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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

#601

Post by maxerickson »

bena wrote: post #597
rkagerer wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker. I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public. Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear teleme…

I think it's part laziness here. Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.

The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data:

https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf....

That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#602

Post by metabagel »

rkagerer wrote: post #537
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…

Never trust a lawyer with a redact tool any more complicated than a marker. I've seen lawyers at major, high-priced law firms make this same mistake. Once it was a huge list of individuals names and bank account balances. Fortunately I was able to intervene just before the uploaded documents were made public. Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear teleme…

> Folks around here blame incompetence, but I say the frequency of this kind of cock-up is crystal clear telemetry telling you the software tools suck.

Absolutely. They know this is confusing, and they're bound and determined not to fix it. At the least, they need a pop-up to let you know that it's not doing what you might think it's doing.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#603

Post by metabagel »

maxerickson wrote: post #601
bena wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's part laziness here. Placing a black rectangle on a PDF is easier than modifying an image or removing text from that same PDF.

The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf.... That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.

I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#604

Post by nabbed »

CNN has an article claiming that the botched redaction work is the fault of the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office, not the Justice Department. From https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...:

"The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021."

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#605

Post by rurban »

vkou wrote: post #451
rurban wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which democracy? The USA isn't one for decades already

I've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries. Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap. Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not ob…

Unfortunately this is unrealistic as we cannot travel to both countries easily.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#606

Post by BurningFrog »

Avicebron wrote: post #577
BurningFrog wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age. It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way. They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs. Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not e…

I agree they have no understanding of math, science or technology. But I disagree with your assessment of motivations to get "better paying jobs", most people who went into journalism I knew were in brownstones right out of college. They didn't need the money, they inherited it, it was the lifestyle they were after.. that's why we get the journalism we do..

Yeah, I should have resisted speculating about the why, when the fact/assertion itself is the important part.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#607

Post by EGreg »

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

Um - and not just journalists.

Most “bullshit jobs” are already being replaced. The era of bullshit jobs is coming to an end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#608

Post by quesera »

tsunamifury wrote: post #588
BurningFrog wrote: post #564

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's important to understand who becomes a journalist in this age. It's people who are very good with words, and at talking to anyone and everyone about anything, both is a friendly and confrontation way. They also have almost no understanding of math, science or technology. If they did, they'd get better paying jobs. Journalism used to be a well paid prestigious career that attracted brilliant people. There is not e…

Haha. I was a journalist for many years. I went to UC Berkeley. I likely currently have a far better paying job than you and have invented technical concepts that founded the LLM. Me thinks the fool speaks of himself.

If you had a better understanding of math and science, you'd know the difference between the concepts of "one" and "statistically meaningful".

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#609

Post by maxerickson »

metabagel wrote: post #603
maxerickson wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tool in Acrobat is exactly placing black rectangles on stuff. There's a second step you are supposed to do when you are finishing marking the redactions that edits out the content underneath them, and offers to sanitize other hidden data: https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/resources/how-to-redact-a-pdf.... That failed redactions happen over and over and over is kind of amazing.

I hope you're not blaming the users. It's understandable they would be confused. The software needs to clarify it for the user. Perhaps, when you try to save it, it should warn you that it looks like you tried to redact text, and that text is still embedded in the document and could be extracted. And then direct you to more information on how to complete the redaction.

Professional users doing more than 1 document? Yes, I'm absolutely blaming them.

I agree that affordances are good, but tools are tools, they can have rough edges, it's okay that it occasionally takes more than zero knowledge and attention to use them.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#610

Post by pstuart »

culi wrote: post #257
refurb wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also don’t assume the mistake wasn’t intentional.

This was my initial reaction to this news. I mean think about it The Trump team knows that nobody is gonna buy whatever they put out as being the full story. Isn't this just the perfect way to make people feel like they got something they weren't supposed to see? They can increase trust in the output without having to increase trust in the source of it And as far as I've heard there hasn't been anything "unredacted"…

As others have mentioned, the administration is staffed and run by loyalists, whose primary skills are flattery and obedience.

Back in the day they had true masters of the Dark Arts. The forged letters about Bush's service were incredibly convenient in helping Bush beat Kerry. I am not alone in thinking it to be masterminded by Karl Rove.

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