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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

#401

Post by digitaltrees »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #128
digitaltrees wrote: post #106

Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack. Please change the title.

Not the only thing hack means now, or the most common usage anymore. See "life hack" - it means unexpected technique.

But this isn’t an unexpected technique it’s literally the core design of the pdf format. It’s a layered format that preserves the layers on any machine. Adobe has a redaction feature to overcome the default behavior that each layer can be accessed even if there is a top layer in front.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#402

Post by SirHumphrey »

vanviegen wrote: post #348
Tostino wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His last administration was filled with traditional Republicans. I may have disagreed with them on virtually every policy point, but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well. We would have never agreed on the right policy, but we definitely agreed that his policy was not the right one.

> but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well. I imagine Republicans such as this still populate a majority of the house and Senate. If they disagree, they are sure making an effort to do so silently.

The amount of things Trump did circumventing Congressional approval might suggest that he does not a clean pass even though Republicans have majority in both the house and the senate.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#403

Post by jonnybgood »

vanviegen wrote: post #371
rcbdev wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They effectively already left NATO What the fuck are you talking about? Someone should tell Russia.

NATO works by projecting a united force. Nations unconditionally backing each other up. The USA is now clearly no longer a part of that. That's not to say that the USA will do nothing if a NATO member is attacked. It might. Or not.

For much of NATO history, the US is NATO. The US doesn’t want it to be like that anymore because it needs to strategically shift to the other side of the world. So, the US says “What if Europe can be NATO? If we can force them to meet the GDP commitment then maybe we don’t need to worry about them too much and commit less of our own resources to this theater.” But of course people interpret this as if the US is abandoning the alliance. No, the US just has other problems to deal with in the world.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#404

Post by _cenw »

wolpoli wrote: post #34
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

Black square vs redaction tool difference is well known if someone's job involves redacting PDF or just working with PDF. It's most likely that additional staffs were pulled in and weren't given enough training.

It seems insane that nobody at the other end runs something as simple as MAT or imagick (twice) over it to take the text layers out before uploading though. I hope this is at least partially intentional.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#405

Post by maCDzP »

Maybe someone knows law can answer this. Is it a crime to ”unredact” files in the US? You probably know that the information is classified since you are putting in the work. Where I live I believe it’s a crime if you share information that is classified even if it’s leaked. So I would not publicly brag about this online.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#406

Post by userbinator »

PeterStuer wrote: post #328
userbinator wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll just send an image and not bother with a PDF. (Note there's also other metadata in a PDF, which you may not want your recipient to know either.)

There's also metadata in the image files. What specifically would be sensitive in the pdf with screenshots metadata that is also not present in the sceenshot image metadata?

PDF has something called an "info dictionary", which most mainstream PDF-writing software will fill out with various bits of info that you might not want known.

Image files usually have substantially less metadata by default, unless it's one taken by a camera.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#407

Post by notahacker »

avidiax wrote: post #90
juujian wrote: post #63

Apart from the technological and procedural question, I would love to learn why the DOJ found it important to protect Indyke. He was Epstein's lawyer, and now we learn that he was personally involved. He is not a Washington person. We expected there to be politically motivated protection of certain people, but is the DOJ just going to blanket protect anybody in the docs?

Indyke works for other powerful people, runs in MAGA circles. Two things come to mind: * Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1] * He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented. [1] https://www…

> It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans.

Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#408

Post by throw101010 »

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…

> strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth)

If it's worth so little to your eyes/comprehension you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...

That snide remark is used to discredit a profession in passing, but the reason you won't find a lot of examples of this happening is because the trust clients have to put in lawyers and the legal system in general is what makes it work, and betraying that trust is a literal professional suicide (suspension, disbarment, reputational ruin, and often civil liability) for any lawyer... that's why "strict" doesn't mean anything "little" in this case.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#409

Post by jwrallie »

OneMorePerson wrote: post #231

It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF. I always felt paranoid (without any real…

I learned that a long time ago when I was a student and wanted to submit a pdf generated by a trial version of some software as an assignment and was trying to be clever and cover the watermark that said unregistered with a white box.

When opening the file in my slow computer, I could see all the rendering of the watermark happening in slow motion until the white box would pop up on top of the text.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#410

Post by RobotToaster »

GistNoesis wrote: post #278
OneMorePerson wrote: post #231

It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF. I always felt paranoid (without any real…

If it's not done properly, and you happen at any point in the chain to put black blocks on a compressed image (and PDF do compress internal images), you are leaking some bits of information in the shadow casted by the compression algorithm : (Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/jpguncrop )

Somewhat related, I once sent a FOI request to a government agency that decided the most secure way to redact documents was to print them, use a permanent marker, and then scan them. Unfortunately they used dye based markers over laser print, so simply throwing the document into Photoshop and turning up the contrast made it readable.
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