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Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

neosmart.net

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Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#71
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide a couple examples of the laws they're violating?

As noted above: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-119publ38/pdf/PLAW-... : the Attorney General was to have produced the entirety of the Epstein files, with very narrowly-enumerated redactions, in December. She has not done so. Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A. In additio…

Allegations aren't evidence. Has the Administration actually been found guilty of violating the law - if that is even possible.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about court orders? https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/ice-violations-judge-... > ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence," Schiltz said, adding that he counted 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/frustrations-from-judge-prosecu...

[flagged]

"Allegations" from the exact judges whose orders aren't being enacted? The orders in question are pretty simple: release this guy. Don't take this guy out of state. It's pretty clear when they're not being followed. This guy is not a slouch:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/27/patrick-schiltz-jud...

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

Did you notice that one article I linked involved a DoJ lawyer admitting that she couldn't convince ICE to obey court orders that she was trying to transmit to them? That's beyond an allegation and into admission. How is that not evidence?

More on these ignored court orders:

https://www.mprnews.org/story/2026/01/28/ice-illegally-detai...

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#73

This is one of those things that seems like a nerd snipe but would be more easily accomplished through brute forcing it. Just get 76 people to manually type out one page each, you'd be done before the blog post was written.

> Just get 76 people I consider myself fairly normal in this regard, but I don't have 76 friends to ask to do this, so I don't know how I'd go about doing this. Post an ad on craigslist? Fiverr? Seems like a lot to manage.

First, build a fanbase by streaming on Twitch.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#74
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As noted above: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-119publ38/pdf/PLAW-... : the Attorney General was to have produced the entirety of the Epstein files, with very narrowly-enumerated redactions, in December. She has not done so. Furthermore, there are numerous allegations that the documents that have been released contain CSAM, which (referencing the PDF above) may fall afoul of 18 U.S.C. 2252–2252A. In additio…

Allegations aren't evidence. Has the Administration actually been found guilty of violating the law - if that is even possible.

Yes, the Abrego Garcia and Öztürk detentions are two very newsworthy cases that have actually reached the point of a final judgement in the district courts, as opposed to "merely" preliminary injunctions against the government.

(It's also worth noting that almost none of the government's appeals to their losses in preliminary injunctions have been on the merits as to whether or not their actions were legal, but rather on the grounds of "no one should be allowed to challenge our actions," which has also been a fairly losing argument for everybody except SCOTUS.)

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#75
post #7

> it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this Or worse. She did.

there are a few messaging conversations between FB agents early on that are kind of interesting. It would be very interesting to see them about the releases. I sometimes wonder if some was malicious compliance... ie, do a shitty job so the info get's out before it get re-redacted... we can hope...

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#76

Nerdsnipe confirmed :) Claude Opus came up with this script: https://pastebin.com/ntE50PkZ It produces a somewhat-readable PDF (first page at least) with this text output: https://pastebin.com/SADsJZHd (I used the cleaned output at https://pastebin.com/UXRAJdKJ mentioned in a comment by Joe on the blog page)

> It produces a somewhat-readable PDF (first page at least) with this text output

Any chance you could share a screenshot / re-export it as a (normalized) PDF? I’m curious about what’s in there, but all of my readers refuse to open it.

Re: Recreating Epstein PDFs from raw encoded attachments

#80

Given how much of a hot mess PDFs are in general, it seems like it would behoove the government to just develop a new, actually safe format to standardize around for government releases and make it open source. Unlike every other PDF format that has been attempted, the federal government doesn't have to worry about adoption.

You’re thinking about this as a nerd. It’s not a tools problem, it’s a problem of malicious compliance and contempt for the law.

Even the previous justice departments struggled with PDFs. The way they handled it was scrubbing all possible metadata and uploading it as images.

For example, when the Mueller reports were released with redactions, they had no searchable text or meta data because they were worried about these exact kind of data leaks.

However, vast troves of unsearchable text is not a huge win for transparency.

PDFs are just a garbage format and even good administrations struggle.

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