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I found this part interesting: There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected wi
by anigbrowl 9mo ago
I found this part interesting:
There are also other documents that appear to simulate a scanned document but completely lack the “real-world noise” expected with physical paper-based workflows. The much crisper images appear almost perfect without random artifacts or background noise, and with the exact same amount of image skew across multiple pages. Thanks to the borders around each page of text, page skew can easily be measured, such as with VOL00007\IMAGES\0001\EFTA00009229.pdf. It is highly likely these PDFs were created by rendering original content (from a digital document) to an image (e.g., via print to image or save to image functionality) and then applying image processing such as skew, downscaling, and color reduction.
- streetfighter64 9mo agoVery interesting. That document in particular seems to be an interview of A. Acosta by the DoJ from 2019. But what reason would the FBI have for pretending it's a scanned document, if it is genuine? Perhaps there's some aspect of Epstein's deal with Acosta that they'd rather not reveal to the public? https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA00009229.pdf https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%207/EFTA000092...
- draw_down 9mo ago[dead]
- juujian 9mo agoNot that I can speak from personal experience or anything... But somebody on an email chain may have requested a scanned version of the document to ensure there is no metadata and the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document. There might even be a webtool available somewhere to do so, I wouldn't know...
- mikkupikku 9mo ago> the employee might have found it easier to just flatten the pdf and apply a graphical filter to make the document appear like a scanned document Is that remotely plausible? I can't imaging faking a scan being easier than just walking down the hall to the copier room.
- ffsm8 9mo agoDepending on their technical capability, yes. I mean even in this thread you got what are essentially one-liners to do it. Definitely less hassle then doing it irl
- streetfighter64 9mo agoHoe big a percentage of FBI / DoJ employees are running linux (with imagemagick) as their work computer? I'd be surprised to see a similar oneliner for a stock windows installation. Yeah they might have used some web converter, but that on the other hand would have been extremely incompetent handling of the secret data.
- 1718627440 9mo agoInstalling MSYS2 is a matter of a few minutes. There is also WSL and macOS features a POSIX shell, imagemagick is likely already installed as a dependency somewhere, like ffmpeg often also is.
- mikkupikku 9mo agoI know I'm not the brightest bulb by any measure, but do some people really take less than at least a few minutes to come up with one-liners for problems as novel as graphical transformations to PDFs? Maybe if the presumed techie hacker / federal worker took it as an amusing challenge I could see this being done, but genuinely out of pure laziness? That's incredible if true.
- naniwaduni 9mo agoIt's not a novel problem. But yes, I don't think people quite appreciate how quick and easy it is for people who are in the habit of brewing up one-liners to solve simple problems to do that. I've done it here on HN for jq toy problems before, and I don't really doubt there are people similarly familiar with imagemagick.
- agopo 9mo ago[dead]
- ThePowerOfFuet 9mo agoStraight to the signup page? A bit blatant, no?
- breppp 9mo agoI am only guessing that they had to remove the document from a classified network in a way where data won't possibly leak
- tombrossman 9mo agoGNOME Desktop users can put this in a Bash script in ~/.local/share/nautilus/ for more convincing looking fake PDF scans, accessible from your right-click menu. I do not recall where I copied it from originally to give credit so thanks, random internet person (probably on Stack Exchange). It works perfectly. ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e '-' '')$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5)) for pdf in "$@"; do magick -density 150 $pdf \ -linear-stretch '1.5%x2%' \ -rotate 0.4 \ -attenuate '0.01' \ +noise Multiplicative \ -colorspace 'gray' \ "${pdf%.*}-fakescan.${pdf##*.}" done
- streetfighter64 9mo agoShouldn't $ROTATION be set inside the loop and actually used in the magick command?
- tombrossman 9mo agoYou know, now that you point it out that seems obvious. I think maybe I was experimenting with rotation and left that in, unused. I did this years ago. The loop works OK though. Thanks for the feedback (and now I have to finish editing that script ...)
- barrkel 9mo agoThat seq is probably supposed to be $(seq 0.05 0.05 0.5). Right now it's always 0.05. Note that you can get random numbers straight from bash with $RANDOM. It's 15 bit (0 to 32767) but good enough here; this would get between 0.05 and 0.5: $(printf "0.%.4d\n" $((500 + RANDOM % 4501)))
- lordgrenville 9mo agoNothing about this is specific to GNOME, right? Imagemagick is cross-platform
- turboponyy 9mo agoI guess the Gnome-specific part is that Gnome comes with the Nautilus file browser, and the instructions add a script for Nautilus. But yea, this will work as long as you have imagemagick and Nautilus installed.
- hiccuphippo 9mo agoI mean, I do that all the time when they ask me to print something, sign it, and then scan it. Sign a blank paper, scan it, paste the original doc on it. Then keep the scan for future docs.
- foxglacier 9mo agoAn easier trick I've used is just sign directly on the computer screen over the displayed document with a whiteboard marker and take a photo with my phone.
- nullbio 9mo agoThe real question is: Which of the documents are the ones that are "simulating" scanned documents, and what political narrative do they reinforce? The only reason I can think of for why someone would want to do this is to pass off fraudulent or AI generated images as real.
- boromisp 9mo agoA simpler explanation could be wanting to skip the print->sign->scan ceremony required by some institutions.
- reactordev 9mo agoThis. Slip in a few thousand “fakes” with the trove of goods to be able to fabricate a narrative.
- lucideer 9mo agoAnother explanation is that it's simply one form of lazy ineffective obfuscation performed by inexperienced relative luddites in an attempt to walk the fine line between complying with the supreme court directive & not releasing anything useful. Other investigations into the files have found oddities like redaction of the word "don't" indicating a haphazard find-&-replace approach to redaction, possibly LLM-aided. The DOJ/Akamai online hosted search feature is also incomplete - potentially due to some of these "digitally scanned" files not being subject to OCR.
- lucideer 9mo ago> to pass off fraudulent or AI generated images as real. Possibly but I don't find it compelling, if only because a significant portion of the media reportage on the files has made claims that are entirely baseless - if there were a narrative to be sold one would expect such reportage to be actively leveraging such fraudulent images.
- zoky 9mo agoSuch a weird way to do it when it would be a vastly easier to just blow the document out to paper and re-scan it.
- brazzy 9mo agoVastly easier when you do it to one or a handful of documents. But if you want to do it to 2000 documents...
- pbhjpbhj 9mo ago4 reems (4×500) is hardly a lot for commercial equipment to handle - paper trays will take a reem at a time. Document analysis would still show some shenanigans were in play, but you'd get a bit of variation at least.
- fc417fc802 9mo agoBut at that point why bother with the fakery? Why does it matter if it's obviously of digital origin? As long as it's rendered down to an image problem solved. Was the motivation for this benign (an employee skirting regulations) or malicious?
- userinexperienc 9mo ago[dead]