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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Un-redacted text from released documents began circulating on social media on Monday evening
People examining documents released by the Department of Justice in the Jeffrey Epstein case discovered that some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
Un-redacted text from these documents began circulating through social media on Monday evening. An exhibit in a civil case in the Virgin Islands against Darren K Indyke and Richard D Kahn, two executors of Epstein’s estate, contains redacted allegations explaining how Epstein and his associates had facilitated the sexual abuse of children. The exhibit was part of the second amended complaint in the state case against Indyke and Kahn.
Did they just change the back and foreground colours to black and call it a day?
I would like to think that it was on purpose. So whoever was working on that knew that someone could realize it. I don’t know why I keep having faith in people.
It makes sense. They didn’t flush the entirety of the FBI and we know Patel isn’t doing all this himself, so I too believe that there are people just doing some good ol’ malicious compliance. Apparently documents from previous administrations didn’t have this issue so they could do it correctly, they just aren’t.
Doubtful.
This happens ALL the time. Countless publicly released police reports, legal documents, and even (allegedly) classified documents all just use the black highlighter in Acrobat because “that is what I would do if this were a physical copy”.
One of the first things you do when anyone gives you a “redacted” PDF is to just highlight the text. The next step up is to then check the layers of the PDF in case they added black rectangles to a scanned document (and a lot of OCR tools actually do that by default).
Same with seeing if you have the document history in a word file.
Never underestimate how computer illiterate the average person is. We shit on genz for not knowing what a directory structure is but… they ain’t that far behind the curve. It is mostly just that VERY narrow subset of genx/millennial who grew up with “family computers” that picked up most of these skills.
But the average person isn’t redacting important info left and right, is it?
Average people work in all layers of government, including records. It’s not a crazy idea that someone lacking certain skills might end up with the task of redacting documents. Not all redactions are damning evidence of a crime - my own divorce decree (which are all public information) would have my kids’ names redacted if some rando requested a copy of it.
Why wouldn’t it be?
Presumably they are better at investigative work and shooting people. Unless they are specifically involved in “cyber crime” or “digital forensics” there is no reason to expect high levels of computer skills.
In an even competent world? The people who ARE experts at that would have been consulted to define the protocol everyone else follows. Yeah…
Kids are goof at using things they interact with. Blame smartphone OS Devs for not having file managers installed by default
Back in my day “programming” meant typing assembly opcodes into an assembler and having to know what registers your machine had
Then high level languages like C came along and everyone got lazy
Android has included a file manager for a very long time.
Absolutely.
People who work for the government usually like the idea of government.
It’s a shockingly common source of data leaks. There are some versions with more subtlety, like actually redacting the text but a copy of it remains in the file for version tracking, as a separate layer, or things like that.
PDF is derived from printer control tools, and has a lot of features built in that add flexibility for office document purposes, but can be surprising for people not expecting it.
If you’re working as a team to redact documents you might deliberately use something reversible so that the person checking your work can 1) see what you redacted 2) unredact if they think you shouldn’t have.
Sometimes people also just don’t know there’s actual reaction tools built in.
The part that I’m more surprised by is that whatever process they have for releasing documents didn’t involve passing it through a system of some sort that automatically fixed that sort of thing.