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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> - 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.
> 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 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.
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 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."
"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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s easy to appear competent when you’re sitting on your butt doing nothing. 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. Totally pathetic effort after the stellar performance by the legal eagles in the Obama administration. Trump 2.0 is pursing a very aggressive legal strategy. It has a bunch of very smart people racking up wins in areas such as funding cuts, education, civil rights, deployment of national guard, etc. It also has people that are… struggling. But, unlike with Trump 1.0, they’re actually trying to move the ball forward for their team.
> 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?
> 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?
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)
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.
> 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?
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.
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 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!
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
The covid origins Slack messages discovery material (Anderson & Holmes) were famously poorly redacted pdfs, allowing their unredacting by Gilles Demaneuf, benefiting all of us.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.”
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'
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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?
“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
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.
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.
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.
Thank you, I came here just to verify that no "hack" was involved.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
The other side of that same coin is to never admit to malice if your actions can be adequately excused by stupidity.
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.
> - 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.
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
What a joke…
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.
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.
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."
DOGE
FTC vs Microsoft: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
"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.
Case study: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
> 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.
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.
> 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
> 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.
I suppose the best process would be this, and then after rescanning putting a black bar over each redacted text with image editing.
It's not fool proof:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/28/23777298/sony-ftc-microso...
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.
> with taxi receipts
Please tell me they were saving them for expensing.
Europol is nothing next to Natasha in accounting
Yes.
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.
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 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.
I would just do the digital version of that: add 100% black bars then screenshot page by page and probably increase the contrast too.
> 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.
It’s easy to appear competent when you’re sitting on your butt doing nothing. 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. Totally pathetic effort after the stellar performance by the legal eagles in the Obama administration. Trump 2.0 is pursing a very aggressive legal strategy. It has a bunch of very smart people racking up wins in areas such as funding cuts, education, civil rights, deployment of national guard, etc. It also has people that are… struggling. But, unlike with Trump 1.0, they’re actually trying to move the ball forward for their team.
> 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?
> 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?
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
>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").
> 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.
> 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?
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...
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.
The covid origins Slack messages discovery material (Anderson & Holmes) were famously poorly redacted pdfs, allowing their unredacting by Gilles Demaneuf, benefiting all of us.
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
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
>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.
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 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.
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'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.
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?
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.
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.
Support for NATO within the US is Isreal-lite for different demographics. Pouring resources into it isn't without downsides.
>Start openly supporting Russia
Already done.
Trump is a born banana Republic dictator...
I like to refer to MAGA as Banana Republicans.
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.
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.
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.
Well, the very fact that we are even discussing it means Trump already weakened NATO as an alliance.
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)
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.
Europe is already considering to have a nuclear shield.
This is because if Trump
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
I feel the same and do the same.
Me too.
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?
"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.
Misdirection 101
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
When other people close to the case end up dead you have a pretty decent reason to not leak.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah — don't attribute to resistance what can adequately be explained by idiocy.
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
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.
Well he did get Ellen Degeneris to self-deport
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.
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.
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.
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!!” :)
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.
This is one of those instances where I with hn had some kind of remindMe feature.
I hope I'm wrong, but I legit believe that will happen.
See you in about 2 years.
Hopefully it is not an instance where you won't need it.
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.
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'.
> 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.
Oh the horror!
Tell us more about the sane (“common sense”?) gun laws!
I love these.
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_...
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.
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?
> science based policy making
One of my favorite trivia questions is: how long has it been since Congress has had staff scientists?
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.
The country as a whole, no. But within the regime? Yeah.
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.
> 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.)
A third possibility is diversion, while the most damaging evidence would be suppressed a different way.
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.
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.
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.
The 'resistance' was not releasing them during the last administration.
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.
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?
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.
>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
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 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
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 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.
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.
I guess but if you write something down real small and I squint at it is that still hacking?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
It's also the meaning used in the title of this very Web site.
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?
You have a better editor?
ed is the standard Unix text editor.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
All you have to do is work for a MAGA person or MAGA billionaire donor for them to protect you.
..."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.
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.
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.
Should the military publish plans before the battle? Should witness protection programs be public record?
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.
To protect innocent people for examples, or to not reveal some secrets.
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.
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 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.
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?
is there an overview page somewhere just about what was redacted?
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....
Let's nobody make any fuss about this yet, lest they wise up before releasing the rest of the docs this way too!
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.
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.
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!
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?
Part of me wonders whether they had some of the text under the "redactions" changed too.
pdf is just a computer version of laminated paper
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".
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...
i wouldn't trust any of these "undo's"
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!
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
Link broken. (See reply with link that works.)
AKA https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Matter%20...
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.
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 "hacked" my facebook account the other day. I forgot my password and used the "forget password" link to gain access .
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.
I wonder if it's purposeful misdirection
If you think mere human incompetence with documents is bad, imagine all the vibe coded apps.
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...
See also: https://x.com/FaytuksNetwork/status/2003237895897780632
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.
There are people here that would still vote for these evil people.
Am I crazy or didn't the same thing happen with Epstein's phone book some years ago? Coincidence?
Alright, now when everyone knows this. I hope people have backed up all the files to unredact everything before DOJ retracts the sensitive documents.
Lots of these redaction doesn't make sense unless they're made to protect the rich and powerful. Not surprising of course.
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:
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.
I'm seeing, for example, "Hyperion Air, Inc" was redacted.
Victim?
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 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.
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.
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.
There's no patriotism in protecting chomos.
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.
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".
ah yes, “hacks”
[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
We'll merge those comments hither.
"hacks"
copy and paste people, the idiots have taken over
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?
“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
"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.
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.
Warped democracy.