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"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte Let all the files get released first. Then show your hacks.
Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function.
Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted.
Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who discovered the information, rather than on the people were put in charge of handling the redaction and screwed it up.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's being "undone with the lamest hack known to mankind." Still technically a hack.
It’s not a hack. It’s known, expected behavior of the program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. Color filled boxes is not it.
This isn't about knowledge or expectations. They didn't use colored boxes to jazz up the presentation, they _intended_ to prevent you from reading it, and now you can, with this, again incredibly _lame_ almost meaningless even-my-five-year-old-could-do this "hack."
Trump's razor: Why attribute something to incompetence when you can attribute it to patriotic sabotage?
There's no patriotism here. That's just part of the cover for seeking power.
It seems that my novel "razor" is misunderstood. The article attributes bad redacting to gross incompetence. But what if the person having done this bad redacting is instead doing sabotage with plausible deniability "lol, those damn PDF tools, you never know how they work"?
It makes this story more interesting, and it allows one to see an outline of the future film scripts that will be written about this period. The courageous saboteurs at the dawn of american fascism.
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Crime may go unpunished by this is why statues of limitations exist. The window on some crimes stays open for a very long time.
"Some" is 99% crimes against the state with the occasional bone they throw the peasants to look like they care. Heck, murder probably wouldn't even be unlimited if not for the fact that it thumbs it's nose at the state's monopoly on violence.
It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks. Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function. Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted. Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who dis…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Once I worked for a company that got a quote in the form of a Word document. Turned out it had history turned on and quotes to competitors could be recovered. There is a lot of incompitence when it comes to file formats.
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.
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> Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text Sure. But anyone can visually examine this. That means everyone with situational context can directly examine the quality of the redaction. Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works. Or you have to separate the folks with context from the folks with techical competence. (There is the third optio…
> But anyone can visually examine this. Can they? In principle it could be the difference between RGB 0.0,0.0,0.0 and RGB 0.004,0.0,0.0, that could be very difficult to visually see, but an algorithm could unmask the data with some correlation. If you do it digitally and then map the material to black-and-white bitmap, then that you can actually virtually examine. > Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to…
The larger point is that the "usual" redaction involves a tape pen or paint-style ink (dries opaque), IIRC, then photocopy, because the blocked out area is opaque. Scanner is probably no different than photocopy for these purposes.