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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

#211

Post by piker »

throwup238 wrote: post #45
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…

> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly. What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or…

> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.

Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#212

Post by sigwinch »

JohnTHaller wrote: post #131
nickpinkston wrote: post #31

I wonder if any of this is a conscious act of resistance vs. just incompetence. And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

Given the sheer number of people they had to pull in and work overtime to redact Trump's name as well as those of prominent Republicans and donors as per numerous sources within the FBI and the administration itself, incompetence is likely for a chunk of it.

It’s funny that this effort, the largest exertion of FBI agents second only to 9/11, seems to be unprepared to redact. Cynically, I’m prepared for it to be part of a generative set of PDFs derived from the prompt “create court documents consistent with these 16 PDFs which obscure the role of Donald Trump between 1993 and 1998.”

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#213

Post by sdenton4 »

ourmandave wrote: post #95
andsoitis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?

The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition. If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.

I have very little faith that scotus will have any consistency in their decisions going forward - they seem to be nakedly political, and backing trump. If the elections swing the other direction (despite their aid in gerrymandering), expect them to cry about the power of the presidency and start rolling it back as fast as they can push decisions through the shadow docket.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#214

Post by thinkcomp »

I love how the entire internet thinks that this is a big deal when all that happened is that USDOJ re-posted some poorly-redacted court documents that were poorly redacted by non-USDOJ attorneys more than three years ago.

Yes, USDOJ is incompetent and dysfunctional, but this is not why. But sure, whatever, carry on...

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#215

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

I want to believe this is malicious compliance.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#216

Post by fc417fc802 »

eviks wrote: post #152
fc417fc802 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not at all. It's a procedure that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. Sometimes that's what you want. > you can't simply search&replace with machine precision Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.

You process doesn't make sense, why wouldn't you just black box redact right away and print and scan? What does underline then ink give you? But it's also not the process described in the blog > that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. You've already screwed up by leaking length and risking errors in manual search&replace

The blog has no relevance to your claim that the print and scan procedure somehow fundamentally precludes automated search and replace. I refuted that. You remain free to perform automated search and replace prior to printing the document. You also have the flexibility to perform manual redactions both digitally as well as physically with ink.

It's clearly a superior process that provides ease of use, ease of understanding, and is exceedingly difficult to screw up. Barr's DoJ should be commended for having selected a procedure that minimizes the risk of systemic failure when carried out by a collection of people with such diverse technical backgrounds and competence levels.

Notably, had the same procedure been followed for the Epstein files then the headline we are currently commenting under presumably wouldn't exist.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#217

Post by jaggederest »

marcosdumay wrote: post #99
brailsafe wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh, have at it, here's the full spec: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/assets/5b... Should take... a weekend tops? ;) PDF is crazy and scary

> PDF includes eight basic types of objects: Boolean values, Integer and Real numbers, Strings, Names, Arrays, Dictionaries, Streams, and the null object Wait, this is more complete than SOAP. It may be a good idea to redo the IPC protocol with a different serialization format!

Well, it's a descendant of Postscript (much like JSON is a descendant of Javascript, loosely)

Society would probably never recover if we started implementing RPC-in-Postscript though.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#218

Post by pppppiiiiiuuuuu »

consz wrote: post #193
pppppiiiiiuuuuu wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think you may have very differing views of what "self-defense" situations you and the other poster are talking about. Could you describe a specific scenario one of those hundred people might be imagining?

I don't really care to have an in depth discussion of self defense scenarios because I don't think that helps us understand common sense gun regulation any better. I'm sure you can find people making that argument if you are curious. My point is not that the AR-15 is an appropriate self defense weapon but that there are better arguments you could have made, and that the one you did make lost someone who is already sympathetic to your position.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#219

Post by sigwinch »

jmyeet wrote: post #89
nickpinkston wrote: post #31

I wonder if any of this is a conscious act of resistance vs. just incompetence. And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

It's a good question. For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's releva…

Fine, but the teeth of this act belong to some future justice department. I predict Trump will issue blanket pardons for everyone involved, up to Bondi; and that none of them will respect a congressional subpoena.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#220

Post by prophesi »

jeffparsons wrote: post #122
TOMDM wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone sends me a document with text in it that they meant to remove but didn't and then I read that text, I haven't hacked anything they're just incompetent. Hacking is unauthorised use of a system. Reading a document that was not adequately redacted can hardly be considered hacking.

Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime? I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at…

If this were prior to 2021, I would say the CFAA could be violated so long as the property owner's _intentions_ were for that information to only be accessible to certain users. But I think the CFAA has been sufficiently reduced in scope after Van Buren v United States [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States

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