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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

#781

Post by phil21 »

cmarschner wrote: post #294
heavyset_go wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe this is malicious compliance.

Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence

The most likely explanation when hundreds of people make the same fuckup is the tooling and/or process sucks. Not that hundreds of people lack basic competence.

The most recent analogy I have is field techs in IT work. A company sends out "truck roll" tickets, and then complaints when there is a 40% failure/re-work rate on said truck rolls.

A single or handful of techs with said failure rate? Yep, perhaps incompetence.

A global failure rate across dozens of cities/countries and 40+ technicians total? No longer incompetence. At least at the field tech level. That's a documentation, process, and standards problem 100% guaranteed.

That some above average highly competent "hero" technicians are able to compensate for it is irrelevant.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#782

Post by yfw »

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…

Its befuddling you think theres mechanisms to incentivize competency over loyalty in some of these organizations

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#783

Post by yfw »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #733
jm4 wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It often comes down to not using the right software and training issues. They have to use Acrobat, which has a redaction tool. This is expensive so some places cheap out on other tools that don’t have a real redaction feature. They highlight with black and think it does the same thing whereas the redaction tool completely removes the content and any associated metadata from the document. This was basically the only r…

This is to be expected from an effort like DOGE simply because the E is for Efficiency. That is, how well a system is performing. The ratio of energy input to output. Unfortunately the E in DOGE should have been for Effectiveness. That is, is the system shooting at the right target, and how close is it to hitting that target. You can be very efficient but if you’re doing the wrong thing(s) you’re ultimately wasting r…

Or it a scam run by someone who wants to get access the social security info on americans. We are in trouble if you think the acronym is the biggest issue

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#784

Post by awesome_dude »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #235
awesome_dude wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Knowing your limits has to be a sign of intelligence. "Dumb" people (FTR the description actually refers to something rather than that which you think it does...) run around on the internet getting mad because they haven't thought things through...

It's an interesting question though. I know quite some "smart" people who lack self awareness to an almost fatal degree yet can outdo the vast majority of the population at solving logic puzzles. It tends to be a rather frustrating condition to deal with.

I think that you are conflating things.

Knowing your limits is a sign of intelligence, but it's not the only one, and it's not a requirement. Meaning that not having that understanding doesn't exclude you from being intelligent.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#785

Post by MuffinFlavored »

HaZeust wrote: post #762
ryukoposting wrote: post #709

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

You ought to re-read GP. They aren't saying there's a decision to be stupid, but that it's a byproduct of their process.

I'm not so sure.

> Some of them can barely use a mouse.

How/why are they employed for that position then?

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#786

Post by Ms-J »

h33t-l4x0r wrote: post #373
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You mean the guy who covered up for Epstein's 'suicide' and expected us morons to believe it? Let's assume that's true. How does it clash with him being "contemptible...but smart AF"?

Yeah I mean, orchestrating an assassination in a federal prison of a guy the whole world is watching, and never even so much as a whiff of a leak? Because how do you contain that without whacking everyone involved (which we would know about)? You don't. Not without teleportation, time-travel, or at the very least post-hypnotic suggestion. Oh he's smart AF, all right.

There were some leaks. Some of the events I would need to check my offline documents for more specific references but, for example, the Reddit leak with a person who was working at the jail saying that he had to let in someone associated with the military and they left shortly after Epstein was killed.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#787

Post by td2 »

Tell me if im too conspiritorial. Wouldnt it makes sense to have bad censorship on information thats e.g a 8/10 on a guilty scala. And make sure the 10/10s stay censored? Let People assume they can uncensor some, and what they uncensor is representative for any censored information. While the parts that couldnt be uncensored are way worse?

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#788

Post by CSSer »

throwup238 wrote: post #702
pessimizer wrote: post #599

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ahe…

Imagine if society were a program and laws, policies and procedures were its codebase. The scary thing is that the way it gets patched in reality isn't very different from the way agentic LLMs perform on actual codebases today. Bug in this department? Delete it. People abuse this system? Add more friction for legitimate users. Society has a need? Greenfield a feature that works great but doesn't fit in with existing systems at all. This didn't used to be so on the nose. I can't decide if we should welcome our new robot overlords or even what is a reflection of who anymore.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#789

Post by phendrenad2 »

crazygringo wrote: post #779
phendrenad2 wrote: post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't see the original pixels in the document at any resolution though. That's the point.

You don't see the pixels when you zoom in? Try again: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss... If you don't see jaggy pixel edges to the letters and form elements, what do you see?

Are you saying that I'm saying that there are no pixels in the document? Like, do you think that I think that scanners have come to operate on pure platonic forms and no longer use the concept of pixels? That would be really cool, wouldn't it. But no, I don't believe that. Hm. Where did this conversation go wrong. I think I was unclear in my last statement. I have yet to see someone show the original scribbles or ink marks that these OCR layers were generated based on. That's what I meant by "destructive". Now, I'm no expert on documents, so you might want to just cut your losses and stop trying to educate me and let me be uneducated in this matter. I'll accept that I don't know what I'm talking about, and reduce my criticisms of this whole thing to pointing out that the explanations don't make sense to me.

Re: Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

#790

Post by pfannkuchen »

rgblambda wrote: post #270
pfannkuchen wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I don’t believe we had that button at the founding Every government everywhere has and has always had state secrets e.g. names of spies. >make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense. People still commit capital offenses. This just makes it much easier to get to that witness and get away. We also know from empirical evidence that the death penalty is not useful for deterring cr…

No you are confused. People commit capital offenses for one of two reasons: either because they lack impulse control, or because they don’t think they will be caught.

If we fix the second one, we only have the first group. We can fix the second group, and the remaining first group, while it does apply to capital offenses in general, does not apply to violence against witnesses.

It seems like killing witnesses (after the fact, since witness protection does not intervene during the initial crime being witnessed to protect the witness mere moments after their witnessing) actually requires impulse control, because to do it you need to a) anticipate an abstract threat b) formulate a plan in advance c) carry out the plan. This is why it is typically executed in organized crime by bosses, and not by people engaging in random violence.

I’m not saying no one carries out capital offenses, I’m just saying that no one engages in witness directed violence due to lack of impulse control, they do it because they don’t think they will be caught, and more thorough rules enforcement does address that.

On witness protection making one’s criminal record secret. Okay? One can easily be opposed to that practice. How about we don’t make deals to hide relevant safety information from the public? It seems pretty easy to oppose. Just because the government does it, doesn’t mean it is a good reason. Are you defending the reason, or just stating what is? If you are just stating what is, I don’t see how that’s relevant.

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