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Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

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Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#21

Post by jacquesm »

ajross wrote: post #16
socalnate1 wrote: post #2

This 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…

Exactly. Conversion to PDF 'flattens' the document.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#23

Post by delish »

Bucephalus355 wrote: post #3

We all leave huge incriminating paper trails to some extent. This is why privacy is so important, because we’re all committing crimes in theory. That being said Manafort looks very very guilty and his crimes, which are financially based, I think are even more reprehensible in this era of global austerity and low economic growth. Back to the privacy point, we are currently going through NIST 800-53 at work. We only ne…

> Those Enron-esque cross-cut shredders don’t cut it anymore with open source machine learning that can easily reassemble those documents.

That's interesting! When I googled for this, I found a few papers, but nothing like a git repository. Do you have more information?

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#24

Post by ajross »

twoquestions wrote: post #14
lisper wrote: post #4

Nixon 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.

Mostly true. Hans Reiser and Ross Ulbricht were smart folks who got caught nonetheless.

But not always true. No one's figured out Satoshi Nakamoto yet.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#25

Post by marnett »

cm2012 wrote: post #9
lisper wrote: post #4

Nixon 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?

That's why white collar crime is so difficult to prosecute. And it's why prosecutor's rely so much on getting low level people to turn on high level people.

I think that has a lot more to do with prosecutors never going after executive because they are buddy-buddy.

Martin Shkreli is a perfect example of a CEO that can get canned when it is decided he should be.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#26

Post by astockwell »

retSava wrote: post #8

Semi-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…

Put that in AWS Lambda and charge $1 each. Boom, Saas-retirement-fund.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#27

Post by simias »

I scoffed a bit at this part:

>Try it in Adobe Acrobat (via the “Save as Other” command under “File” on a Mac) and you’ll quickly be redirected to Adobe’s website and presented with a handful of subscription packages that will allow you to transform your documents. [...] Indeed, it’s probably a little safer, all things considered.

If I was doing shady stuff the last thing I'd want to do is send my incriminating documents to some 3rd party service. That being said I would also probably not send them over the clear in emails either.

It's pretty insane how cavalier people are with email security (or lack thereof). I can't imagine that they would be so lenient if they were sending each other the files over regular mail. I think most people simply don't realize how thoroughly unsecure stock email is, you're basically lending an open postcard over the internet and you can be sure that a bunch of copies are made along the way. It's pretty much the worst way to share sensitive documents online short of posting them on facebook.

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#28

Post by raquo »

retSava wrote: post #8

Semi-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…

On a Mac I think printing to the built in PDF saver might work?

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#29

Post by Bucephalus355 »

jacquesm wrote: post #10
Bucephalus355 wrote: post #3

We all leave huge incriminating paper trails to some extent. This is why privacy is so important, because we’re all committing crimes in theory. That being said Manafort looks very very guilty and his crimes, which are financially based, I think are even more reprehensible in this era of global austerity and low economic growth. Back to the privacy point, we are currently going through NIST 800-53 at work. We only ne…

Manaforts crimes are as bad as they are because he and his buddies were instrumental in destroying a country that was already fighting for its survival and many people have died and will continue to die as a result of this. If you compare the reaction to the VW scandal to what is happening here it is funny how the 'end result' is so much worse in the case of Manafort that it is a miracle he's just indicted for what a…

Yes I see what you mean, and wow thanks for putting his crimes in a broader context.

It’s my hope that “financial crimes” are just going to be a convenient way to indict the many many people who have committed crimes like him.

Back in 2016, a weird / interesting / pretty smart idea in Clinton’s platform was to help the US deficit by only enforcing current tax laws. Lol that’s all it was, enforcing the laws that were already there to raise an additional 100 billion+ in revenue every year. It makes you think how many people are committing tax fraud at this very moment...

Re: Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

#30

Post by twoquestions »

ajross wrote: post #24
twoquestions wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everybody's stupid sometimes, and it only takes once to do you in.

Mostly true. Hans Reiser and Ross Ulbricht were smart folks who got caught nonetheless. But not always true. No one's figured out Satoshi Nakamoto yet.

Nakamoto is also not a criminal, so there's less will to uncover their identity.

But yes, you're correct it's not a forever and always thing.

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