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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

#541

Post by cogman10 »

notahacker wrote: post #407
avidiax wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing).

It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.

And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#542

Post by tremon »

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…

Here in NL if confidential information about offenders leaks from court documents, it usually leads to a reduction in sentencing because the leak of classified information is weighed as part of the punishment. If the leak was proven to be intentional, it might lead to a mistrial or even acquittal. Leaking of victims' information usually only results in a groveling public apology from the Minister/Secretary of Justice du jour.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#543

Post by lloydatkinson »

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…

Calling everything a hack is the only way to make tech illiterate boomers and zoomers alike understand anything.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#544

Post by shkkmo »

silveira wrote: post #526
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.

If you unlock a lock, that's still a lock. Also, in light of everything that is happening, is incredible that the top comment on this thread is about some minor semantic definitions.

And it is still a lock if it was just hanging there and not actually locked as in this case.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#545

Post by kergonath »

Eisenstein wrote: post #383
kergonath wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. That sounds reinsuring, but it is completely false. The idea that the pendulum swings is just regression to the mean: sure, after a terrible president, the next one is likely to be less terrible. But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a…

> But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely. Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would? The Cold War may have been a factor. > Don’t count on it. In all likelihood i…

> Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would?

In western democracies, I can think of a couple. For example, the wave of left-wing intellectualism that was prevalent up until the 1980s got somewhat lost and lost contact with the lower classes, which left an opening for far-right populists.

> The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left.

You’re right. In that frame of reference, it might indeed regress to the far left, but that would still be slightly to the left of Bill Clinton. The US don’t strike me as having a particularly strong left-wing culture and I don’t see it appearing any time soon.

> There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.

I don’t think the word exist, but the concept proved very useful to a lot of dictators.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#546

Post by ben_w »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #531
pixl97 wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How someone like this gets a paying job as a journalist is beyond me. You seem highly confused on what a journalists job is in this era. Very few publishers are about correctness. It's about speed of getting the article out and getting as many eyeballs as possible to look at the ads in the article. Or as the saying goes, A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

You could easily replace them with an LLM if that were the case. Although I don’t completely disagree with your cynical take I don’t think that’s actually the case for most of the Guardians journalists, they do a lot of quality reporting too

Back when LLM chatbots were new and shiny, I was comparing the failure modes to journalism by way of the Gell-Mann amnesia effect.

Sure, deep investigative jounalism with real skill and effort behind it is a thing; but it is an expensive thing, and opinion pieces disguised as jounalism are much cheaper, as is reporting on other people's reports.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#548

Post by crazygringo »

insertchatbot wrote: post #429
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…

Not to mention when the White House published Obama's birth certificate as a PDF. I remember being able to open it and turn the different layers off and on.

Are you trying to suggest that indicated it was fraudulent? That has very much been debunked -- it's just an artifact of OCR and compression, something that many scanners do automatically [1].

You can still open it with Illustrator if you want to see: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss...

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/birth-certificate/

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#549

Post by cogman10 »

pfannkuchen wrote: post #245
red75prime wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Right, I’m aware of the excuses the government uses to keep secrets. But on principle, what right does the government have to keep secrets from its own people? I don’t believe we had that button at the founding, it was added somewhere along the way. I’m asking what is the justification for this, and whether in the grand scheme of things that outweighs the principle of the government not being a separate entity from t…

The power/right came from national security legislation written and enacted by elected officials. Because we have a government that works by proxy, it means that the leaders we elect are effectively supposed to represent the people they serve (that's the ideal. Obviously we've fallen WAY short of that).

Pragmatically, I think it's easy to recognize that the government should be allowed to have some secrets from the public. I think the clearest and most extreme example is the details of our nuclear armaments.

But the question of where the line is is a tricky one. IMO, we definitely allow the government far more secrets than it should have.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#550

Post by ProjectArcturis »

tdeck wrote: post #105
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

The bigger difference from my perspective is that they have competent people doing the strategy this time. The last Trump administration failed to use the obvious levers available to accomplish fascism, while this one has been wildly successful on that end. In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country, and unfortunately more and more competent people will choose to work for them in o…

>In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country

I disagree. It felt that way for the first few months, but the wheels are coming off. Trump is too old and unpopular to steal a 3rd term. Therefore everyone around him has to worry about what will happen in 3 years, and plan for post-Trump rather than forever-Trump.

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