5 ms·
Un-Redactor
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- Waterluvian 9mo agoAre there tools for trying to predict possible fits for redacted data given font, black bar size, and context?
- jmward01 9mo agoI was thinking something similar. I wonder if the font uses kerning, and you know the rendering engine and the algorithm for how the text was blocked, if you can get exact text back even. Or, at a minimum, rule out words based on the available information. Not a field I am familiar with but I bet there are a lot of ways to uncover the redacted values.
- amarant 9mo agoI don't know what fonts are typically used in redacted documents, but surely this kind of technique could be rendered useless by a mono space font? Seems silly not to use a mono space font in these cases.
- sa46 9mo agoWouldn’t a mono space font provide more information since you can extrapolate the exact number of characters?
- jmward01 9mo agoThis is the government. The documents are faxed/photo-copied/etc etc. They are a bunch of random docs from random sources and the original creators never thought 'This will be redacted'. They just fired up word and started typing.
- estimator7292 9mo agohttps://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/
- DavidSJ 9mo agoIn some redacted documents, there is even an alphabetical word index at the end with a list of pages on which the words appear. The redacted words are also redacted in the word index, but the alphabetically preceding and succeeding words are visible, as is the number of index lines taken up by the redacted word's entry, which correlates with the number of appearances of that word. This seems like rather useful information to constrain a search by such a tool.
- kvthweatt 9mo agoYes.
- mapontosevenths 9mo agoDoes it even matter? The kind of people who see stuff like this and are still fine with it are likely fine with anything else thats discovered as well. The truth has become irrelevant. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA00025010.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000250...
- kvthweatt 9mo agoThis just attempts to match box dimensions.
- dylan604 9mo agoi'm sure people will ask chatGPT to do this very thing, so it's a good thing LLMs never make shit up
- 8note 9mo ago> Republishing altered documents is illegal what exactly does this mean? misrepresenting the altered document as unaltered? i cant imagine it being illegal to do madlibs
- kvthweatt 9mo agoThat's the point though. You cannot just write anything and put it up. It must be accurate. Even that being said, you still shouldn't reupload your altered document anywhere.
- cess11 9mo agoWhy not? In some cases it might amount to fraud or something, but in general, why would it be prohibited?
- dylan604 9mo agothis tool coming out on the heels of the DOJ releasing a trove of redacted documents doesn't come across as coincidental to me. let's think about this for a bit longer from that idea of using this on legal evidence...why would doctoring a legal document be prohibited?
- nradov 9mo agoGenerally there is nothing illegal about altering a legal document, or even a strict definition of what counts as a legal document. Under some circumstances it could be illegal to alter a document and use that for fraud, or submit an altered document to a court or government agency. If the doctoring falsely defames someone then you could also open yourself up to a civil suit.
- dylan604 9mo agoIf you can be sued for it, sounds like it's prohibited to me
- typeofhuman 9mo ago> lets you put your own information over a redaction box. This doesn't remove redactions, it lets you write over them.
- dundarious 9mo agoYes, this is at best a project for trolling, and it is getting voted on because people naively think it has some useful applications regarding the Epstein documents. It does not. This is trash, IMO.
- kvthweatt 9mo agoJust fixed it, try it again. Added images to show the tool in action.
- dundarious 9mo agoNo, it was better when it was broken, because it serves no positive purpose. Low quality across the board.
- websiteapi 9mo agowhy unredact, rather than just edit the pdf to remove the redaction box and insert whatever you want? presumably you'd want a viewer to see that you modified a redaction, but why?
- speedgoose 9mo agoFrom a previous post of the author, I guess the motivation is to write back the text on top on the black boxes.
- dylan604 9mo agoanyone using PDF features to redact are just not doing it right
- kvthweatt 9mo agoThe point is you can perform a box dimension attack. If you have a known input, you can match all outputs. Example: Document that DOJ took down and reuploaded that redacted Trump's name when it was previously available. They used the same size boxes in each location. You cannot do this with handwriting, but fonts have known widths.
- cortesoft 9mo agoCouldn’t it be the same letters in a different order?
- dylan604 9mo agodepending on the font used, the spacing between letters can change depending on what letters are next to each other.
- fn-mote 9mo agoA probabilistic attack on redaction is still an attack. You'd never be blase about the same information about your password. Plus with redaction there's a pretty small number of posible words when the boxes are small.
- BLKNSLVR 9mo agoie. Twerp
- jaredwiener 9mo agoFree Law Project also has this open source tool to detect bad redactions: https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray
- yellow_lead 9mo agoWith regards to the Epstein files, it seems some files are not redacted well. For instance, this file says Mona if you remove the top layer https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA00013678.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000136... Some others I've seen include 1-3 more letters than are in the redaction.
- brikym 9mo agoYou should really put some usage instructions on the README. uv run --with PyMuPDF --with pillow ./unredactor-main/unredact.py I tried a couple PDFs but get "Failed to open PDF: bad argument type for built-in operation". Redactle.net has something similar where you can double-click or tap-hold then type a note over the redacted word.
- austinjp 9mo agoI see another similar comment, but I have an explicit question. Does the following from the README hold any water at all, legally? > I am not responsible for your use of this tool. ... By using this tool you claim all legal liability for any documents you create with it. Without a detailed and carefully worded license, does this confer any protection whatsoever? Having asked that, I'm not sure what protection would be needed. Could a victim of abuse of this tool (or similar) seek some sort of take-down of the tool? It seems unlikely but I'm curious about the scenario.
- kvthweatt 9mo agoWell what are they gonna do tell me take the tool down? Too late.
- kvthweatt 9mo agoNew info dropped: The redactions by DOJ are so sloppy that you can COPY AND PASTE blocks of text to a new text editor and see the "redacted" text beneath. Try it yourself. They did not properly redact many documents. It's about to get wild.
- kvthweatt 9mo agoI fixed all the issues in the tool. It works now.
- kvthweatt 9mo agoAdded the ability to auto unredact and generate HTML from your PDF files.