Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word • Hacker News Board

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

#171

Post by mbell » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:10 PM UTC

criley2 wrote: post #97

mbell wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really need a technical background or some sort of college training to find the File > Save As > PDF option?

Using File -> Save As -> PDF requires several skills Window management in Windows GUI: 1. Usage of File Menu and/or Ribbon Menu 2. Knowledge of Word's PDF integration File System knowledge: 1. What a "file" is 2. What "file formats" are 3. What a PDF is 4. That a word document can be saved or printed as a PDF Etc etc etc I work with non-technical folks all the time and printing/saving as PDF comes up often. Usually i…

How much of that is applicable in this case?

He knew enough to attach the file to an e-mail and send it to someone else asking for a PDF version. So the only piece of missing knowledge here appears to be finding the option in word's menus.

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

#172

Post by actsasbuffoon » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:11 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #65

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…

No shredder can match the document-eradicating power of an incinerator.

Interestingly enough, many documents have been recovered from Pompeii.

Quick history refresher: Pompeii was an ancient Roman city-town near Naples. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in the year 79, Pompeii was covered in ~15 feet of lava and volcanic ash. One imagines that this was highly distressing to the residents of Pompeii, but none were available for comment as they were all busy being incinerated. I guess we'll never know how they really felt about it.

Then sometime in the 1900s a group of workers were excavating the area for a new project. They had been burning these odd little bits of coal they'd found. Imagine the horror when someone realized the "coal" was actually old manuscripts that had crumpled up into little balls of carbon due to the volcanic eruption. The workers had been burning priceless ancient Roman artifacts!

Researchers were able to mechanically separate some of the manuscripts, and with the aid of modern computer vision systems, we've been able to read some of them. It's quite an amazing story.

So I guess you probably want to spend the extra $20 and spring for the really good incinerator on Amazon. You don't want future historians literally digging through your incriminating financial documents.

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

#173

Post by KirinDave » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:14 PM UTC

braderhart wrote: post #133

s73v3r_ wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't buy that many people are quite bad with computers?

When it is your job to hide your financial activities, then no not really.

Why can't people be bad at their jobs?

I'm having trouble buying any other explanation than, "This absurdly overcomplicated workflow introduced by conventional office software not designed to cover its tracks didn't cover its own tracks" as plausible.

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

#174

Post by logfromblammo » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:15 PM UTC

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #110

lovefromatx wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Different context but Buffett's quote “If a cop follows you for 500 miles, you’re going to get a ticket,” applies here. If you are a criminal you don't violate only one law. You tend to violate multiple laws and at some point you are going to be sloppy.

And just to be overly clear, the quote does not generalize to: "If the FBI watches you for 500 days, you're going to get charged with money laundering and conspiracy to defraud the United States".

If the FBI watches you for 500 days, they will either find something to charge you with, or they will entrap you into doing something they can charge you with, because their budget does not include as much money for "pointless investigations of innocent people" as it does for "nailing guilty-looking people to the wall, and making the agency look good in the press".

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

#175

Post by macintux » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:16 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #141

jmull wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually much worse than sending incriminating documents through the mail, even printed brazenly on a postcard. To capture incriminating physical mail, the authorities have to already be monitoring you at the time you send the documents. With email they are typically able to go back and capture emails from days, weeks, and years prior.

> It's actually much worse than sending incriminating documents through the mail, even printed brazenly on a postcard. I know I'm nitpickig, but the USPS photographs of all pieces of mail and digitizes it. This information is considered metadata and is not protected against unwarranted searches, so postcards are much worse (for privacy), because even the small-town PD can get access to them without having to look for…

> the USPS photographs of all pieces of mail and digitizes it

Thanks, I had no idea.

While doing some genealogy recently I found that a distant ancestor had unclaimed mail in the post office shortly before he died.

I found it vaguely amusing to envision walking in and asking for it now, 125 years later; I guess some distant descendant of mine might be able to ask for a photo of mail I'd sent or received.

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

#176

Post by herodotus » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:21 PM UTC

freehunter wrote: post #5

There are certain things I cannot believe are still this difficult with as advanced as user-friendly technology is: sending files to someone else, and converting documents. Sending files to someone else is a problem with a ton of solutions, some of them better than others, but none of them actually solving the problem. Email often has size limits and spam filters block certain attachments. Dropbox is often restricted…

Actually, converting PDF to a file format is very non-trivial. The problem is that the PDF typically retains none of the semantic structure of the original file. Yes, I know there are converters to Word, none of which are perfect, but in each case the people who wrote the converters had to do a lot of work. PDF is all about geometry. So even the characters in a word do not have to be together in the PDF content stream. (I worked extensively on semantic reconstruction of PDF documents before I retired.)

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

#177

Post by scblock » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:22 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #163

scblock wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In what way do you mean flattened? Authorship and metadata? No, that is often still present, and many tools will include author and software data by default. Layers? No, PDFs can have extensive layers.

> In what way do you mean flattened? Surely in the context of the episode we're talking about: the discovery of the $4M in fraudulent income claimed in the document. In the Word document, that edit would be discoverable. In PDF it is not. You seem to be making an abstract argument about "PDF security" here. The point of the subthread is a practical point about whether Manafort was correctly generating a fraudulent do…

I am trying to clear up what appear to be hugely misleading assumptions about how PDFs work.

Edit: and based on the information provided in these news reports, he was being a massive technology rube.

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

#178

Post by chestervonwinch » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:33 PM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #150

If you have a track record on the span of decades of doing shady stuff, why would you associate yourself with a lightning rod of controversy? Why join any political campaign? Manafort is not a smart man.

Money and a desire to get back to positions of influence, most likely. See this article for a lot of detail:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/paul-ma...

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

#179

Post by jandrese » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:36 PM UTC

stcredzero wrote: post #56

jacquesm wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buffet's quote applies to non-criminals as well.

More in the US than elsewhere. In Germany, you obey the speed limit, and only rubes pass on the right. In the US, everyone drives 9 mph above the posted limit if they're being careful, and people pass on the right willy-nilly, regardless of what local laws say. But if the police really want to enforce that on you, they can. There are tons of "blue laws" in the US, some from over a hundred years back. Sometimes the po…

I'll stop passing people in the right lane when they stop cruising at 5 below the speed limit (or more frequently: fluctuating their speed from +10 to -10 of the limit randomly) in the passing lane.

If you are going the same speed as the person to your right, you are in the wrong lane.

People just have no clue. The number of times I've seen some overloaded U-Haul lumber over to the left lane and just sit there as it struggles to get up hills is supremely aggravating.

I don't like passing on the right and will avoid it when I can, but I also don't like being in a traffic clump and will always look for ways to escape it or avoid getting trapped in it. If I have to pass you on the right to avoid getting pincered by the clump of traffic coming up behind me, I will.

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

#180

Post by talmand » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 9:44 PM UTC

jdavis703 wrote: post #103

fencepost wrote: post #87

For people thinking that he should have known better on a technical basis, maybe but remember that during the time in question he was a 64-68 year old man (= graduated college around the time Unix was being rewritten in C) who's never worked in a technical field. By the time most of these capabilities existed Manafort had been management/executive for years or decades. That's not to say that he couldn't have learned…

Not sending a written paper trail should be covered in Criminal Surivial Strategies 101. Whether it's telegraph, snail mail, email or WhatsApp, this is just sloppy criminal work. For example Steven Cohen avoided an insider trading conviction by making sure nothing bad ever had his name on it. If you needed to discuss something secret, you talked to him in person. Background: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/co…

It's likely people such as that don't even realize they are creating a paper trail.

"Paper trail? There was no paper! How could there be a trail!?"