Un-redacted text from released documents began circulating on social media on Monday evening
People examining documents released by the Department of Justice in the Jeffrey Epstein case discovered that some of the file redaction can be undone with Photoshop techniques, or by simply highlighting text to paste into a word processing file.
Un-redacted text from these documents began circulating through social media on Monday evening. An exhibit in a civil case in the Virgin Islands against Darren K Indyke and Richard D Kahn, two executors of Epstein’s estate, contains redacted allegations explaining how Epstein and his associates had facilitated the sexual abuse of children. The exhibit was part of the second amended complaint in the state case against Indyke and Kahn.
Doubtful.
This happens ALL the time. Countless publicly released police reports, legal documents, and even (allegedly) classified documents all just use the black highlighter in Acrobat because “that is what I would do if this were a physical copy”.
One of the first things you do when anyone gives you a “redacted” PDF is to just highlight the text. The next step up is to then check the layers of the PDF in case they added black rectangles to a scanned document (and a lot of OCR tools actually do that by default).
Same with seeing if you have the document history in a word file.
Never underestimate how computer illiterate the average person is. We shit on genz for not knowing what a directory structure is but… they ain’t that far behind the curve. It is mostly just that VERY narrow subset of genx/millennial who grew up with “family computers” that picked up most of these skills.
But the average person isn’t redacting important info left and right, is it?
Average people work in all layers of government, including records. It’s not a crazy idea that someone lacking certain skills might end up with the task of redacting documents. Not all redactions are damning evidence of a crime - my own divorce decree (which are all public information) would have my kids’ names redacted if some rando requested a copy of it.
Why wouldn’t it be?
Presumably they are better at investigative work and shooting people. Unless they are specifically involved in “cyber crime” or “digital forensics” there is no reason to expect high levels of computer skills.
In an even competent world? The people who ARE experts at that would have been consulted to define the protocol everyone else follows. Yeah…
Kids are goof at using things they interact with. Blame smartphone OS Devs for not having file managers installed by default
Back in my day “programming” meant typing assembly opcodes into an assembler and having to know what registers your machine had
Then high level languages like C came along and everyone got lazy
Android has included a file manager for a very long time.