctored already. You might get thrown some meaningless and practically worthless + innocent scraps and bones like Trump wrapping his arm around a young woman and that‘s it.
You think you uncovered the hidden layer but that was just a decoy.
You guys are too gullible.
Nice. Love malicious compliance.
I never want to hear a MAGA supporter whine about DEI or meritocracy ever again. Supposedly you're against that stuff but just hire loyalists who fuck everything up? Embarrassing.
My favorite excerpt so far:
Case ID #: 50D-NY-302757
Witness Information
First Name: Donald
Middle Name:
Last Name: Trump
Age: 70
DOB:
Additional Info: Again, just trying to find out the NYPD detective on the FBI sex trafficking task force that called me a couple of weeks ago and spoke to me about some of these issues.
How is Contact Known: He participated regularly in paying money to force me to ‐----- with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan.
Type: Business
Address:
City: Washington DC
State: District of Columbia
Zip: 20500
Country: United States
I thought that the font spacing allowed for some statistical analysis. Also some letters sneak out of the redaction boxes, but the PDF file having removable black highlighter boxes on top is pathetic.
At least it gives the US a better chance of doing a u-turn on the steep downhill path it recently took. Maybe it was intentional incompetence.
i wouldn't trust any of these "undo's"
Alright, now when everyone knows this. I hope people have backed up all the files to unredact everything before DOJ retracts the sensitive documents.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law last month permits the Department of Justice “to withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation”
just wow.
This is probably just pure stupidity, but part of me hopes there is some tech person in there who knew exactly what they were doing. I’d take a job as a tech person in this administration just to sabotage stuff like this.
One of the most pathetic things that has come out of this is that the British press refuse to say the phrase "Prince Andrew" anymore. It has to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Because he was officially stripped of the title. He’s no longer a Prince. It’s not some grand conspiracy to distance him from the royal family, that’s just how titles work and the British are real sticklers about that class nonsense.
He was Prince Andrew back then. It's yet another example of how the silly British press falls into line whenever Buck House tells it to.
The British media also attempted to bury this story several times but couldn't, because it was so big in the USA, and Americans don't take orders from them. The BBC royal coverage has never been anything but propaganda and flattery.
Anyway, the name should be Windsor-Mountbatten, not the other way round (or the string of German names they were anglicised from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg etc)
Any redactions of note? Going full conspiratard here and assuming this information that was accidentally censored ineffectively also reveals nothing new.
A better headline would’ve been: “authorities utterly fail in their attempts to redact documents. Again.”
This would be comical if it weren’t so serious.
Am I crazy or didn't the same thing happen with Epstein's phone book some years ago? Coincidence?
Terrible headline. The unredacted data was included in the file. That's not a hack.
It has become more plausible that nothing of value was released and the level of obviously poor redaction was done as a tarpit to own the libs.
The article buried the lede. Last sentence:
> It was unclear how property material complies with the redaction standard under the law.
In other words, who knows what else was redacted that is unrelated to either the victims or jeopardizing an active federal investigation (are there any related to Epstein? I thought those all got killed, except those ordered by Trump to investigate Democrats of course.)
The US really is pathetic.
When do we find out that the nuclear launch codes got changed to "YoureFired!".
See also:
We Just Unredacted the Epstein Files
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
I tried to ascertain, but am not certain, this is the original blog source. Maybe they made some prior X posts.
hacks :facepalm:
Trump's razor: Why attribute something to incompetence when you can attribute it to patriotic sabotage?
There's no patriotism here. That's just part of the cover for seeking power.
Who's seeking power, the poor schmuck who misused their PDF tools?
It seems that my novel "razor" is misunderstood. The article attributes bad redacting to gross incompetence. But what if the person having done this bad redacting is instead doing sabotage with plausible deniability "lol, those damn PDF tools, you never know how they work"?
It makes this story more interesting, and it allows one to see an outline of the future film scripts that will be written about this period. The courageous saboteurs at the dawn of american fascism.
I do think I misunderstood your post, sorry. I was thinking of those ordering the redaction.
I do still think incompetence is more likely to be the explanation. Incompetent redactions are a perennial problem even in much less controversial situations.
There's no patriotism in protecting chomos.
define "patriotism"
It's certainly possible that some of the underlings are deliberately sabotaging orders from above. It's also possible that they're incompetent, as so many of the Trump team are. How would we know which it is?
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[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
We'll merge those comments hither.
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Did we learn anything useful or is it exactly as I said in the other thread, which got downvoted to hell, that all the really juicy blackmail material is with the CIA and will never see the light of day?
Won't know until all the documents are released. The blackmail is undeniable. But what's more interesting is who else was involved. Who purchased his services? That's what they are trying to hide.
Do you have any evidence of that?
Of course they don't but it sounds truthy so give it a few rounds of the Internet whisper machine and it can become accepted fact everybody "knows".
This site has really gone downhill lately with drivel like this being upvoted. Any real developers on this site anymore?
Regardless of the content itself, naive redaction of a high profile PDF still exposing the text contents is something that seems relevant to the community. Maybe you are in the wrong place?
"hacks"
copy and paste people, the idiots have taken over
"hacks" lol. Next, ctl+alt+del and it's equivalents are gonna be called arcane theurgy
Hacks don’t have to be pretty — if it works it works. Here’s my “hack” to get into many school computer systems:
Username: admin
Password: password
it's even less impressive; somebody left the credentials typed into the text boxes and went to get a slimfast out of the staff breakroom and you walked into the computer lab and hit enter.
“Like you guys have had this stuff for a year. Doesn’t it seem like you could just throw all that into AI at this stage of the game? And just redact the names of the victims, and let’s go.” Joe Rogan
There is a book by Richard Dawkins- I am me I am free or something like that, and it has a main picture of Richard standing naked and having a private part being covered by black rectangle but somehow my laptop back then was slow and when you scrolled it would temporary remove the square for a split second
Are you sure? I can't find any trace of any book by Richard Dawkins with a title much like that, and that doesn't seem like a very on-brand sort of cover pic for a book by him, and an image search for "Richard Dawkins book cover" doesn't turn up anything like it.
Most likely "I Am Me, I Am Free: The Robot's Guide to Freedom. - David Icke"
Confusing David "The monarchy are secretly lizards" Icke with Dawkins is astonishing.
More "info": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory#Da...
Omg. I am such an idiot!
I think this is a good thing. I think the people talking dictator this and that do not understand we have the ability to critique the administration. What we lack is control of the underhanded lobbyism. It is a warped democracy but still a democracy.
You sure about that? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/12/18/larry-bushart...
Every slide towards authoritarianism is gradual, there is no announcement.
Bruh they're kidnapping people in the streets. They took over CBS and censored a documentary about CECOT.
> They took over CBS
Careful, this will get you labeled an antisemite
Warped democracy.