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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

#491

Post by sailfast »

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…

Typically these folks use standard redaction software. Has anyone explored the fact that the software is just a buggy, silly mess?

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#492

Post by michaelt »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #306
cmarschner wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence

Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.

Doesn’t having lots of people involved also raise the chance of incompetence?

You’re more likely to get at least one inept agent in a random sample of 1000 than a sample of 10.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#493

Post by sallveburrpi »

pwg wrote: post #475
Arch-TK wrote: post #462

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…

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the…

I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here.

It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this…

You can find out the technical details in one quick search.

How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#494

Post by sallveburrpi »

stingraycharles wrote: post #471
Arch-TK wrote: post #462

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…

I also like to think this was maybe done as a form of malicious compliance. Someone inside the agency was tasked with redacting this, and found a way to sneak the information through but still getting it passed by their supervisors, so that the information got out.

To me this is the only explanation that makes sense. However wouldn’t they risk repercussions when this is inevitably found out? I assume they have records who redacted which documents

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#495

Post by skeltoac »

pwg wrote: post #475
Arch-TK wrote: post #462

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…

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the…

The journalist is not necessarily responsible for the title. Editors often change those and they don’t need to get the approval of the journalist. The editor knows what they are doing and that it will irk some tech folks.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#496

Post by pwg »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #488
pwg wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the…

It's not a hard technical concept to grasp that placing a stick-it onto some thing doesn't make the thing behind it disappear.

No, it is not. But given the abysmal lack of technical knowledge of the "typical computer user" they don't see the redacted PDF's as "having black stick-it notes stuck on top of the text". They see the PDF as having had a "black marker pen" applied that has obliterated the text from view.

When someone then shows them how to copy/paste out the original text, because the PDF was simply black stick-it notes above the text, it appears to them as if that someone is a magical wizard of infinite intelligence.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#497

Post by Fricken »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #493
pwg wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The journalist writing the story has the same level of technical knowledge about how to "redact" properly in the digital realm as the individuals doing the redaction. To the journalist, with zero knowledge of the technical aspects, viewing the "redacted" document, it appears to be "redacted", so when someone "unredacts" it, the action of revealing the otherwise hidden material appears to be "magical" to them (in the…

I would consider it gross negligence on the journalists part to not know the technical details here. It’s really not that hard; as someone else on this thread pointed out even my grandma knows this… You can find out the technical details in one quick search. How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me.

>some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.

That's the first sentence of the article, and that's all there is to it.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#498

Post by sallveburrpi »

thdrtol wrote: post #369
cmarschner wrote: post #294

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.

To be fair handling Word documents is much more complex than redacting a PDF properly.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#499

Post by alimw »

wisty wrote: post #374
rcbdev wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's a left wing cooker conspiracy theory that the guy who gave Ukraine the Javalin anti tank missiles and forced NATO to increase military spending to 5% of GDP is actually a secret Russian agent.

You literally just used NATO for a grouping that does not include the US.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#500

Post by calgoo »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #482
kungito wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They failed to redact data. That's it. People just read the files afterwards, only formatting was wierd.

They're likely viewing the electronic documents by analogy to photocopies with blacked out sections where there is nothing to distinguish the text from the redacting marks and nothing you can project out. They don't know the structure of the file format and how information in it is encoded or rendered, or even that there is a distinction between encoding and rendering. (A better analogy might be the original physical…

To complicated, the people doing the redacting pasted digital stickers ontop of the text, people are just removing the stickers.
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