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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

#701

Post by orionspelt »

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…

Befuddling you are befuddled by non-tech obsessed people failing to grasp tech.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#702

Post by throwup238 »

pessimizer wrote: post #599
beasthacker wrote: post #521

The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose. The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as…

This is an extremely interesting perspective. I haven't really heard it before, but I once worked for the state in a technical capacity and watched as they spent entire workdays and scheduled multiple meetings with the sole purpose of figuring out ways to slow down or narrow FOIA requests. I didn't really know how they slept at night, but I don't know how a lot of people sleep at night. I only had to be involved beca…

There’s a great Australian comedy called Utopia about a government department that has a whole episode B-plot of the characters working on the Aussie equivalent of a FOIA request. It’s pretty funny and in the end one of the workers just finds it easier to leak the document to the requesting journalist rather than deal with the official process, even though it was mundane contract details on a carpark that came in ahead of schedule and under budget.

In another episode they’re trying to find out the length of a stealth submarine for construction planning purposes of a port or something, and they have to go through endless layers of security checks with the military that lead nowhere. In the end a reporter filming a documentary episode on the government agency tells them the length because they were allowed to film the submarine on another program.

Definitely recommend the show and my friends in government say it’s scarily accurate.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#704

Post by viccis »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #420
pfannkuchen wrote: post #184

Stupid question: why is the government even allowed to redact stuff? Isn’t the government keeping secrets from the people totally antithetical to democracy?

To protect innocent people for examples, or to not reveal some secrets.

Some of these don't feel like they fall into those. For example in [1], on page 41, I can't imagine how that redaction fits either.

1: https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1HFqpFLOJgYLiAgjT...

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#705

Post by stocksinsmocks »

crazygringo wrote: post #548
insertchatbot wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Yes, signed by “U.K.L. Lee” himself. Did you actually look at it? These FBI goombas aren’t even trying.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#707

Post by seg_lol »

fwip wrote: post #558
seg_lol wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mal-redacted file actually points to a crime itself of redacting things it shouldn't have.

Or, if there is indeed an ongoing investigation on those two, it could be leaking that fact, right?

Not in this case, this is just a cover for the guilty because this shows that Epsteins Estate also works for Trump. The rot runs deep. There is no investigation, that is the point.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#708

Post by tremon »

mrguyorama wrote: post #665
metabagel wrote: post #603

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have 30 years direct evidence that the users would ignore that warning, complain about the computer warning them too much, insist that the warning is entirely unnecessary, and then release a document with important information unredacted. The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on. They don't think of a PDF as a set of rendering instructions that can…

The problem is that the user generally doesn't have a functioning mental model of what's actually going on

Sorry, but a professional user not having an operational understanding of the tools they're working with is called culpable negligence in any other profession. A home user not knowing how MS Word works is fine, but we're talking desk clerks whose primary task is document management, and lawyers who were explicitly tasked with data redaction for digital publication. I don't think we should excuse or normalize this level of incompetence.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#709

Post by ryukoposting »

beasthacker wrote: post #521

The U.S. federal government is bad at redactions on purpose. The offices responsible for redactions are usually in-house legal shops (e.g., an Office of Chief Counsel inside an agency like CBP) and the agency’s FOIA office. They’re often doing redactions manually in Adobe, which is slow, tedious, and error-prone. Because the process is error prone, the federal government gets multiple layers of review, justified (as…

Please refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

No, there isn't an enormous cohort of bureaucrats going to work every day, collectively wringing their hands and saying "haha, we're going to be STUPID today!"

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#710

Post by queuebert »

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.

Adobe's contempt for users strikes again.
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