Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks
(theguardian.com)538 points by vinni2 15 hours ago
538 points by vinni2 15 hours ago
I am happy with their lack of expertise and hope it stays that way, because I cannot remember a single case where redactions put the citizenry at a better place for it.
Of course if it's in the middle of an investigation it can spoil the investigation, allow criminals to cover their tracks, allow escape.
In such case the document should be vetted by competent and honest officials to judge whether it is timely to release it, or whether suppressing it just ensures that investigation is never concluded, extending a forever renewed cover to the criminals.
Since hundreds of people were involved the most likely explanation is incompetence
Having lots of people involved means that it's more likely to be malicious compliance or deniable sabotage. It only needs one person who disagrees with the redactions to start doing things that they know will allow info to leak.
> - Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?
Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
> What happens in a court case when this occurs? Does the receiving party get to review and use the redacted information (assuming it’s not gagged by other means) or do they have to immediately report the error and clean room it?
Typically, two copies of a redacted document are submitted via ECF. One is an unredacted but sealed copy that is visible to the judge and all parties to the case. The other is a redacted copy that is visible to the general public.
So, to answer what I believe to be your question: the opposing party in a case would typically have an unredacted copy regardless of whether information is leaked to the general public via improper redaction, so the issue you raise is moot.
> strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth)
If it's worth so little to your eyes/comprehension you will have no problem citing a huge count of cases where lawyers do not respect their obligations towards the courts and their clients...
That snide remark is used to discredit a profession in passing, but the reason you won't find a lot of examples of this happening is because the trust clients have to put in lawyers and the legal system in general is what makes it work, and betraying that trust is a literal professional suicide (suspension, disbarment, reputational ruin, and often civil liability) for any lawyer... that's why "strict" doesn't mean anything "little" in this case.
My guess would be that if the benefitting legal party didn't need to declare they also benefitted from this (because they legally can't be caught, etc.) they wouldn't.
I know and am friends with a lot of lawyers. They're pretty ruthless when it comes to this kind of thing.
Legally, I would think both parties get copies of everything. I don't know if that was the case here.
> Edit: after reading up on this it looks like attorneys have strict ethical standards to not use the information (for what little that may be worth), but the Associated Press was a third party who unredacted public court documents in a separate Facebook case.
Curious. I am not a litigator but this is surprising if you found support for it. My gut was that the general obligation to be a zealous advocate for your client would require a litigant to use inadvertently disclosed information unless it was somehow barred by the court. Confidentiality obligations would remain owed to the client, and there might be some tension there but it would be resolvable.
My recollection is that it varies quite a bit between jurisdictions. The ABA's model rules require you to notify the other party when they accidentally send you something but leave unspecified what else, if anything, you might have to do.
A famous case where this came into play was one of the Infowars defamation suits. Alex Jones’s lawyer accidentally sent the families’ lawyer the full contents of a phone backup. They notified Jones’s lawyer, and gave him some time to reply. After that time elapsed, the whole dump was considered fair game.
This is the moment when that mistake was revealed in court: https://youtu.be/pgxZSBfGXUM and this is the hearing for the emergency motion to suppress that data: https://youtu.be/dKbAmNwbiMk
"There are major differences between the Trump 1.0 and 2.0 administrations. In the Trump 1.0 administration, many of the most important officials were very competent men. One example would be then-Attorney General William Barr. Barr is contemptible, yes, but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file. There are ways to properly redact a PDF digitally, but going analog is foolproof.
The Trump 2.0 administration, in contrast, is staffed top to bottom with fools."
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-pdf-r...
> made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page
That's not very competent.
> going analog is foolproof
Absolutely not. There are many way's to f this up. Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text.
> Just the smallest variation in places that have been inked twice will reveal the clear text
Sure. But anyone can visually examine this. That means everyone with situational context can directly examine the quality of the redaction.
Contrast that with a digital redation. You have to trust the tool works. Or you have to separate the folks with context from the folks with techical competence. (There is the third option of training everyone in the DoJ how to examine the inner workings of a PDF. That seems wasteful.)
I suppose the best process would be this, and then after rescanning putting a black bar over each redacted text with image editing.
It's like Russian spies being caught in the Netherlands with taxi receipts showing they took a taxi from their Moscow HQ to the airport: corrupt organizations attract/can only hire incompetent people...
https://www.vice.com/en/article/russian-spies-chemical-weapo...
Anyone remember how the Trump I regime had staff who couldn't figure out the lighting in the White House, or mistitled Australia's Prime Minister as President?
> with taxi receipts
Please tell me they were saving them for expensing.
Or the passports discovered intact after a particularly heinous terrorist attack.
The bigger difference from my perspective is that they have competent people doing the strategy this time. The last Trump administration failed to use the obvious levers available to accomplish fascism, while this one has been wildly successful on that end. In a few years they will have realigned the whole power dynamic in the country, and unfortunately more and more competent people will choose to work for them in order to receive the benefits of doing so.
His last administration was filled with traditional Republicans.
I may have disagreed with them on virtually every policy point, but they seemed to disagree with the most harmful Trump policies as well.
We would have never agreed on the right policy, but we definitely agreed that his policy was not the right one.
> they have competent people doing the strategy this time
They had a great playbook in Project 2025. I'm not convinced Trump ever had the smartest people executing it.
> 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.
It’s easy to appear competent when you’re sitting on your butt doing nothing. Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit. Totally pathetic effort after the stellar performance by the legal eagles in the Obama administration. Trump 2.0 is pursing a very aggressive legal strategy. It has a bunch of very smart people racking up wins in areas such as funding cuts, education, civil rights, deployment of national guard, etc. It also has people that are… struggling. But, unlike with Trump 1.0, they’re actually trying to move the ball forward for their team.
> Had exactly did Barr and Co. accomplish in terms of moving forward the agenda people voted for? These guys were so eager to win accolades from liberals they couldn’t even pick the lowest hanging fruit.
Are you talking about the same Bill Barr? "Eager to win accolades from liberals" is a hilariously Trump-after-he-fired-someone thing to say.
Have you read his Wikipedia page? Do you know who he actually is?
> but smart AF. When Barr’s DOJ released a redacted version of the Mueller Report, they printed the whole thing, made their redactions with actual ink, and then re-scanned every page to generate a new PDF with absolutely no digital trace of the original PDF file.
This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with. Also, this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions. And it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision, but have to do the manual conversion step to printed position
> This is a dumb way of doing that, exactly what "stupid" people do when their are somewhat aware of the limits of their competence or only as smart as the tech they grew up with.
No, this is an example of someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful outcomes.
"Smart" people like to believe that knowing enough minutiae is enough to result in a successful outcome.
Actual smart people know that the process is more important than the minutiae, and proceed accordingly.
> someone understanding the limits of the people they delegate to, and putting in a process so that delegation to even a very dumb person still has successful
Oh, man, is he the only smart person in the whole department of >100k employees and an >x contractors??? What other fantasy do you need to believe in to excuse the flaws? Also, if he's so smart why didn't he, you know, hire someone smart for the job?
> even a very dumb person still has successful
Except it's easier to make mistakes following his process for both smart and dumb people, not be successful!
> Actual smart people know that the process is more important
So he's not actually smart according to your own definition because the process he has set up was bad, so he apparently did not know it was important to set it up better?
> important than the minutiae
Demanding only paper redactions is that minutiae.
Not at all. It's a procedure that's very difficult to unintentionally screw up. Sometimes that's what you want.
> you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Sure you can. Search and somehow mark the text (underline or similar) to make keywords hard to miss. Then proceed with the manual print, expunge, scan process.
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length
This is the only weakness of Barr's method.
> it doesn't eliminate the risk of non-redaction since you can't simply search&replace with machine precision
Anyong relying on automated tools to redact is doing so performatively. At the end of the day, you need people who understand the context to sit down and read through the documents and strike out anything that reveals–directly or indirectly, spelled correctly or incorrectly–too much.
> this type of redaction eliminates the possibility to change text length, which is a very common leak when especially for various names/official positions
Increasing the size of the redaction box to include enough of the surrounding text to make that very difficult.
Given the context and the baldly political direction behind the redactions, it's not at all unlikely that this is the result of deliberate sabotage or malicious compliance. Bondi isn't blacking these things out herself, she's ordering people to do it who aren't true believers. Purges take time (and often blood). She's stuck with the staff trained under previous administrations.
You mean the layers that were, in fact, just side effects of scanning the (non-authoritative) short form certificate?
It's funny seeing this play out because in my personal life anytime I'm sharing a sensitive document where someone needs to see part of it but I don't want them to see the rest that's not relevant, I'll first block out/redact the text I don't want them to see (covering it, using a redacting highlighter thing, etc.), and then I'll screenshot the page and make that image a PDF.
I always felt paranoid (without any real evidence, just a guess) that there would always be a chance that anything done in software could be reversed somehow.
If it's not done properly, and you happen at any point in the chain to put black blocks on a compressed image (and PDF do compress internal images), you are leaking some bits of information in the shadow casted by the compression algorithm : (Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/jpguncrop )
Somewhat related, I once sent a FOI request to a government agency that decided the most secure way to redact documents was to print them, use a permanent marker, and then scan them. Unfortunately they used dye based markers over laser print, so simply throwing the document into Photoshop and turning up the contrast made it readable.
I remember noticing that a teacher in high school had used white-out to hide the marks for the correct multiple choice answer on final exam practice questions before copying them. Then she literally cut-and-pasted questions from the practice questions for the final. I did mediocre on the essay, but got the highest score in the class on the multiple choice questions, because I could see little black dots where the white out was used.
And that's just in the non-adversarial simple case.
If you don't know the provenance of images you are putting black box on (for example because of a rogue employee intentionally wanting to leak them, or if the image sensor of your target had been compromised to leak some info by another team), your redaction can be rendered ineffective, as some images can be made uncroppable by construction .
(Self-plug : https://github.com/unrealwill/uncroppable )
And also be aware that compression is hiding everywhere : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compressed_sensing
Right, using stenography to encode some parity bits into an image so that lost information can be reconstructed seems like an obvious approach - all sorts of approaches you could use, akin to FEC. Haven't looked at your site yet, will be interested to see what you've built :)
Edit: I checked it out, nice, I like the lower res stenography approach, can work very nicely with good upscaling filters - gave it a star :)
>Let's crop it anyway
That is not cropping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cropping_(image)
>Cropping is the removal of unwanted _outer_ areas from a photographic or illustrated image.
I was thinking I understand what's going on but then I came to the image showing the diff and I don't understand at all how that diff can unredact anything.
It's not that you can unredact them from scratch (you could never get the blue circle back from this software). It's that you can tell which of the redacted images is which of the origin images. Investigative teams often find themselves in a situation where they have all four images, but need to work out which redacted files are which of the origins. Take for example, where headed paper is otherwise entirely redacted.
So with this technique, you can definitively say "Redacted-file-A is definitely a redacted version of Origin-file-A". Super useful for identifying forgeries in a stack of otherwise legitimate files.
Also good for for saying "the date on origin-file-B is 1993, and the file you've presented as evidence is provable as origin-file-b, so you definitely know of [whatever event] in 1993".
Ok thanks. That sounds reasonable.
>... and therefore you can unredact them
from that readme is just not true then I guess?
I learned that a long time ago when I was a student and wanted to submit a pdf generated by a trial version of some software as an assignment and was trying to be clever and cover the watermark that said unregistered with a white box.
When opening the file in my slow computer, I could see all the rendering of the watermark happening in slow motion until the white box would pop up on top of the text.
It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title.
Randomly removing these by trial and error will usually quite easily allow you to find the watermark and nix it, with the advantage that even a sophisticated recipient will not be able to find out from the pdf file what the watermark was.
I'll just send an image and not bother with a PDF.
(Note there's also other metadata in a PDF, which you may not want your recipient to know either.)
There's also metadata in the image files. What specifically would be sensitive in the pdf with screenshots metadata that is also not present in the sceenshot image metadata?
PDF has something called an "info dictionary", which most mainstream PDF-writing software will fill out with various bits of info that you might not want known.
Image files usually have substantially less metadata by default, unless it's one taken by a camera.
it's absolutely bewildering how ridiculous everything has been so far in terms of competence and this really takes the cherry on the top near Christmas too.
how much lower can they go ?!
USA is still very high, so they can go much much lower, but I think they might go to some still lower places, finding them where we didn't even know such places could exist. Some ideas:
- Leave NATO
- Start openly supporting Russia and North Korea
- Arrest whole International Criminal Court
- Preventively invade China
Reintroduce witch burning.
Reintroduce death penalties on public squares.
Taking Greenland and Venezuela is given, as they took most of Latin America already. Just the new Mexican president looks like the next thorn in their eyes. Too competent, too social, too anti-corruption.
Support for NATO within the US is Isreal-lite for different demographics. Pouring resources into it isn't without downsides.
They effectively already left NATO and openly support Russia already. ICC members are already under fire and some had their microsoft account banned by Trump. Trump will invade Greenland and Canada first. China is less of an priority.
This low https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_abuse_in_Pakistan aka a society where child abuse is simply accepted and mainstream, with the child abuse of child labour and dhijhadism being just additional nightmare fuel on top.
If we survive long enough I do believe historians will look back on this period and state as a matter of fact, rape and child abuse were completely acceptable, because it seems it’s totally fine with our elected leaders. If these leaders were democratically elected there is only one conclusion to draw from it…
Maybe it was always part of the plan. Plausible Deniability.
This is what I do while sharing such images. I crop out those parts first and then take another screenshot. I do not even risk painting over and then take another screenshot. I have been doing this forever.
That seems like a dangerous approach. Though printer drivers do often use rasterization, especially when targeting cheap printers, many printers can render vector graphics and text as well. Print-to-PDF will often use the later approach, unless of course the source program always rasterizes it's output when sending it out to the printer driver, or the used Print-to-PDF driver is particularly stupid.
I then convert the image to grayscale only. Then I apply a filter so that only 16 colors are used. And I then adjust brightness/contrast so that "white is really white". It's all scripted: "screenshot to PDF". One of my oldest shell script.
16 shades of grey (not 50) is plenty enough for text to still be smooth.
I do it for several reasons, one of them being I often take manual notes on official documents (which infuriates my wife btw) but then sometimes I need to then scan the documents and send them (local IRS / notary / bank / whatever). So I'll just scan then I'll fill rectangle with white where I took handnotes. Another reason is when there's paper printed on two sides, at scan times sometimes if the paper is thin / ink is thick, the other side shall show.
I wonder how that'd work vs adversarial inputs: never really thought about it.
"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte
Let all the files get released first.
Then show your hacks.
They're not 'hacks' it's the people doing the redaction making beginner mistakes of not properly removing the selectable text under the redactions. They're either drawing black rectangles over the text or highlighting it black neither of which prevents the underlying text from being selected.
Keeping that secret would require sponaneous silence from everyone looking at these docs which is just not possible.
This was my initial reaction to this news. I mean think about it
The Trump team knows that nobody is gonna buy whatever they put out as being the full story. Isn't this just the perfect way to make people feel like they got something they weren't supposed to see? They can increase trust in the output without having to increase trust in the source of it
And as far as I've heard there hasn't been anything "unredacted" that's been of any consequence. It all just feels a little too perfect.
It's the same government that invited a journalist to a signal discussion about ongoing military strike in Yemen.
Maybe that was just a ploy to get us to underestimate them.
No, it's the opposite, it's fairly damaging. Previously they could claim, dubiously but plausible, that all redactions were about protecting victims (the only redactions allowed under the act). A lot of the "undone redactions" are solely about protecting the abusers, illegal under the law.
Whether breaking a law actually matters anymore is another question though, as crime is legal now.
That was my thought. Just happen to leak some info for people you are interested in hurting but claim it was an accident.
And in terms of no big news in “unredacted”, it’s likely names that don’t mean anything to the average voter but damaging material for K Street.
I wonder if any of this is a conscious act of resistance vs. just incompetence.
And yes, I've heard of Hanlon's Razor haha
Black square vs redaction tool difference is well known if someone's job involves redacting PDF or just working with PDF. It's most likely that additional staffs were pulled in and weren't given enough training.
Colleagues whose full time job is doing this sort of thing for various bits of the government have told me this is exactly the case here. People from all over the government have been deputized to redact these documents with little or no prior training.
I wonder if this activity is being used as a kind of loyalty test. Keep track of who is assigned to redact what, and then if certain files leak or are insufficiently redacted, they indicate who isn't all in on Dear Leader.
It's not like a few more stories of Trump raping $whomever are going to move the needle at all, especially with how the media is on board with burying negative coverage of the regime.
Also if you're wondering how this activity isn't some kind of abuse of government resources, keep in mind that thanks to the Supreme Council's embrace of the Unitary Executive Theory (ie Sparkling Autocracy), covering up evidence about Donald Trump raping under-aged sex trafficking victims is now an official priority of the United States Government.
Yeah — don't attribute to resistance what can adequately be explained by idiocy.
Let people believe it's deliberate sabotage. Unfortunately, in real life, minions of a dictator serve the dictator; they don't risk their live or safety for a noble cause. Any screw-ups are a result of gross incompetence that is typical for every dictatorship.
Arendt:
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
Another option: also change some of the text underneath.
Given the sheer number of people they had to pull in and work overtime to redact Trump's name as well as those of prominent Republicans and donors as per numerous sources within the FBI and the administration itself, incompetence is likely for a chunk of it.
It’s funny that this effort, the largest exertion of FBI agents second only to 9/11, seems to be unprepared to redact. Cynically, I’m prepared for it to be part of a generative set of PDFs derived from the prompt “create court documents consistent with these 16 PDFs which obscure the role of Donald Trump between 1993 and 1998.”
There's a third option: Ambivalence.
Any major documents/files have been removed all together. Then the rest was farmed out to anyone they could find with basic instructions to redact anything embarrassing.
Since there's absolutely zero chance anyone in the administration will ever be held accountable for what's left, they're not overly concerned.
The thing that I've been waiting to see for years is the actual video recordings. There were supposedly cameras everywhere, for years. I'm not even talking about the disgusting stuff, I'm talking security for entrances, hallways, etc.
The FBI definitely has them, where are they?
What about Maxwell's media files? There was nothing found there? Did they subpoena security companies and cloud providers?
The documents are all deniable. Yes video evidence can now be easily faked, but real video will have details that are hard to invent. Regardless, videos are worth millions of words.
Reporting is that they had a basically impossible deadline and they took lawyers off of counterintelligence work to do this. So a conscious act of resistance is possible, but it's a situation where mistakes are likely - people working very quickly trying to meet a deadline and doing work they aren't that familiar with and don't really want to be doing.
It seems like a common tactic by this administration is to just not do what they are required to do until they have been told 50 times and criminal charges are being filed. I suspect the actual truth here is 'don't do this' turned into 'you have 1 day to do this and keep my name out of the release' which led to lots of issues. They probably spent more time deciding the order of pages to release, and how to avoid releasing the things damaging to the administration, than actually doing the work needed to release it. Now they will say 'look, see! You didn't give us enough time and our incompetence is the proof'
Considering the Comey, James, and Adams debacles, seems quite likely they're purged most people with a shred of competence.
It's a good question.
For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's relevant to the subpoena, it's marked as responsive, given an identifier and handed over to the other side. Non-responsive communication might not be eg attorney-client communications.
It can go further and parts of documents can be viewed as non-responsive and otherwise be blacked out eg the minutes of a meeting that discussed 4 topics and only 1 of them was about the company purchase. That may be commercially sensitive and beyond the scope of the subpoena.
Every such redaction and exclusion has to be logged and a reason given for it being non-responsive where a judge can review that and decide if the reason is good or not, should it ever be an issue. Can lawyers find something damaging and not want to hand it over and just mark it non-responsive? Technically, yes. Kind of. It's a good way to get disbarred or even jailed.
My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts, particularly when the only incentive is keeping their job and the downside is losing their career. It could happen.
What I suspect is happening is all the good lawyers simply aren't engaging in this redaction process because they know better so the DoJ had the wheel out some bad and/or unethical ones who would.
What they're doing is in blatant violation to the law passed last month and good lawyers know it.
There's a lot of this going on at the DoJ currently. Take the recent political prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, etc. No good prosecutor is putting their name to those indictments so the administration was forced to bring in incompetent stooges who would. This included former Trump personal attorneys who got improerly appointed as US Attorneys. This got the Comey indictment thrown out.
The law that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey co-sponsored was sweeping and clear about what needs to be released. The DoJ is trying to protect both members of the administration and powerful people, some of whom are likely big donors and/or foreign government officials or even heads of state.
That's also why this process is so slow I imagine. There are only so many ethically compromised lackeys they can find.
There's already bipartisan talk of inherent contempt being applied in the House, so the teeth might not wait for a future justice department.
There's no putting this genie back in the bottle.
MAGA is a cult and every cult has a mission. MAGA's mission is to uncover the elite pedophile ring. A cult can only be sustained so long as the mission is incomplete. Epstein is core foundational mythology. It's going to be really difficult if not impossible to redirect this.
You'll notice that Mike Johnson once again has put Congress in recess to avoid it taking action, this time a day before the 30 day deadline. The last time was for 7 weeks to try and get Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition to avoid all this. Republicans know what a core problem this is.
So it's politically damaging with his base for Trump to pardon attorneys involved in obstructing this. But even if he weathers that, it doesn't solve his problem.
For one, any attorneys despite any pardon are subject to disciplinary proceedings (including disbarment) as well as possible state charges.
For another, this stuff is simply going to get out. Where previously a DoJ attorney would be committing career suicide if they got caught leaking things like grand jury testimony and confidential non-prosecution agreements, now they're obligated to. So they're not leakers anymore, they're whistleblowers who are following the law.
Congress will eventually have to come back into session and Pam Bondi may actually face a real risk of impeachment. If that happens, who is going to want this job when the key requirement is being such a loyalist that you have to break the law?
Congress will also seek compliaance from DoJ and hold investigations as well as drip feed their own documents from,say, the House Oversight Committee.
And in the wings we still have Ghislaine Maxwell who is clearly operating under an implicit understanding that she will get a pardon or, more likely, a commutation. Her move to a lower security prison that isn't eligible for her type of offenses was (IMHO) clearly a move to buy her continued silence until it became politically possible to free her. I don't think that's ever going to be possible other than maybe a lame duck pardon when leaving office.
This story is only getting bigger.
> My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
> So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts,
Political redaction in this release under the Epstein Transparency Act is an overt, illegal act.
Does that reconfigure your estimation of whether DoJ attorneys that aren't the Trump inner-circle loyalists installed in leadership roles might engage in resistance against (or at least fail to point out methodological flaws in the inplmentation of) it?
Its not a hack to copy and paste text that is part of the document data. The incompetence of the people responsible to comply with the law doesnt mean its reasonable to label something a hack.
Please change the title.
If I open your laptop and guess your password then that counts as hacking you in both legal and security terms
You don't need to do some sophisticated thing for it to be considered hacking
You guessing my password is not the same as a know and expected behavior of a program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. PDF is a format known to have layers. Lawyers are trained on day one not to make this mistake. (I am a recovering lawyer). This is either incompetence or deliberate disclosure.
Placing a black box on the text isn’t a redaction any more than placing a sticky note would be. No reasonable person can expect a sticky note to permanently prevent readers from seeing text and no reasonable person can expect a black overlay box in pdf to prevent reading text because this is literally a fundamental feature of pdfs as a layer format file
If someone sends me a document with text in it that they meant to remove but didn't and then I read that text, I haven't hacked anything they're just incompetent.
Hacking is unauthorised use of a system. Reading a document that was not adequately redacted can hardly be considered hacking.
Or in case some folks find the addition of a computer confusing here, if someone sends you a physical letter and they've used correction tape or a black marker to obscure some parts of the letter, and you scratch away the correction tape or hold the letter up to a light source to read what's underneath, have you committed a crime?
I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know what the law has to say about this. But I do have at least a small handful of brain cells to rub together, so I know what the law _should_ say about this.
Hacking is not just authorised use of a system. Hacking and hacking techniques can apply to systems you fully own or systems which you are authorised to hack. Hacking is using something in a way that the designer didn’t anticipate or intend on.
Adobe designed pdf to behave this way. Placing layers over text doesn’t remove the text from the file. They have a specific redaction feature for that purpose.
I’m not an attorney or anything, but the relevant federal statute is explicitly about unauthorized access of computer systems (18 USC 1030).
Opening someone else’s laptop and guessing the password would absolutely fall under that definition, but I think it’s very much questionable if poking around a document that you have legitimately obtained would do so.
Hacking is any use of a technology in a way that it wasn’t intended. The redaction is so stupid as to almost appear intentional, so maybe you’re right, this isn’t hacking because maybe the information was intended to be discovered.
It’s not a hack. It’s known, expected behavior of the program. Adobe has a specific feature to redact. Color filled boxes is not it.
> limit/lack of authorization
By serving up the PDF file I am being authorized to receive, view, process, etc etc the entire contents. Not just some limited subset. If I wasn't authorized to receive some portion of the file then that needed to be withheld to begin with.
That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
For starts, wouldn't it be kind of ironic to set up limits and authorization in a context that is about making some content available to the public?
I'd say any technical or legal restrictions or possible means to enforce DRM ought to be disabled or absent from the media format used when disseminating content that must be disclosed.
Censorship (of necessary) should purge the data entirely,ie: replace by ###
That's not true, you can mistakenly receive data you're not authorized to have (might even be criminal to have!)
> That's entirely different from gaining unauthorized entry to a system and copying out files that were never publicly available to begin with.
That's not the sum total of hacks, if you have publicly accessible password-protected PDF and guess the password as 1234, that's a hack. Copy& paste of black boxes is similarly a hack around content protection
> To put it simply, I am not responsible for the other party's incompetence.
To put it even simpler, this conversation is not about you and your responsibility, but about the different meanings of the word "hack "
Not the only thing hack means now, or the most common usage anymore. See "life hack" - it means unexpected technique.
But this isn’t an unexpected technique it’s literally the core design of the pdf format. It’s a layered format that preserves the layers on any machine. Adobe has a redaction feature to overcome the default behavior that each layer can be accessed even if there is a top layer in front.
Maybe someone knows law can answer this. Is it a crime to ”unredact” files in the US? You probably know that the information is classified since you are putting in the work. Where I live I believe it’s a crime if you share information that is classified even if it’s leaked. So I would not publicly brag about this online.
The average office worker has it on their computer, illustrating how commonplace unredacting could be. Any text tool will work, even some designed to detect bad redactions in PDFs via drag and drop (now specifically trained on these known bad redactions). https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray
Apart from the technological and procedural question, I would love to learn why the DOJ found it important to protect Indyke. He was Epstein's lawyer, and now we learn that he was personally involved. He is not a Washington person. We expected there to be politically motivated protection of certain people, but is the DOJ just going to blanket protect anybody in the docs?
Indyke works for other powerful people, runs in MAGA circles.
Two things come to mind:
* Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1]
* He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented.
[1] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_doj-f...
> It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans.
Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.
He was Epstein’s lawyer, he almost certainly has the dirt on anyone the DoJ wants to protect, and may be the kind of person that would be inclined to burn whoever DoJ was protecting if he wasn't getting treatment at least as favorable.
All you have to do is work for a MAGA person or MAGA billionaire donor for them to protect you.
From TFA:
> [Indyke] was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate.
So I don't know about "not a Washington person", but clearly connections exist to the current administration.
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 remove the underlying text; the concealed content could be extracted. This led to extensive discussion and an Inspector General review.
- UK Ministry of Defence submarine security document (UK, 2011) A MoD report had “redacted” sections that could be revealed by copying/pasting the “blacked out” text—because the text was still present, just visually obscured.
- Apple v. Samsung ruling (U.S., 2011) A federal judge’s opinion attempted to redact passages, but the content was still recoverable due to the way the PDF was formatted; copying text out revealed the “redacted” parts.
- Associated Press + Facebook valuation estimate in court transcript (U.S., 2009) The AP reported it could read “redacted” portions of a court transcript by cut-and-paste (classic overlay-style failure). Secondary coverage notes the mechanism explicitly.
A broader “history of failures” compilation (multiple orgs / years) The PDF Association collected multiple incidents (including several above) and describes the common failure mode: black shapes drawn over text without deleting/sanitizing the underlying content. https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PD...