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Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

theguardian.com

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Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#201

Post by JKCalhoun »

pppppiiiiiuuuuu wrote: post #181
cyberax wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 se…

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 ideal because it's easier to be proficient with a rifle than with a pistol"

So a shotgun then?

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#202

Post by eviks »

herewulf wrote: post #182
eviks wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 the…

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 man…

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!)

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#203

Post by JKCalhoun »

irishcoffee wrote: post #79
Loughla wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is one of those instances where I with hn had some kind of remindMe feature.

Hopefully it is not an instance where you won't need it.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#204

Post by ekianjo »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98
cmarschner wrote: post #14

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 remov…

"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-sca…

> 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?

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#205

Post by fc417fc802 »

eviks wrote: post #174
fc417fc802 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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…

> 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.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#206

Post by dragonwriter »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #112
dragonwriter wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#207

Post by JKCalhoun »

nlitsme wrote: post #29
nlitsme wrote: post #28

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.)

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#208

Post by etskinner »

stronglikedan wrote: post #127
Gigachad wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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...

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#209

Post by MuffinFlavored »

red75prime wrote: post #195
pfannkuchen wrote: post #184

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).

Is the Department of Justice not a part of the government?
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