Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word

Post by captaincrowbar » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

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…

Post by gscott » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 10:58 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…

Post by gamblor956 » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 11:07 PM UTC

mwfunk wrote: post #149

alphabettsy wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People pass on the right because people block the passing lane. It shouldn’t be possible in most cases to pass on the right.

Rant: I see this in the Bay Area all the time. On many freeways, the fast lane is also the carpool/HOV lane, at least during high-traffic times. The idea is that the government wants to encourage carpooling and/or low-emissions vehicles, therefore restricting the fast lane to such people would encourage such things. But I often see people get in the fast lane not because they want to go faster than the adjacent lane,…

Post by gamblor956 » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 11:12 PM UTC

FPGAhacker wrote: post #93

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.

well, i don't know the context of buffett's quote, what he meant, but i can say with confidence that in the US, even the most upstanding citizen breaks several laws per day. speed limits, imperfect stops, improper turns from a stop, unsafe lane change, following too closely, breaking too fast... The problem with a lot of these is the definitions contain imprecise terms subject to an officers whims of interpretation.…

Post by slantyyz » Fri, Feb 23, 2018, 11:30 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #174

Old_Thrashbarg wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".