21 ms·

Some Epstein file redactions are being undone

• tomekf 10mo ago
  How it’s done from technical point?
  • general1465 10mo ago
    Mistaking redaction tool (replaces data with black square) and black highlighter (adds black square as another layer). If people doing redactions are computer-illiterate, they won't see the difference.
  • mmh0000 10mo ago
    Layers. PDF is an absurdly complex file format. It's part of the reason there is no single "good" PDF reader, just a lot of mediocre PDF readers that are all terrible in their own way. Which is a topic for another day. There are several ways to remove data in a PDF: - Remove the data. This is much harder than it sounds. Many PDF tools won't let you change the content of a PDF, not because it isn't possible, but because you'll likely massively screw up the formatting, and the tools don't want to deal with that. - Replace the data. This what what all the "blackout" tools do, find "A" and replace with "🮋". This is effective and doesn't break formatting since it's a 1-to-1 replacement. The problem with "replacing" is that not every PDF tool works the same way, and some, instead, just change the foreground and background color to black; it looks nearly the same, but the power of copy-and-paste still functions. - Then you have the computer illiterate, who think changing the foreground and background color to black is good enough anyway.
    • hallole 10mo ago
      Thanks for this. Really quells the urge I get every so often to just code my own PDF editor, because they all suck and certainly it couldn't be THAT hard. Such hubris!
      • gregsadetsky 10mo ago
        Don't stop yourself before getting started. I believe in you - maybe you could write the one editor that would actually work! Not kidding - it's a ~~~billion dollar market haha Make an MVP/Show HN :-)
      • brailsafe 10mo ago
        Heh, have at it, here's the full spec: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/assets/5b15559b96303194340b99820d3a70fa/PDF_ISO_32000-2.pdf https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/assets/5b... Should take... a weekend tops? ;) PDF is crazy and scary
        • embedding-shape 10mo ago
          7.5.6 "Incremental updates" from the specification is an interesting section too, speaking about accessing data people didn't think to remove from PDF files properly.
        • CamperBob2 10mo ago
          We will be able to say that AGI has arrived when we can hand that spec off to a model and tell it to build an Acrobat clone.
          • exasperaited 10mo ago
            We will be able to say that AGI has arrived when the AI hands it back and says "no".
            • CamperBob2 10mo ago
  • oliwarner 10mo ago
    They drew black boxes over the text. The text is still underneath. On OCR'd scanned documents, the text you'd copy is actually stored in metadata and just linked by position to the image. Anyway, if you click on a "redaction", you're clicking on the box and can't select the text underneath, but if you just highlight the text around it, you can copy all the original text. It's a bizarre oversight.
  • 3eb7988a1663 10mo ago
    I remember reading the recommendation for journalists to redact documents is to black them out in the digital version, print it out, and re-scan it. Anything else has too many potential ways by which it might be possible to smuggle data.
    • dmurray 10mo ago
      Even that might leak to length attacks: one reasonable plaintext would lead to black bars of 1135 px, another to 1138 px, and with enough redactions you can converge on what the plaintext might be. The only safe way for journalists is to paraphrase what the document said and to say "an unnamed source claims that ..." and to guarantee with your reputation, and the reputation of your publisher, that you are being faithful to what the original source said. For even better results, combine multiple sources. Unfortunately paraphrasing things and taking editorial responsibility have both been deprecated in favour of rereleasing press releases in the house style, so it's difficult to get the actual journalism these days.
      • eviks 10mo ago
        You can use constant /variable length replacement to avoid length leaks?
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • Gigachad 10mo ago
    PDF is less like an image, and more like a web page where elements can be stacked on top of each other. You can visually obscure things by sticking a black rectangle over the top, but anyone who inspects inside the pdf can remove it or see the text in the source. There would also be a mix of text documents, and image scans. The way to censor each is different. Perfectly censoring documents, particularly digital ones is actually surprisingly difficult.
    • stronglikedan 10mo ago
      > Perfectly censoring documents, particularly digital ones is actually surprisingly difficult. But the difficult part is easily repeatable once it's figured out, which is why it surprises me that it's not built into Acrobat as a tool already.
      • etskinner 10mo ago
        In fact it is already built into Acrobat: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/protect-documents/redact-pdfs/redact.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/desktop/protect-documents/re...
• montroser 10mo ago
  Let's nobody make any fuss about this yet, lest they wise up before releasing the rest of the docs this way too!
• lawn 10mo ago
  Lots of these redaction doesn't make sense unless they're made to protect the rich and powerful. Not surprising of course.
• Kaibeezy 10mo ago
  See also: We Just Unredacted the Epstein Files https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121 I tried to ascertain, but am not certain, this is the original blog source. Maybe they made some prior X posts.
• Alifatisk 10mo ago
  Alright, now when everyone knows this. I hope people have backed up all the files to unredact everything before DOJ retracts the sensitive documents.
• The-Old-Hacker 10mo ago
  See also: https://x.com/FaytuksNetwork/status/2003237895897780632 https://x.com/FaytuksNetwork/status/2003237895897780632
• xhkkffbf 10mo ago
  So is the data extracted the names of the victims that were supposed to be hidden to protect them? Or is there something else that might be worthy of exposing?
  • kjkjadksj 10mo ago
    There are pages that are nothing but redacted text. It isn’t going to be a victims name copy pasted 80 times in a row…
    • wafflemaker 10mo ago
      >It isn’t going to be a victims name copy pasted 80 times in a row… You can't possibly know that! (Sorry, watching Grinch, Jim Carrey spoke through me).
  • tempaccountabcd 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • kgwxd 10mo ago
    i assume the downvoters don't see the importance of the question.
    • watwut 10mo ago
      The downvoters assume that it is a bad faith question. The downvoters are 99% right with that. If the 1% hit then OP is just exceedingly naive and did not followed the scandal in which case they should maybe first do some reading. The names of involved powerful people were NOT supposed to be censored. All those names except Bill Clinton name were redacted. To protect Trump and everybody else involved in the scandal except said Bill Clinton. But especially to protect Trump.
      • mapontosevenths 10mo ago
        They also obscured the male perpetrators faces and bodies in many images, illegaly.
• buhfur 10mo ago
  Doesn't work on any PDF's of scanned documents , for example the contacts list.
  • jdiff 10mo ago
    Copying and pasting doesn't work. Unless your PDF viewer does OCR. And if the redaction is just a black rectangle overlaid on top, that can still be removed.
• cmarschner 10mo ago
  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-PDF-Redactions-v4a_2.pdf https://pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/High-Security-PD...
  • throwup238 10mo ago
    > - 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.
    • 10mo ago
• tpoacher 10mo ago
  reminds me of that leaky redaction program that won the obfuscated c contest some years back
  • Delk 10mo ago
    Probably the Underhanded C Contest (https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html) but yeah. Obfuscated C Contest entries usually aren't underhanded, just intentionally obscure about what they do or how they do it.
    • tpoacher 10mo ago
      sorry, yes, that one. Great contest. And a great entry, I had a big chuckle running it and unredacting my documents, even photos!
• ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
  [dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
  • dang 10mo ago
    We'll merge those comments hither.
• vdupras 10mo ago
  Trump's razor: Why attribute something to incompetence when you can attribute it to patriotic sabotage?
  • andrewflnr 10mo ago
    There's no patriotism here. That's just part of the cover for seeking power.
    • vdupras 10mo ago
      Who's seeking power, the poor schmuck who misused their PDF tools? It seems that my novel "razor" is misunderstood. The article attributes bad redacting to gross incompetence. But what if the person having done this bad redacting is instead doing sabotage with plausible deniability "lol, those damn PDF tools, you never know how they work"? It makes this story more interesting, and it allows one to see an outline of the future film scripts that will be written about this period. The courageous saboteurs at the dawn of american fascism.
      • andrewflnr 10mo ago
        I do think I misunderstood your post, sorry. I was thinking of those ordering the redaction. I do still think incompetence is more likely to be the explanation. Incompetent redactions are a perennial problem even in much less controversial situations.
  • jimt1234 10mo ago
    There's no patriotism in protecting chomos.
  • TRiG_Ireland 10mo ago
    It's certainly possible that some of the underlings are deliberately sabotaging orders from above. It's also possible that they're incompetent, as so many of the Trump team are. How would we know which it is?
  • insane_dreamer 10mo ago
• tim333 10mo ago
  It's quite funny really. Apparently you just cut and paste the text into Word. They just had the pdf put black rectangles on top.
  • pilaf 10mo ago
    Why into Word specifically?
    • iAMkenough 10mo ago
      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 https://github.com/freelawproject/x-ray
    • arendtio 10mo ago
      You have a better editor?
      • adtac 10mo ago
        ed is the standard Unix text editor.
        • lagniappe 10mo ago
          ed is a line editor
          • Melonai 10mo ago
            vi is also an editor, but sadly not the standard one, and since standard is king: ed it is.
  • echelon 10mo ago
    Why reveal the trick before all the papers have been released?
• nlitsme 10mo ago
  Can you post the document numbers, I can't find where these texts are in the original pdfs.
  • nlitsme 10mo ago
    ah, found it - this is from the 'Court Records' part. https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court Records/Matter of the Estate of Jeffrey E. Epstein, Deceased, No. ST-21-RV-00005 (V.I. Super. Ct. 2021)/2022.03.17-1 Exhibit 1.pdf
    • embedding-shape 10mo ago
      AKA https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Matter%20of%20the%20Estate%20of%20Jeffrey%20E.%20Epstein,%20Deceased,%20No.%20ST-21-RV-00005%20(V.I.%20Super.%20Ct.%202021)/2022.03.17-1%20Exhibit%201.pdf https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Matter%20...
    • JKCalhoun 10mo ago
      Link broken. (See reply with link that works.)
• nickpinkston 10mo ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
  • wolpoli 10mo ago
    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.
    • cynicalsecurity 10mo ago
      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.
      • andsoitis 10mo ago
        Do you truly believe the US is currently a dictatorship?
        • idle_zealot 10mo ago
          It's not so simple a binary. We're definitely much less democratic than a year ago, and the bar was low then.
        • sneak 10mo ago
          I’m still always surprised that there are adults who think it is not. The CIA, for example, is entirely above the law.
          • neutronicus 10mo ago
            That's different from a dictatorship, though, especially if the CIA is not answerable to a supposed dictator.
• lisbbb 10mo ago
  Did we learn anything useful or is it exactly as I said in the other thread, which got downvoted to hell, that all the really juicy blackmail material is with the CIA and will never see the light of day?
  • apical_dendrite 10mo ago
    Do you have any evidence of that?
    • XorNot 10mo ago
      Of course they don't but it sounds truthy so give it a few rounds of the Internet whisper machine and it can become accepted fact everybody "knows".
  • gosub100 10mo ago
    Won't know until all the documents are released. The blackmail is undeniable. But what's more interesting is who else was involved. Who purchased his services? That's what they are trying to hide.
• c420 10mo ago
  “Like you guys have had this stuff for a year. Doesn’t it seem like you could just throw all that into AI at this stage of the game? And just redact the names of the victims, and let’s go.” Joe Rogan
• juujian 10mo ago
  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?
  • avidiax 10mo ago
    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-fbi_from_us_senators_on_darren_indyke_and_richard_kahn_12-17-25pdf.pdf https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_doj-f...
    • notahacker 10mo ago
      > 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.
      • cogman10 10mo ago
        Redactions are just hard in general. It's easy for stuff to slip through the cracks (as we've been seeing). It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs. And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
• Sparkyte 10mo ago
  I think this is a good thing. I think the people talking dictator this and that do not understand we have the ability to critique the administration. What we lack is control of the underhanded lobbyism. It is a warped democracy but still a democracy.
  • hiddencost 10mo ago
    Bruh they're kidnapping people in the streets. They took over CBS and censored a documentary about CECOT.
    • Sparkyte 10mo ago
      Warped democracy.
    • gosub100 10mo ago
      > They took over CBS Careful, this will get you labeled an antisemite
  • Refreeze5224 10mo ago
    You sure about that? https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/12/18/larry-bushart-charlie-kirk-post-lawsuit/87813624007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2025/12/18/larry-bushart... Every slide towards authoritarianism is gradual, there is no announcement.
• sublinear 10mo ago
  If you think mere human incompetence with documents is bad, imagine all the vibe coded apps.
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• digitaltrees 10mo ago
  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.
  • wahnfrieden 10mo ago
    Not the only thing hack means now, or the most common usage anymore. See "life hack" - it means unexpected technique.
    • valleyer 10mo ago
      It's also the meaning used in the title of this very Web site.
    • digitaltrees 10mo ago
      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.
      • wahnfrieden 10mo ago
        Ok
  • weird-eye-issue 10mo ago
    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
    • dullcrisp 10mo ago
      I guess but if you write something down real small and I squint at it is that still hacking?
• pengaru 10mo ago
  "hacks" copy and paste people, the idiots have taken over
• NuclearPM 10mo ago
  There are people here that would still vote for these evil people.
• vincengomes 10mo ago
  "Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" - Napoleon Bonaparte Let all the files get released first. Then show your hacks.
  • esseph 10mo ago
    Too late. The data has been touched far too many times. The chain of custody and any accountability will never happen.
  • rtkwe 10mo ago
    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.
    • irjustin 10mo ago
      Yes but don't tell them they're doing it wrong.
      • agumonkey 10mo ago
        Misdirection 101
      • rtkwe 10mo ago
        Impossible which is the point of the last sentence. Spontaneous secrecy when some people are discovering the bad redactions while publicly streaming is impossible.
  • refurb 10mo ago
    Also don’t assume the mistake wasn’t intentional.
    • 10mo ago
• sandworm101 10mo ago
  Ctrl-c and ctrl-v are not hacks. They are unredacted because either those in charge are not familiar with basic office tasks, or someone wanted this stuff to leak and nobody checked thier work. Either brand of incompetance should cause heads to roll. But, just like the signal fiasco, nothing will happen. When your brand is perfection, you cannot ever admit a mistake.
• spacecadet 10mo ago
  It has become more plausible that nothing of value was released and the level of obviously poor redaction was done as a tarpit to own the libs.
• sva_ 10mo ago
  Am I crazy or didn't the same thing happen with Epstein's phone book some years ago? Coincidence?
• userbinator 10mo ago
  Part of me wonders whether they had some of the text under the "redactions" changed too.
• cryptoegorophy 10mo ago
  There is a book by Richard Dawkins- I am me I am free or something like that, and it has a main picture of Richard standing naked and having a private part being covered by black rectangle but somehow my laptop back then was slow and when you scrolled it would temporary remove the square for a split second
  • gjm11 10mo ago
    Are you sure? I can't find any trace of any book by Richard Dawkins with a title much like that, and that doesn't seem like a very on-brand sort of cover pic for a book by him, and an image search for "Richard Dawkins book cover" doesn't turn up anything like it.
    • poglet 10mo ago
      Most likely "I Am Me, I Am Free: The Robot's Guide to Freedom. - David Icke"
      • xnorswap 10mo ago
        Confusing David "The monarchy are secretly lizards" Icke with Dawkins is astonishing. More "info": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory#David_Icke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_conspiracy_theory#Da...
      • cryptoegorophy 10mo ago
        Omg. I am such an idiot!
• binary132 10mo ago
  [flagged]
• pfannkuchen 10mo ago
  Stupid question: why is the government even allowed to redact stuff? Isn’t the government keeping secrets from the people totally antithetical to democracy?
  • red75prime 10mo ago
    It's not the government, it's the department of justice. To name two: protection of witnesses, protection of state secrets ("the people" is not a person who can keep secrets).
    • MuffinFlavored 10mo ago
      Is the Department of Justice not a part of the government?
      • sigwinch 10mo ago
        It’s not the body which decides whether something is secret. It reactively redacts secrets and its own OIG is empowered to realign that logic. As of February, it’s sensible to ask if there’s an OIG.
    • pfannkuchen 10mo ago
      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 the people. There are multiple ways to approach witness protection. For example if we have a problem with witnesses being harmed we could make being involved with witness harm at any layer of indirection a capital offense. We can probably think of other options besides the government being allowed to keep secrets from its own people.
      • rgblambda 10mo ago
• BigParm 10mo ago
  I wonder if it's purposeful misdirection
  • cogman10 10mo ago
    I don't think so. They had 30 days to process 10s of thousands of documents. The rumors floating around is they had to pull in people from other departments to work on the task. It's pretty plausible that someone thought a black highlighter was good enough for redaction.
• thinkcomp 10mo ago
  I love how the entire internet thinks that this is a big deal when all that happened is that USDOJ re-posted some poorly-redacted court documents that were poorly redacted by non-USDOJ attorneys more than three years ago. Yes, USDOJ is incompetent and dysfunctional, but this is not why. But sure, whatever, carry on...
• OneMorePerson 10mo ago
  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.
  • crossroadsguy 10mo ago
    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.
  • userbinator 10mo ago
    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.)
    • PeterStuer 10mo ago
      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?
      • userbinator 10mo ago
        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.
        • morshu9001 10mo ago
• NicoJuicy 10mo ago
  A mafia state puts loyalists on top and can't produce anything ( smart people leave) and smart people who think for their own can't be promoted. That's also why a mafia extorts and doesn't run complex businesses in general. Perhaps the US can survive this administration. But somewhere down the line it will become broken.
  • rurban 10mo ago
    The non-complex mafia businesses is moot since the 50ies already. They run Vegas, most of big sports leagues, politics, secret services and restaurant chains. Everything which can effectively wash money.
    • NicoJuicy 10mo ago
      Or they just slap their brand on something and call themselves a genius
• eBombzor 10mo ago
  This site has really gone downhill lately with drivel like this being upvoted. Any real developers on this site anymore?
  • supermatt 10mo ago
    Regardless of the content itself, naive redaction of a high profile PDF still exposing the text contents is something that seems relevant to the community. Maybe you are in the wrong place?
    • deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
• deleted 10mo ago
  [deleted]
• scirob 10mo ago
  Man if you can do this should keep it secret until they release more bad redactions...
• b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago
  "hacks" lol. Next, ctl+alt+del and it's equivalents are gonna be called arcane theurgy
  • pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
    Hacks don’t have to be pretty — if it works it works. Here’s my “hack” to get into many school computer systems: Username: admin Password: password
    • b00ty4breakfast 10mo ago
      it's even less impressive; somebody left the credentials typed into the text boxes and went to get a slimfast out of the staff breakroom and you walked into the computer lab and hit enter.
• pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
  What is the proper way to do this? I see a couple suggestions in the comments: 1. Draw a black box over it in image editor, save a screenshot 2. Crop the info out Are there other good ways?
  • user_7832 10mo ago
    PDFs do have a "burn and destroy the parts/layers below" as part of the spec meant explicitly for redaction like this. Apparently they didn't use it, I guess?
• KnuthIsGod 10mo ago
  Print on paper. Physically cut out the pieces you want to send to remove. Scan. Still suspect that someone can undo this from data may have been accidentally steaganographed across non-deleted parts of the image.
  • hexfish 10mo ago
    Not sure but that might actually add your printer's unique dots to the scanned image. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printer_tracking_dots
  • fodkodrasz 10mo ago
    Microdots may leak your identity this way (though I guess a really high resolution scan is needed for that)
    • immibis 10mo ago
      It's no problem if they leak the fact that an FBI office printer was used to print the documents the FBI released.
  • arendtio 10mo ago
    I think even after printing and scanning there could still be jpg artfacts from the original (e.g. if you scan lossless). However, I wonder whether heavily compressing the redacted image would help remove any unwanted artefacts. But the best solution is probably to render the original file from scratch, without compression, before redacting the image.
  • deleted 10mo ago
    [deleted]
  • empath75 10mo ago
    You can also make guesses from font/typeface kerning if it's not from a typewriter.
• rbbydotdev 10mo ago
  when i first saw this, i thought it was a meme. There is no way the DOJ could be so incompetent to fumble their own cover up.
• tom86150 10mo ago
  [dead]
• anovikov 10mo ago
  hacks :facepalm:
• entropiae 10mo ago
  Not the first time; in 2005 the US report about Nicola Calipari's death in Baghdad was redacted (and unredacted by italian newspapers) in the same way.
• UrineSqueegee 10mo ago
  i wouldn't trust any of these "undo's"
• jtrn 10mo ago
  Shout out to Stirling PDF that can be self hosted and has a relatively robust and easy to use redaction tool. All for free.... For now....
• delbronski 10mo ago
  This is probably just pure stupidity, but part of me hopes there is some tech person in there who knew exactly what they were doing. I’d take a job as a tech person in this administration just to sabotage stuff like this.
• wutwut182 10mo ago
  I "hacked" my facebook account the other day. I forgot my password and used the "forget password" link to gain access .
• maCDzP 10mo ago
  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.
  • DoneWithAllThat 10mo ago
    In the US this is protected by the first amendment. Exceptions apply only for military and government employees who agree to prosecution in such cases as a condition for employment or enlistment (getting a clearance, basically). For everyone else it is lawful.
• jFriedensreich 10mo ago
  is there an overview page somewhere just about what was redacted?
  • criddell 10mo ago
    https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-glitch-virgin-islands https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...
• brachkow 10mo ago
  pdf is just a computer version of laminated paper
• Arch-TK 10mo ago
  It sets a bad precedent to call things like this hacks. Firstly, calling this redaction implies that the data is missing, and calling what was done "unredacting" is akin to saying someone "decrypted" a cryptographic hash function. Nobody unredacted anything here, they merely discovered that it hadn't been redacted, and simply looked like it was redacted. Calling this a hack places responsibility on the people who discovered the information, rather than on the people were put in charge of handling the redaction and screwed it up.
  • e38383 10mo ago
    Thank you, I came here just to verify that no "hack" was involved.
  • stingraycharles 10mo ago
    I also like to think this was maybe done as a form of malicious compliance. Someone inside the agency was tasked with redacting this, and found a way to sneak the information through but still getting it passed by their supervisors, so that the information got out.
    • GuB-42 10mo ago
      It reminds me of the 2008 Underhanded C code contest. The subject was exactly this. https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html https://www.underhanded-c.org/_page_id_17.html And the winner's solution is incredibly simple and clever.
    • sallveburrpi 10mo ago
      To me this is the only explanation that makes sense. However wouldn’t they risk repercussions when this is inevitably found out? I assume they have records who redacted which documents
      • stingraycharles 10mo ago
        Yes they may get fired, but it will be difficult to prove intent and very easy to claim incompetence. So I don’t think there will be jail time if that’s what you’re referring to.
• indubioprorubik 10mo ago
  Can you shadowprofile the redactions by length of the black box and heuristic occurance bundling?
• throw-12-16 10mo ago
  The US really is pathetic. When do we find out that the nuclear launch codes got changed to "YoureFired!".
• albert_e 10mo ago
  "hacks". This is like putting a post-it on a printed document and circulating it as "redacted" -- and calling anyone who lifted the post-it a criminal/thief.
• alerighi 10mo ago
  To me is strange that for such important document they didn't print them and scan with a scanner (that way it's physically impossible that some metadata or other thing that is not on the printed piece of paper ends up in what is released). It's the standard practice.
• beasthacker 10mo ago
  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 DOJ lawyers regularly tell courts) by the need to “protect the information of innocent U.S. citizens.” But the “bad at redactions” part isn’t an accident. It functions as a litigation tactic. Makes production slow, make FOIA responses slow, and then point to that slow, manual process as the reason the timeline has to be slow. The government could easily buy the kind of redaction tools that most law firms have used for decades. Purpose built redaction tools speed the work up and reduce mistakes. But the government doesn't buy those tools because faster, cleaner production benefits the requester. The downside for the government is that every so often a judge gets fed up and orders a normal timeline. Then agencies go into panic mode and initiate an “all hands on deck.” Then you end up with untrained, non-attorney staff doing rushed redactions by hand in Adobe. Some of them can barely use a mouse. That’s when you see the classic technical failures: someone draws a black rectangle that looks like a redaction, instead of applying a real redaction that actually removes the underlying text.
  • pessimizer 10mo ago
    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 because I had to do the actual trawling through the emails. They spent their time trying to narrow the keywords that I'd have to search, and trying to figure out new definitions of the words "related to."
    • throwup238 10mo ago
      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.
• hypeatei 10mo ago
  I never want to hear a MAGA supporter whine about DEI or meritocracy ever again. Supposedly you're against that stuff but just hire loyalists who fuck everything up? Embarrassing.
• lt_snuffles 10mo ago
  I feel like it is some form of malicious compliance from some fbi agents
• mbix77 10mo ago
  Nice. Love malicious compliance.
• Forgeties79 10mo ago
  I love how every single comment here is litigating whether or not this qualifies “hacking” (yes I know obviously it does not) so I can’t really find any discussion on the contents lol
  • guerrilla 10mo ago
    Actually there are two type of comments: "it's not hacking" and "it's malicious compliance". That makes of 90% of what's here, split about 50/50.
    • Forgeties79 10mo ago
      And now we have our third! A meta-analysis of the HN comment chain!
      • guerrilla 10mo ago
        You're welcome.
• Traubenfuchs 10mo ago
  This is "fake stupidity", a decoy to make the public think it is uncovering stuff that was meant to be hidden while in reality the really damning documents have been filtered and or doctored already. You might get thrown some meaningless and practically worthless + innocent scraps and bones like Trump wrapping his arm around a young woman and that‘s it. You think you uncovered the hidden layer but that was just a decoy. You guys are too gullible.
• ronbenton 10mo ago
  This reminds me of when some government org leaked social security numbers in client-rendered html comments (or something similar) and people who discovered this were called hackers for using browser dev tools
  • flaminHotSpeedo 10mo ago
    Are you thinking of the Missouri department of education's teacher directory website? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governors-office-responsible-for-teacher-data-leak/ https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/02/report-missouri-governor... Luckily someone eventually talked sense into the governor, despite him ignoring the FBI originally when they told him it wasn't a hack
• guerrilla 10mo ago
  Doesn't sound like much interesting was found otherwise that'd be what's making all the headlines... Everything in that article is pretty much what I'd expect.
  • stevenwoo 10mo ago
    I did not expect the one case in other documents where a 13 year old pregnant child was raped by Trump and her baby was killed by a relative. https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA00025010.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%208/EFTA000250...
    • hedora 10mo ago
      Trump has openly admitted to child prostitution in official statements, so the first part of that isn’t surprising at all. Look at the early quotes where Trump complains about Epstein being a creep. The main problem Trump had was that Epstein poached Trump’s favorite kids for prostitution years after they were hired by Trump.
    • guerrilla 10mo ago
      These rape allegations are from 2016 originally. There's already a court case about it. So, it's both already known and just allegations. That doesn't help us and shouldn't surprise us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct_allegations#Katie_Johnson/Jane_Doe_(1994) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct...
      • stevenwoo 10mo ago
        There was a tip revealed to be from 2020 that linked him to this case:https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1pve21d/unredacted_fbi_national_threat_operations_center/ https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1pve21d/unredacted_fbi...
• shwaj 10mo ago
  Rather than bemoaning the ignorance of those who can’t grasp that the text still exists under black rectangles, we should thank our lucky stars that this method of deredacting still works, well over a decade after the first time I heard of it. May it continue to work in the decades to come!
• xecaz 10mo ago
  When i hack something, it generally takes a bit more than just copy pasting..
• nabbed 10mo ago
  CNN has an article claiming that the botched redaction work is the fault of the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office, not the Justice Department. From https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-glitch-virgin-islands https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/politics/epstein-redactions-g...: "The glitch appears to affect only a tiny number of the hundreds of thousands of documents that the Justice Department has posted online this past week because of a new Epstein-related transparency law. And it appears this redacting error wasn’t committed by the Justice Department – but rather by the Virgin Islands’ attorney general’s office when it first posted the original court filing onto a public docket in 2021."
• maximgeorge 10mo ago
  [dead]
• willmadden 10mo ago
  Terrible headline. The unredacted data was included in the file. That's not a hack.
• m-p-3 10mo ago
  Not hacks, (malicious?) incompetency.
• aethelyon 10mo ago
  "some" or a single file?
• notorandit 10mo ago
  It depends on what do you mean "hack". Redacting important documents can qualify as a heck of a hack.
• marysminefnuf 10mo ago
  I swear the top comment on every popular post is always about semantics or nitpicking and is very rarely about anything in the article itself.
  • rityvkjivfgj 10mo ago
    [dead]
  • AppleBananaPie 10mo ago
    This doesn't seem to be the case here. Which comment is showing up top for you?
    • weberer 10mo ago
      The comment by Arch-TK is currently the top for me.
      • TheSkyHasEyes 10mo ago
        Interesting. RajT88 20 minute old post is top on my end.
        • teach 10mo ago
          For me, the top comment is currently cmarschner's day-old comment enumerating a bunch of other examples of botched redaction
  • ziml77 10mo ago
    I noticed my most recent nitpick comment got a significant number of upvotes. I spent some time today wondering if HN needed a way to indicate something is a nitpick and cause the votes on it to carry less weight in the sorting. Because if the nitpick is valid I don't think downvotes are appropriate since people might end up seeing it and having misconceptions corrected, but it also shouldn't detract from discussions on the meat of the post. Of course I'm probably the odd one out, wanting to apply that modifier to my own nitpick comments, so that idea probably wouldn't end up being very useful in general. (There is also some irony in me commenting on your comment here where it's completely unrelated to the actual post...)
• fallingfrog 10mo ago
  My favorite excerpt so far: Case ID #: 50D-NY-302757 Witness Information First Name: Donald Middle Name: Last Name: Trump Age: 70 DOB: Additional Info: Again, just trying to find out the NYPD detective on the FBI sex trafficking task force that called me a couple of weeks ago and spoke to me about some of these issues. How is Contact Known: He participated regularly in paying money to force me to ‐----- with him and he was present when my uncle murdered my newborn child and disposed of the body in Lake Michigan. Type: Business Address: City: Washington DC State: District of Columbia Zip: 20500 Country: United States
• broabprobe 10mo ago
  thank you for using the old.reddit link, it’s a small miracle they keep that running…
• itsthecourier 10mo ago
  The Epstein Files Transparency Act signed into law last month permits the Department of Justice “to withhold certain information such as the personal information of victims and materials that would jeopardize an active federal investigation” just wow.
• tim-tday 10mo ago
  A better headline would’ve been: “authorities utterly fail in their attempts to redact documents. Again.” This would be comical if it weren’t so serious.
• RajT88 10mo ago
  I tried to reproduce this - turns out the affected files weren't in the data sets recently released, but other files on the DOJ site (now taken down). I guess the big take-away is scrape everything ASAP when it comes out. I haven't found any meaningful differences yet, but file hashes are different in the published data set zip files available today versus when Archive.org took a snapshot a few days ago. I did write a bit of a tool which will detect and log and dump the text of affected PDF's, since redacting via drawing black boxes as well as using dark-colored highlights are both programmatically detectable. Pretty trivial to do so. Happy Holidays for anyone else who has the day off!
• namuol 10mo ago
  Sounds like a different take on this Onion headline: https://theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-black-highlighters-all-thes-1819568147 https://theonion.com/cia-realizes-its-been-using-black-highl...
• nephihaha 10mo ago
  One of the most pathetic things that has come out of this is that the British press refuse to say the phrase "Prince Andrew" anymore. It has to be Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
  • throwup238 10mo ago
    Because he was officially stripped of the title. He’s no longer a Prince. It’s not some grand conspiracy to distance him from the royal family, that’s just how titles work and the British are real sticklers about that class nonsense.
    • nephihaha 10mo ago
      He was Prince Andrew back then. It's yet another example of how the silly British press falls into line whenever Buck House tells it to. The British media also attempted to bury this story several times but couldn't, because it was so big in the USA, and Americans don't take orders from them. The BBC royal coverage has never been anything but propaganda and flattery. Anyway, the name should be Windsor-Mountbatten, not the other way round (or the string of German names they were anglicised from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha-Battenberg etc)
• cush 10mo ago
  I bet the width of the redacted areas also be used to determine some idea of the content too
• insane_dreamer 10mo ago
  The article buried the lede. Last sentence: > It was unclear how property material complies with the redaction standard under the law. In other words, who knows what else was redacted that is unrelated to either the victims or jeopardizing an active federal investigation (are there any related to Epstein? I thought those all got killed, except those ordered by Trump to investigate Democrats of course.)
• andix 10mo ago
  This has to be on purpose, right? Redacting documents is hard for people who didn't learn how to properly do it, and don't have the right tools. But for courts, the FBI or the DOJ this shouldn't apply. They know how to do it right. I can only imagine, that some people didn't redact the documents properly on purpose. Plausible deniability.
• JensRantil 10mo ago
  Fun fact: Many times you can also declassify numbers by simply looking at the width of the text boxes. I wrote a blog post about it many years ago: https://jensrantil.github.io/posts/how-to-partially-declassify-nsa-docs/ https://jensrantil.github.io/posts/how-to-partially-declassi...
• AniseAbyss 10mo ago
  [dead]
• HK-NC 10mo ago
  Any redactions of note? Going full conspiratard here and assuming this information that was accidentally censored ineffectively also reveals nothing new.
• inavida 10mo ago
  All this agitprop makes me wonder which of your bosses is going down.
• dietr1ch 10mo ago
  I thought that the font spacing allowed for some statistical analysis. Also some letters sneak out of the redaction boxes, but the PDF file having removable black highlighter boxes on top is pathetic. At least it gives the US a better chance of doing a u-turn on the steep downhill path it recently took. Maybe it was intentional incompetence.
• td2 10mo ago
  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?
• tim-tday 10mo ago
  If you redact documents and the documents still contain the redacted content are they truly redacted?