I don't think it was the conversion that was the issue, the gleeful schadenfreude of the article notwithstanding. Mueller is armed with subpoenas after all. This makes it easier for Mueller at best.
Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
11–20 of 238 posts
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#12Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?
[deleted]
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#13Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?
I suppose we currently are not and don't? I think a big aspect of this is that everyone makes mistakes and with an increasingly interconnected, complicated, and honestly insecure digital world those mistakes are just going to be amplified.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#14Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?
Everybody's stupid sometimes, and it only takes once to do you in.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#15Another life ruined by not knowing LaTeX
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#16This is sort of an aside to the article; but it boggles my mind how many people in the business world view PDF's as secure, unalterable documents.
No, Manafort knew what he was doing here, and was doing it for technically sound (albeit legally fraudulent) reasons: Word documents, unlike PDFs[1], store editting history. Manafort knew this, and wanted to evade that tracking.
Where he fell down was in the actual conversion step, and in failing to realize that his email to Gates about the conversion were themselves a history of the edit. But his technical instincts were sound. If all Mueller had was that final PDF, he wouldn't have been able to detect the fraud (absent some other info, that is).
[1] Obviously "PDF" is a histoically complicated format and some versions have features that might allow tracking. But the PDF/A documents emitted by typical "export" tools are stateless representations of printed documents, AFAIK.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#17Semi-related tip: I despise protected pdfs with a passion. Especially when you download a datasheet and you can't add annotations or highlights to it. So, how to remove this protection? One way is to print to postscript and convert back to pdf, but then you can't copy text from it. Here's how (on windows): download qpdf ( http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/ ) and run qpdf.exe -decrypt encrypted.pdf woho.pdf I made a small b…
It's funny how this isn't even about encrypted pdfs but plain ones.
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#18I'm sure they asked their "IT" staff to do the work for them. I wonder how they felt about doing these things
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#19What, the spending at $25,000 at Duane Reade (NYC-area drugstore) wasn't a dead giveaway of money laundering?
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jasonleopold/manafort-under-scrutin... (bottom)
The entire inventory of the store is barely worth 25K, I assume he must have been loading up on gift cards a la Mexican drug lords (http://am.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/10/drug-lords-using-gift-car...).
Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word
#20Nixon was caught because he taped himself obstructing justice. Manafort was caught because he emailed incriminating documents in the clear. How the hell are we going to catch criminals who somehow avoid doing monumentally stupid things?
I think the problem is not as big because you don't need to have those people do monumentally stupid things all the time. It's sufficient if they do it every so often.
And unless someone is an incredibly paranoid person which has the privacy routines ingrained in their DNA, everyone does make stupid mistakes every once in a while.