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A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

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Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#221

Post by pjc50 »

direwolf20 wrote: post #191
Ms-J wrote: post #189

Stylometry works. I've seen it used it cases where the individual was identified from a group. One thing that is telling about the Epstein case study is how long it has stayed in public view. Pizzagate, which involved more powerful people, was shut down faster than I've ever seen for anything else. I still remember and have archived the more extreme content it's sick.

Pizzagate and Epstein are the same thing

Pizzagate was 4chan fanfiction. The Epstein files are real enough to have real consequences, although mostly for people outside the US accountability shield.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#223

Post by landdate »

turboponyy wrote: post #174
lordgrenville wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing about this is specific to GNOME, right? Imagemagick is cross-platform

I guess the Gnome-specific part is that Gnome comes with the Nautilus file browser, and the instructions add a script for Nautilus. But yea, this will work as long as you have imagemagick and Nautilus installed.

or just run script and input pdf as argument...

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#224

Post by landdate »

tombrossman wrote: post #90
anigbrowl wrote: post #71

I found this part interesting: There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easi…

GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly. ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5)) for pdf in "$@"; do magick -density 150 $pdf \ -…

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Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#225

Post by landdate »

landdate wrote: post #224
tombrossman wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly. ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5)) for pdf in "$@"; do magick -density 150 $pdf \ -…

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Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#226

Post by 1718627440 »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #110
ffsm8 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on their technical capability, yes. I mean even in this thread you got what are essentially one-liners to do it. Definitely less hassle then doing it irl

Hoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation. Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.

Installing MSYS2 is a matter of a few minutes. There is also WSL and macOS features a POSIX shell, imagemagick is likely already installed as a dependency somewhere, like ffmpeg often also is.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#227

Post by fc417fc802 »

brazzy wrote: post #183
zoky wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Such a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.

Vastly easier when you do it to one or a handful of documents. But if you want to do it to 2000 documents...

But at that point why bother with the fakery? Why does it matter if it's obviously of digital origin? As long as it's rendered down to an image problem solved.

Was the motivation for this benign (an employee skirting regulations) or malicious?

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#228

Post by danans »

Grisu_FTP wrote: post #206
bigyabai wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> previous presidential terms Term, not plural. There was one (1) interceding administration following Epstein's death. Trump promised that the Epstein files would be released if he was reelected, and then withheld files. Congress passed a bill remediating this, hence the newer tranche of files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epstein_Files_Transparency_Act

Im not too deep into USA politics and have very very bad memory so i dont remember how it went down. The Wikipedia article you linked says it was signed by trump. >and then withheld files. So did he sign that willingly in the end? Did he have to sign it? Did he cave because he said publicly he would?

A super majority in Congress voted for the files to be the released, which is enough to override a veto, so he had to sign it to save face.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#229

Post by watwut »

wtcactus wrote: post #192
direwolf20 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democrats do nothing because they are useless. Republicans do nothing because they are implicated.

Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless and couldn't get bothered with doing some work on it. Seems sensible...

Republicans are much more implicated then democrats. And republican part protects own pedophiles and criminals while democrats are like "sure, go after him" here.

So, yes that is exactly what happened.

Re: A case study in PDF forensics: The Epstein PDFs

#230

Post by danans »

wtcactus wrote: post #192
direwolf20 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democrats do nothing because they are useless. Republicans do nothing because they are implicated.

Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless and couldn't get bothered with doing some work on it. Seems sensible...

> Oh yes, I'm absolutely sure the Democrats were just sitting on a treasure trove of - only - Republican Party members' pedophile crimes for 5 years, and they did nothing because they are useless

No, they did it to protect wealthy and influential people, regardless of party.

It happens that such people are disproportionately Republican aligned, there are fewer places to hide this behavior in the Democratic tent - really just at the top - and the current POTUS seems to be very close to the center of it all.

Independently, we are learning that extremely wealthy and influential men often commit sex crimes through shared fixers like Epstein.

This is about huge wealth and power imbalances, no accountability for the wealthy and powerful, and the behavior they get away with as a result.

If there are any "good guys" here, it's Massie and Khanna for shaming Congress into forcing DOJ to release something, even while DOJ does everything it can to avoid/minimize it.

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