Some Epstein file redactions are being undone with hacks

General News
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This is insanely funny coming from a government organization. The relevant piece of the article:

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.

Isn’t this why we recommend drawing boxes over text to properly redact it?

There are two possibilities I can imagine as to how this happened, coming from a lay person who doesn’t know much about this stuff. They either (1) put the text color and background as black (which I think is unlikely), or (2) drew boxes over the files but forgot to somehow “flatten” the PDF, leaving a layer of data from the unredacted PDF highlightable or accessible through PDF editing software of some kind.

With this recent failure coming to light, we should update the data redaction page to reflect this. Someone else can do that if they wish. This post is only intended to relay the news.

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My take on this is that disgruntled FBI employees that are fundamentally unhappy with what is happening with the Epstein files are leaking documents in malicious compliance to federal orders.

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Thats A hot take if I haven’t seen one

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I’d give it an 80% chance it’s because DOGE cut all the Adobe Pro subscriptions.

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now thats a warm take, like to see that

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I can totally believe this even if its a little conspiratorial. Just because the US is going to shit right now, there still are sane ethical patriots that live and work there who only want to see a United States. The Christmas present that should keep on giving if more such people do what’s right.

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Or this is just all theatre and they did this intentionally with information they want/don’t care about going public.