[HN Gopher] X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions i...
___________________________________________________________________
X-ray: a Python library for finding bad redactions in PDF documents
Author : rendx
Score : 664 points
Date : 2025-12-23 21:54 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| seanw444 wrote:
| The context for OP posting this is that many of the recently-
| released Epstein documents were PDFs "redacted" by being drawn on
| top of.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Is there a good free tool to properly redact PDFs? My workflow
| is to place black annotation rectangles on top and then print
| as PDF with "force rasterization" on. The resulting PDF files
| then just consist of pages with one image each. But this tends
| to be really suboptimal, because it's usually a grayscale or
| color rasterization, so file sizes are very large vs.
| monochrome PDFs with CCITT G3/G4 compression (which is
| absolutely what you want for text content, excellent
| compression and lossless). Post-processing PDFs to convert them
| to CCITT is rather annoying and I only know of CLI ways.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I wasn't sure of this, even though sometimes you'd see remains
| of the original characters near rectangles edges.. does this
| mean the leaked documents have been de-redacted ?
| kstrauser wrote:
| At least some, yes:
| https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/12/23/trump-doj-
| pdf-r...
| agumonkey wrote:
| yeah i expected every political team, even the low level
| ones, to be fully aware of naive pdf "edition"... alas,
| incompetence often does that
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Checks and balances for a more technological era.
| airstrike wrote:
| Survival of the leetest
| zahlman wrote:
| I'm actually surprised not to have yet heard widespread
| conspiracy theorization that this is deliberate for some
| inscrutable reason or other.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Something something "chess, not checkers, this proves he
| has them on the run!"
| k1t wrote:
| Yes, in some cases, eg.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46364121
| agumonkey wrote:
| oh that's a beautiful sight
|
| hopefully this is straw that breaks the camel's back
| XorNot wrote:
| Why would that be the case? The government isn't
| redacting "yes we contacted aliens" they're redacting
| information about military capabilities that might be of
| use to adversaries.
| agumonkey wrote:
| sorry the title mentioned epstein files, so i was hoping
| incriminating facts that would accelerate trump's fall
| jibal wrote:
| No reason to be sorry ... you are right and the other
| person seems quite confused about the context.
| iberator wrote:
| How do you know if its redacted?
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Also good for UFO/UAP/"anomalous phenomena" documents and
| remote viewing PDFs for what it's worth :)
| IceHegel wrote:
| Given recent high profile redaction events, I think one simple
| use of AI would be to have it redact documents according to an
| objective standard.
|
| That should in theory prevent overly redacted documents for
| political purposes.
|
| An approach that could be rolled out today would be redacting
| with human review, but showing what % of redactions the AI would
| have done, and also showing the prompt given to the AI to perform
| redactions.
| mmazing wrote:
| Honestly, it doesn't take any inference or need for AI, there's
| simply data in the documents that can be extracted.
| bogtog wrote:
| I don't think the commentor above is saying that an AI should
| necessarily apply the redaction. Rather, an AI can serve as
| an objective-ish way of determining what should be redacted.
| This seems somewhat analogous to how (non-AI) models can we
| used to evaluate how gerrymandered a map is
| unfocused wrote:
| Adobe Pro, when used properly, will redact anything in a PDF
| permanently.
|
| Whoever did these "bad" redactions doesn't even know how to use a
| PDF Editor.
|
| We have paralegals and lawyers "mark for redaction", then review
| the documents, then "apply redactions". It's literally be done by
| thousands of lawyers/paralegals for decades. This is just someone
| not following the process and procedure, and making mistakes.
| It's actually quite amateurish. You should never, ever screw up
| redactions if you follow the proper process. Good on the X-ray
| project on trying to find errors.
|
| I just want to add, applying black highlights on top of text is
| in fact, the "old" way of redaction, as it was common to do this,
| and then simply print the paper with the black bars, and send the
| paper as the final product.
|
| Whoever did it is probably old, and may have done it thinking
| they were going to print it on paper afterwards!! Just guessing
| as to why someone would do this.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Or they may not understand how PDF works and think that it's
| the same as paper.
|
| Especially with the "draw a black box over it" method, the text
| also stops being trivially mouse-selectable (even if CTRL+A
| might still work).
|
| Another possibility is, of course, that whoever was responsible
| for this knew exactly what they were doing, but this way they
| can claim a honest mistake rather than intentionally leaking
| the data.
| zahlman wrote:
| > Or they may not understand how PDF works and think that
| it's the same as paper.
|
| Yes; that's presumably included in being "amateurish" and
| "not following proper process".
| aidos wrote:
| A while back I did a little work with a company that were
| meant to help us improve our security posture. I terminated
| the contract after they sent me documents in which they'd
| redacted their own AWS keys using this method.
| selectodude wrote:
| Any attorney or law enforcement that works for the US Federal
| Government receives very, very comprehensive instructions on
| how to redact information on basically the first day of
| training. There is absolutely zero doubt among any of my DOGE'd
| friends that this was 100 percent on purpose malicious
| compliance.
| unfocused wrote:
| Agreed. I worked on the Canadian side of the legal side and
| there is a very comprehensive process for redaction. Nobody
| does redaction unless they follow the process. Never seen
| anyone 15+ years do something silly like this in the office.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| So you think it was trump supporters as opposed to in spite
| of trump? Genuine question - Who stands to gain? I don't
| follow this enough to know.
| selectodude wrote:
| No, it's lifelong civil servants who received the order to
| wholesale redact these documents from the Trump toady
| leading the department.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I'm not sure what's unredactable, but naming victims
| isn't something I imagine either party is particularly
| interested in doing. I imagine the HN malicious //
| ineptitude rule is in play here, rather than some sub
| conspiracy conspiracy.
| mlissner wrote:
| Cool to see this here. It's funny because we do so many huge,
| complex, multiyear projects at Free Law Project, but this is the
| most viral any of our work has ever gone!
|
| Anyway, I made X-ray to analyze the millions of documents we have
| in CourtListener so that we can try to educate people about the
| issue.
|
| The analysis was fun. We used S3 batch jobs to analyze millions
| of documents in a matter of minutes, but we haven't done the hard
| part of looking at the results and reporting them out. One day.
| thangalin wrote:
| https://www.argeliuslabs.com/deep-research-on-pdf-redaction-...
|
| > Information Leaking from Redaction Marks: Even when content
| is properly removed, the redaction marks themselves can leak
| some information if not done carefully. For example, if you
| have a black box exactly covering a word, the length of that
| black box gives a clue to the word's length (and potentially
| its identity).
|
| Does X-ray employ glyph spacing attacks and try to exploit font
| metric leaks?
| mlissner wrote:
| No, we worked with researchers that developed that kind of
| system, but didn't broadcast our work b/c the research was
| too sensitive. Seems the cat is out the bag now though.
|
| I think the combination of AI and font-metrics is going to be
| wild though. You ought to be able to make a system that can
| figure out likely words based on the unredacted ones and the
| redaction's size. I haven't seen any redaction system yet
| that protects against this.
| thangalin wrote:
| > I haven't seen any redaction system yet that protects
| against this.
|
| The linked article suggests widening redacted areas more
| than needed with some randomization applied to the width.
| Strikes me that that wouldn't do much except add a few more
| possible solutions.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah, the more robust protection is to widen to a
| constant. But in the general case that could require
| reflowing the pdf. But honestly single word redactions
| are really probably useless with cheap AI that can highly
| accurately fill in the gaps
| rgmerk wrote:
| Depends what you're trying to hide.
|
| If the redaction is a person's name, and there's nothing
| else to give the person's identity away, single word
| redaction probably works reasonably well, AI or no AI.
| godelski wrote:
| > If the redaction is a person's name
|
| I'm not sure if you're aware, but peoples names are
| variable in length. We are talking about a system that
| can identify single character differences. So that does
| reduce the search space, especially since names are not
| all possible letter permutations. Combine that with the
| fact that it isn't uncommon to see partial first letters
| show up. You can even see some instances in the Epstein
| files.
|
| Of course, you can also take this further. Even if you
| can't recover names you can get meta information about
| how many parties are involved by recognizing different
| length redactions correspond to different entities. While
| same length redaction doesn't guarantee same entity it is
| a hint.
| mycall wrote:
| It is also common for authors to misspell names (proper
| nouns) in an attempt to determine who leaks docs (and to
| force non-matches for FOIA requests).
| mhast wrote:
| If you want to fingerprint text you can also do it by
| small insignificant changes to text which doesn't change
| the meaning.
|
| If you have a number such locations with alternatives
| then you can make a number of identifiable versions by
| combining alternates.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I thought glyph spacing attacks are an old idea; like I
| recall reading about such ideas 10-20 years ago unless I'm
| misremembering. Can you clarify why it was considered "too
| sensitive" if the whole point of this effort is to showcase
| these attacks?
| mlissner wrote:
| It's a fine line. Most redactions are for the good, to
| protect someone or something. For example even in the
| Epstein files, where some redactions are being abused,
| most redactions are protecting victims.
|
| If there's a way to undo huge amounts of redactions,
| that'd certainly be a net negative. Sort of like if
| encryption were suddenly broken, you wouldn't publish a
| paper saying so.
|
| Our goal has always been to educate about the problem so
| that it can be addressed. We didn't have resources to
| push on the font metrics approach, so we stayed mostly
| quiet about it.
| btreecat wrote:
| > If there's a way to undo huge amounts of redactions,
| that'd certainly be a net negative. Sort of like if
| encryption were suddenly broken, you wouldn't publish a
| paper saying so.
|
| I can't state emphatically enough how this is not the
| right mental playbook.
|
| If you have found a vulnerability, it's likely someone
| else has too. By sitting on it, you only create more
| future victims.
|
| Disclosure will lead to fixing this issue, mitigating
| it's precense, or switching tools/workflows, possibly a
| combination of. Sitting on it only ensures that folks who
| think they are protected, actually aren't.
| mlissner wrote:
| We're familiar with vulnerability disclosure
| philosophies, but what if the problem can't be fixed
| because there's no forward secrecy for the hundreds of
| millions of documents that are already out there?
|
| It's tricky stuff and we have limited resources,
| unfortunately.
| opello wrote:
| So what is the state of the art in redaction? Re-publish
| the document with an insert that says [redaction] so that
| no (or maybe minimal) length side-channel exists? I
| imagine someone thinks about clever ideas and it would be
| fun to read about them and the trade-offs.
| NoboruWataya wrote:
| This is going to be a disaster IMO because AI will just
| hallucinate what it thinks is the most probable redacted
| word and people will take that as gospel.
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| "don't redact or we will hallucinate something worse and
| make people believe it as gospel" is nice deterrent
| rafram wrote:
| We don't need a "deterrent" against things being redacted
| in publicly released documents. We can have transparency
| without the whole world finding out the names of victims
| and witnesses, people's phone numbers and SSNs, etc.,
| every time a document is released.
| hahn-kev wrote:
| Maybe we should all just use mono-space fonts for
| everything
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| Presumably with font kerning and pixel perfect recreation of
| the source, it would be possible to guess the word very
| accurately.
|
| The strings oioioi and oooiii will have different widths in
| some fonts because character organisation matters a lot.
| setopt wrote:
| I suppose it gets a bit more complex again if you enable
| stuff like microtype, but even then you can probably measure
| how much inter-letter and inter-word spacing has been
| adjusted by just scanning other text in the same line.
|
| I think the conclusion is honestly that PDF is an outdated
| format for keeping records that might have to be redacted in
| the future, like court documents. Something reflowable like
| epub could have the text replaced with constant-space black
| squares instead no hints leaked as someone mentioned in a
| parallel comment.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| I've never heard anyone suggest PDF is a _good_ format, and
| while I don't know the spec, I imagine based on the acrobat
| cve list it's an absolute clusterfuck.
| gigatexal wrote:
| Hilarious that DOJ didn't flatten the layers so you can unredact
| stuff. What a clown show of incompetent idiots. Or... a skillful
| one over on the powers that be internally from someone who knew
| better but knew that they wouldn't know ... and did this to help
| us all
| gigatexal wrote:
| Only MAGA weirdos would downvote this ;-)
| brotchie wrote:
| You'd think the go-to workflow for releasing redacted PDFs would
| be to draw black rectangles and then rasterize to image-only PDFs
| :shrug:
| shbooms wrote:
| often times you will have requirements that the documents you
| release be digitally searchable and so in these cases, this
| would not be an option
| 8note wrote:
| run some ocr on them after to recreate the text layer?
| albert_e wrote:
| With the aggressive push of LLMs and Generative AI ..i am
| expecting a lot of OCR features to become "smarter" by
| default, namely go beyond mechanical OCR and start
| inserting hallucinations and sematically/contextually "more
| correct" information in OCR output
|
| It's not hard to imagine some powerful LLMs being able to
| undo some light redactions that are deducible based on
| context
| blharr wrote:
| Or worse, making up names or information instead of
| writing the reaction.
| pottertheotter wrote:
| This made me think of something I came across recently that's
| almost the opposite problem of requiring PDFs to be
| searchable. A local government would publish PDFs where the
| text is clearly readable on screen, but the selectable text
| layer is intentionally scrambled, so copy/paste or search
| returns garbage. It's a very hostile thing to do, especially
| with public data!
| eviks wrote:
| Hostile indeed, and also happens in user-facing documents
| like product manuals!
| selinkocalar wrote:
| As someone who's built an entire business on "anti-screenshots"
| this is brilliant.
|
| PDF redaction fails are everywhere and it's usually because
| people don't understand that covering text with a black box
| doesn't actually remove the underlying data.
|
| I see this constantly in compliance. People think they're
| protecting sensitive info but the original text is still there
| in the PDF structure.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Not to mention some PDF editors preserve previous edits in
| the PDF file itself, which people also seems unaware of. A
| bit more user friendly description of the feature without
| having to read the specification itself:
| https://developers.foxit.com/developer-
| hub/document/incremen...
| embedding-shape wrote:
| I haven't gone through more than just 10% of the files released
| today, but noticed that at least EFTA00037069.pdf for example has
| a `/Prev` pointer, meaning the previous revision of the file is
| available inside of the PDF itself. In this case, the difference
| is minor (stuff moved around), but I'm guessing if it's in one
| file, it could be more. You can run `qpdf --show-object=trailer
| EFTA00037069.pdf` on a PDF file to see for yourself if it's
| there.
|
| I'm almost fully convinced that someone did this bad
| intentionally, together with the bad redactions, as surely people
| tasked with redacting a bunch of files receive some instructions
| on what to do/not to do?
| xhevahir wrote:
| > as surely people tasked with redacting a bunch of files
| receive some instructions on what to do/not to do?
|
| You've phrased this as a question; I gather that you know
| better than to assume a modicum of competence from these
| people.
| throwawaysleep wrote:
| All the reporting I have read suggests that they are roping
| anyone and everyone they can into doing redactions. So I
| suspect many simply lack the experience to do it well.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Ok, so say someone says "We're overloaded, we need more
| people" so someone else says "Ok, department Q, R and T
| changes priority to doing redaction" then at least one person
| somewhere in this chain has to at least consider that every
| person from Q, R and T must go through at least a 3 slide
| powerpoint or whatever saying what's happening, this is what
| to do, this is what to not do, right?
| throwaway173738 wrote:
| Lol you're assuming anyone in the management chain believes
| there's any nuance or thought to the task beyond the
| superficial. I can assure you that lots of managers lack
| the humility to appreciate how little they might actually
| know.
| sawjet wrote:
| It depends on which administration you support if the
| redactions have been completed in good faith.
| blitzar wrote:
| They should all have been using the same redaction tooling.
|
| If I were to hazard a guess, pure speculation, I would say
| the unretrievable parts were court / previously redacted and
| the retrievable parts are the latest round of panicked rushed
| redactions.
| victor9000 wrote:
| I looked into this specific file, and the history doesn't
| contain anything too interesting. The root file is already the
| fully redacted and flattened document, and the edit in question
| is the addition of a numbered footer to each page.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Give a room full of high school students instructions for a 3
| step process. I guarantee at least 10% are going to screw it up
| somehow.
| jmward01 wrote:
| Hmmm.. The more I think about this the more any font kerning is
| likely a major leak for redaction. Even if the boxes have
| randomness applied to them, the words around a blacked out area
| have exact positioning that constrains the text within so that
| only certain letter/space combinations could fit between them.
| With a little knowledge of the rendering algorithm and some
| educated guessing about the text a bruit force search may be able
| to do a very credible job of discovering the actual text. This
| isn't my field. Anyone out there that has actually worked on this
| problem?
| mlissner wrote:
| Really depends on the length and predictability of the
| redaction, but yes. If it's short and contextually it's only
| likely to be either "yes" or "no", you've got it. If it's
| longer and could contain an unknown person's name along with
| some other words, well, that's harder.
| jmward01 wrote:
| I feel like this creates a hash value and the real question
| is how unique of a value does it represent and how easy it is
| to narrow it down given throwing a dictionary at it.
| Similarly, unknown names could likely be teased out like a
| one-time pad. If they appear in multiple sentences then their
| randomness quickly repeats and becomes something that
| potentially could be isolated from the rest of the words
| around them. This would probably be a fun problem for a
| cryptography class to work on.
| skykooler wrote:
| If so, then finding the redacted string would be similar to
| trying to brute-force a hash (though presumably slower,
| since text layout algorithms are probably more complex than
| a single hash invocation).
| worewood wrote:
| There was a recent vulnerability, where researchers were able
| to extract information from an encrypted chat session from an
| LLM, by analyzing packet size/timings of the underlying SSL
| connection. A classic side-channel attack. Seems possible to
| draw a parallel between the two.
| dylan604 wrote:
| > the more any font kerning is likely a major leak for
| redaction
|
| Now I want a font that randomly adjusts the kerning
| automagically to be used by people in standard word processors
| not some graphics app. In this way, every time the same word
| appears in the document, the kerning is different between each
| one.
| chews wrote:
| My autism wants that idea straight into a dumpster fire.
| dylan604 wrote:
| not really sure what this means.
|
| most people cannot detect differences in kerning, and must
| be extreme adjustments to get people to notice. even then,
| the words would need to be aligned above/below each other
| for people to see the differences. however, a computer
| program analyzing the size of a bounding box would notice
| single pixel differences. so randomly adjusting the
| kearning per word by pixels between each letter would go
| unnoticed by the vast majority of readers, but could play
| absolute havoc with algos trying to decipher possible word
| combos based on bounding box size.
| IshKebab wrote:
| Unlikely to be possible except for the smallest redactions,
| like if you have a single name redacted and a list of
| candidates. But I think kerning wouldn't help you much more
| than just knowing the rough length anyway.
| dcollect wrote:
| lol thanks bros
|
| text=about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go
| public with their stories of being text=Epstein also threatened
| harm to victims and helped release damaging stories =attorneys'
| fees and case costs in litigation related to this conduct.
|
| =Defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex
| trafficking and abuse
|
| text=$327,497.48 and $6,487.04 in New York City text=trafficking
| and abuse conduct. text=destroy evidence relevant to ongoing
| court proceedings involving Defendants' criminal sex text=Epstein
| also instructed one or more Epstein Enterprise participant-
| witnesses to text=trafficked and sexually abused. text=conduct by
| paying large sums of money to participant-witnesses, including by
| paying for their
| 5ak12agff wrote:
| Given that no U.S. or Israeli citizen apart from Epstein and
| Maxwell has experienced severe repercussions and Andrew Windsor
| is the perfect fall guy, there is the possibility that nothing
| will be revealed from these uncovered redactions.
|
| The releases haven't yielded anything so far. For all we know,
| Epstein used other methods of communications for the really
| sensitive stuff. This would not be a surprise, since the whole
| Maxwell family was deep into tech (Magellan, Chiliad) and Ehud
| Barak was the head of Israeli military intelligence in the 1980s.
|
| The story is going to be closed in a bipartisan manner except
| that it might be used to remove some unwanted politicians. The
| New York Times has already released an article that "explains"
| Epstein's wealth which names all figures that appear in
| "conspiracy theories" in an innocent way. Basically, they claim
| that Epstein could just steal from billionaires like Wexner and
| the billionaires would roll over and do nothing.
|
| That is the official confirmation that all intelligence angles
| will be squashed in a bipartisan manner. For all we know, the
| "incompetence" in the redactions may be a way of saying: "See, we
| have nothing to hide."
| shrubble wrote:
| Shockingly, you can see redaction info from within your browser's
| PDF viewer. I am using Brave on Linux, and went here:
|
| https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/Court%20Records/Matter%20...
|
| As a test, select with your mouse the entire first line of
| paragraph number 90, and then paste it into a text editor or a
| shell. The unredacted text appears!
| ktpsns wrote:
| This is exactly the type of bad redactions which the X-ray
| software will also find.
| sawjet wrote:
| You can X-ray a PDF?
| stressback wrote:
| Unsure if you are serious but the commenter is referring to
| the tool name that this post links to
| Fnoord wrote:
| Yep, bingo:
|
| $ uvx --from x-ray xray "https://www.justice.gov/multimedia/C
| ourt%20Records/Matter%20..."
| sroussey wrote:
| Why would "Financial Strategy Group, Ltd" be redacted?
| belter wrote:
| There is no way looking at most of the now unredacted text that
| it should redacted.
|
| It's clear that the DOJ was paying overtime, based on the
| number of redactions, so the agents and lawyers just roamed
| free...
| blitz_skull wrote:
| Explain like I'm stupid: what is the most gracious interpretation
| of redaction when releasing files like this?
|
| Why should anyone involved retain any anonymity?
|
| I'm asking in good faith because naively it seems like this
| should not even exist. All of it should be exposed.
|
| EDIT: I did not think about the innocent folks that might be
| caught in the crossfire. That checks out. Thanks everyone!
| krapp wrote:
| Protecting the identity of victims, eyewitnesses or informants.
| sawjet wrote:
| Don't forget the co-conspirators!
| krapp wrote:
| The weirdest part about that is this administration was
| clearly willing to just stall and could have done what the
| CIA and FBI does all the time and just "disappear" all of
| the documents.
|
| What would be the fallout? The Democrats are complicit, the
| regime all but controls the judiciary (at least the Supreme
| Court.) And a lot of these guys are billionaires and
| untouchable anyway unless someone does a Luigi on them.
| They have the ability to just brute force past the
| controversy and yet they've chosen to attempt the most
| ridiculously inept coverup possible.
|
| On the one the sheer stupidity of this administration and
| its incompetence at implementing fascism means that as bad
| as things are they could be much worse. On the other hand I
| fear that once JD Vance or someone just as evil but without
| Trump's instability takes power we're going to wish we'd
| done something more when we had the chance.
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| Iirc WikiLeaks took the position of any information that would
| directly lead to the bodily harm of an individual (or something
| to that effect). The rational being, "Yes, group A did
| something horrible that warrants investigation, but if we
| publish their GPS coordinates they will be blown to
| smitherines"
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Unless those people impacted were friendly to US interests?
| if I recall correctly they published the names of
| collaborators and informants in Iraq. They also published
| military tactics that would help those trying to kill US
| soldiers. GPS coordinates by comparison generally go stale
| very quickly.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| No, that was the 2010 "diplomatic cables" release.
| Basically, they disseminated an encrypted version of the
| data cache, and gave the decryption key to a few key
| people, including Guardian journalist David Leigh, with the
| expectation he'd report on the info without sharing
| sensitive intel.
|
| David Leigh then published the decryption key in his 2011
| book about Wikileaks (for some reason) and the info became
| publicly available. Everyone pinned the blame on Assange.
|
| Moral of the story: journalists can and will disclose
| ridiculously sensitive info you give them for a bit of fame
| and you should be extremely careful about covering your
| tracks.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| So no, they don't redact things even when it can put
| people in harm's way.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| There was, to say the least, not a specific law mandating
| release of the material held by WikiLeaks and specify what
| was to be, and what was not to be, redacted, so I don't see
| that as much of a guide here.
| empath75 wrote:
| The files of a high profile and long running investigation are
| going to be full of false leads, hoaxes and other bullshit. The
| reason they don't just always release the files after closing
| cases is that there genuinely are going to he innocent people
| caught in the crossfire who have privacy rights.
|
| This case is so important and such a clusterfuck that the files
| need to be opened anyway.
| ozim wrote:
| Person asking above question explains he doesn't understand
| so I guess he also doesn't understand prosecutors, lawyers,
| law enforcement, judges make mistakes.
|
| So yes this is best explanation. Revealing everything might
| bring great harm to innocent people just because they were
| somehow mentioned in the documents.
|
| Just add all the experience we already have with "internet
| investigators" that ruin people lives for petty reasons.
| supercheetah wrote:
| FWIW, a lot of of the victims (possibly all) are saying they
| don't care about redactions if they end up being used to
| protect perpetrators. They want to make sure everyone is held
| accountable.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| https://abcnews.go.com/US/epsteins-alleged-victims-accuse-
| do...
|
| Specifically, a number of Epstein victims have complained
| that the release was unacceptable because it was incomplete,
| illegally redacted material other than victim names which was
| not excepted from release under the law mandating release,
| and because it _failed_ to redact victim identities required
| to be protected under the law mandating release.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| The law mandating release requires redaction of victim
| identities, information relating to investigations that are
| still active, child sexual absue material, and information
| related to national security.
|
| It generally prohibits other redactions, and expressly
| prohibits redactions for embarassment, reputational harm, or
| political sensitivity.
|
| Of course, there is considerable concern that the actual
| reactions do not appear to comply with the legal requirements.
| unstatusthequo wrote:
| It's a bit amusing seeing ediscovery principles go mainstream.
| tamimio wrote:
| Tech people would be shocked and surprised to know how tech-
| illiterate non-tech people are. Reminds me of old days when the
| IT guy is AIO in some non-tech facility and is treated like god!!
| eviks wrote:
| Pity such an awful document format with so many basic fails at
| being digital, continues to reign in a lot of areas!
| alessandroliva wrote:
| This being on top of the news on Esptein files being badly
| redacted is pretty funny
| IshKebab wrote:
| Are you under the impression that they're unconnected?
| e38383 wrote:
| It's either redacted or not. There is no "bad". The text is
| either there or it isn't, sorry but this is a binary option and
| not on a spectrum from bad to good.
| 47282847 wrote:
| Maybe "attempted" would be more accurate? I personally don't
| mind the "bad", I get what is meant by it.
|
| But since we're talking about accuracy: I don't agree on
| redactions being binary. You can redact with a pen that under
| certain lighting still reveals the text; you can redact parts
| that are easy to reconstruct when you have additional
| information; you can redact with a pen color that over time
| loses its function; etc. The "perfect" redaction would perhaps
| leave no clues as to even how much text was redacted? It seems
| to depend on the goal and context of the redaction, whether it
| achieves its purpose or not.
| dev1ycan wrote:
| Yeah let's helpt he govt redact pdfs (literally).
| PunchyHamster wrote:
| Great, now govt will have easy tool to check it
| shevy-java wrote:
| The issue is more that the current US government is not very
| bright. Nor very open. Kind of rogue-like.
|
| I think governments should not be able to hide information from
| citizens in general. I don't trust those who hide stuff while
| being fed money from the taxpayers - that is a modern form of
| slavery.
| bossyTeacher wrote:
| This is not something to do with the redacted Epstein files,
| right?
| yoan9224 wrote:
| the timing of this with the epstein docs is pretty funny.
| honestly feels like someone did those redactions badly on purpose
| - anyone who works with pdfs knows you don't just draw black
| boxes over text. either massive incompetence or malicious
| compliance
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-12-24 23:01 UTC)