I was watching a coffeezilla video on the new leaks yesterday, and I saw he could highlight and copy text in the pdf document.
I have had broken PDFs that lose the ability to select and search for text for much less modifications, and was wondering if there was a way to see behind the redaction.
I figured it would be a task for someone to look at the text in code and see the redacted parts, but turns out everyone can do it lol.
And nothing will happen. Magats are ging to maga. Democrats are ging to democrat.
msm has no interest in covering it fully, because its mostly captured by conservatives
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The Guardian claims that there are some redacted documents that can un-redacted by copying the text and pasting it into another window. Also, in other documents, photoshop can be used to enhance features of the redacted portions of text to reveal potential characters being covered.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/23/epstein-unredacted-files-social-media
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Never forget that above all, above the narcissism, the megalomania, and the viciousness, above all Trump is a terrifyingly stupid and incompetent man. When he hires, he does so that he feels like he’s the smartest one in the room. That tells me a lot about the people now running our federal government.
With all of its mercilessness, it can be easy to forget that authoritarianism is a profoundly flawed and short-sighted way to run a government.
Honestly wondering if this was done deliberately by DOJ tech folks who weren’t on board with the cover-up.
From what I’ve heard, it wasn’t released, they were uploaded and it’s url kept private. Imo they probably did that to send it to a few highly ranked people so they could check if they agreed with the censorship before releasing them. However, the URL for those to-be-released files were easily guessed based on the pattern of the previously already public ones.
I have heard of a gov employee keeping a usb cable in a locked cabinet because they thought it had leftover data after use.
Not actually an insane practice. There are compromised cables that look normal but have hidden storage to record data for later retrieval.
ah yes, in case some bits got stuck in the pipe
It’s those internet tubes, can’t trust em
Oversecure is better than undersecure
Universal Security Box
Never attribute to morality that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hey there. It doesn’t work in authoritarian regimes. When the only way to resist is sabotage, sabotage is everywhere
The saying is usually malice but I suppose it still works with morality all the same
Because this would be doing a good thing, not a malicious one.
Being malicious is not exclusive to being a bad person. Good people can be malicious in the face of adversity. It’s an effective tool of protest.
malicious compliance to be exact which is not the same as malice, pure malice is somewhat evil.
I wonder how greed figures in, it’s not like companies need to be moral to end up on the right side
Never attribute to ______ that which can be adequately attributed to profit/line go up.
Not usually, it’s Hanlon’s Razor.
Maybe we can call this version “Hamlon’s razor” or something
Given the sheer ineptitude of this administration, this was likely stupidity.
When I worked for DOD, I worked on a FOIA request and was trained on using the declassification software. The software worked by highlighting the appropriate text and then “flattened” the highlight so you couldn’t do this.
The software was REQUIRED to be used because it would also perform the validation.
These people probably used regular Adobe acrobat. Because they are that dumb. And they don’t know about proper FOIA procedures.
Because they are stupid.
30 minutes before releasing the Epstein files:
“Grok, how do I redact a PDF?”
It might be likely that DOGE thought it was frivilous government spending the license for that software, because it’s the government and they’d use licensed software, so axed it out.
I heard some print it out and then scan it.
hell, taking a picture of the screen with a phone would have been better. this is literally the only way to have fucked this up that i can come up with. like maybe if they used too thin of a sharpie on physical paper, but even that probably would have blocked parts of the text.
that said, i can see the average technologically inept person making this mistake. if it wasn’t on purpose, it would have to be someone that didn’t grow up with computers. either someone trump’s age, or someone who grew up with only smart phones. Iwould bet the latter knowing trump and his cheapness. this can’t have been done by an existing professional in the system, they’re too experienced normally. I know this is a lot of assumptions, but i bet it would have had to be a young intern from trump’s camp. and i do bet that over intentional malice towards trump. anyone that did this on purpose would be smart enough to see far enough ahead to predict themselves get arrested or killed as soon as people figured it out. also, hanlon’s razor.
i think i actually made almost this exact mistake once. difference is mine was for an assignment in high school 20 years ago and the consequence was getting snickered at by my peers. it’s a genuinely easy thing to overlook if you’re not used to using tools in a word editor or most other software. it’s also entirely unsurprising that trump’s camp would botch a project. he doesn’t pay people and is a menace to his employees. no one compitent wants to work for him unless they’re true believers.
so yeah, jumping to conclusions about this being intentional is conspiracy nut thinking. if someone’s reasoning includes bits like “it just makes too much sense” and “think about how much they have to gain/lose” they’re just jumping to conclusions without evidence. remember that correlation does not imply causation. just because something happened near a powerful person that affects the world or that person significantly doesn’t mean there’s a conspiracy. just because the motive for an action exists or makes sense that doesn’t mean it happened. i have a motive to want to kill Trump, but if he dies while I’m near d.c. that doesn’t make me a suspect. 90% of the people near d.c. at any given moment have motive to kill trump.
If true, their information needs to be noted if possible only after the arrest of all these other assholes. Gotta protect the ones that did not follow orders of this pedophile regime.
or it was purposeful to feed the public another thread of distraction that we can all entangle ourselves with for the next few months.
At this point, the controversy is not Trump … the controversy is the American government, the American media and the American public just rolling over another chapter of this absolute stupidity.
At this point? Probably, this isn’t the first time we have seen thick exact rookie mistake.
Of course, who knows since doge or whatever probably wiped the people who knew how to get things done I it and replaced with high schoolers that just can’t wait to gobble elons musky bits
The incompetence is staggering.
thats how russia is run, get rid of the “potential threatening” govt workers and replace them with brown-nosers.
And also has a long history. They’ve done this before.
Trump’s GOP supporters are all incompetents.
When you fire all of the intelligence out of the intelligence community, and the rest jump ship.
I really hope they’re put in front of a panel and say “we don’t have the manpower”
first thing to do is them stopping any investigation against russia, and agains trump when he got into power. on the intelligence side tulsi gabbard runs interference.
That’s the only thing they’re good at
So the entirety of the files released thus far, have been copied and unredacted I would assume. Might just need to buy some popcorn. Probably going to be a wild couple weeks.
I haven’t checked myself, but on another post someone claimed that only some of the pages were “redacted” in this manner. If that’s the case then while we got more information than they probably wanted us too, there is still some information that’s yet to be made available.
Look at the address:
https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet 8/EFTA00025010.pdf
Good fuck this is filthy
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Might have been a little optimistic… I’ll take whatever win we can get!
This is true, but still, that number of mentions must be concerning for many people.
Except, if we’ve learned anything to this point, it’s that Trump will once again face zero repercussions from this.
No. Only some files. Most have been redacted in an effective manner.
Why do I keep expecting the US government to be remotely competent at anything?
It was more competent before they fired everyone competent and replaced them with incompetent sycophants. It wasn’t perfect before, but far better than now.
Propaganda i guess, the evidence for incompetence has been right there for decades and it keeps getting easier to find.
To be fair it’s genuinely a super common mistake. I see redacted documents often at work (I do nothing fancy, just some privacy policy thing we deal with) and on like 30% of the documents we get you can either just highlight the underlying text or literally click and drag the black box off of the words lol.
I guess what happens is people can redact it such that they can no longer see it in their particular pdf software but then a different software can bypass it
I guess what happens is people can redact it such that they can no longer see it in their particular pdf software but then a different software can bypass it
That’s pretty charitable. I’ve worked civil service many years ago and the computer skills of some of them were beyond laughable. I never dealt with redacted documents during that stint of my life but I can say with 100% certainty that I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if someone “redacted” a document by making the text and background highlight color black and posting the Word
docxfile online.It’s a mistake you can expect interns to make, Feds should do better. They’ve pulled this same stunt many times before. And considering Trump ordered the entire FBI to work on this, one would think they’d do it properly.
It’s entirely dependent on which parts of the government you’re dealing with. The parts operated by the career civil servants and people who got there by working the job tend to be run perfectly well.
In cases where it’s political appointees following rules and guidelines setup by the aforementioned people, it tends to be… Fine.It’s the political appointees who actively disregard or are hostile to the civil service who are profoundly incompetent. You know, because they were selected for ideology, not competency.
For some reason that I think is spelled really similar to “traitorous anti American assets and useful idiops” the trump administration has been opposed to. and in favor of making it easier to fire, the civil service, AKA: the competent part.
It’s why you can end up with the parts that work well, like the military, NOAA and others like it wandering around being competent (prior to the current “let’s fire everyone and try to destroy the country” moment), while political appointees accidentally add a reporter to an illegal group chat. It’s the authoritarian impulse to demand orthodoxy and committed belief not just from the people who decide direction, but from the people who make day to day decisions as well.
As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.
As a fun aside, it lets you know who was doing the redaction work instead of the people who would normally be responsible for ensuring a smooth release of documents.
Does it? It seems to me that the ineffective redactions could be either hostile Trump appointees acting with incompetence or patriotic career civil servants engaging in malicious compliance, so it doesn’t actually reveal which.
I love this shit, it really shows how ludicrous those “deep state” conspiracy theories are. They can’t even blot out a document that incriminates their own leader.
It also goes some way towards showing how unlikely it is that Epstein was murdered and with no evidence/perpetrators of his murder showing up in the last 6 years.
Except it is not a conspiracy anymore. Trump is literally stacking the federal government with employees who are only loyal to him. That is what “deep state” means.
Remember: When dealing with conservatives then every accusation is a confesssion.
he was mentioned way too many times to be able to cover it up, the real question is the billionaires/ and other world leaders involved in the files is what is being hidden.
They can’t even blot out a document that incriminates their own leader.
Either that, or someone made a deliberate ‘mistake’ for reasons unkown.
Maybe.
But no one checked. Did they just trust an intern to do this for them?
A thousand FBI agents working for weeks did the initial redactions back in the spring. Way too big an undertaking, and too quickly accomplished, to have gone right. I have old posts here predicting they’d fuck up the redactions on quite a bit of stuff. And I’m so glad to see it happening.
I predicted sleuths would be able to figure out some stuff that was supposed to be redacted (like “donald trump” redactions always being the same width or something) but if this is true it has to be sabotage from within lol
Idk this just being incompetence wouldn’t be the most insane thing ever. I’d hardly expect anyone in the Trump Administration to know how Microsoft word works
Has anyone actually tried this?
I did. I checked both the “Masseuses” and the “Contact Book,” (mentioned in the X comments as being not redacted correctly), and they seem to be redacted properly. I’ve tried 3 PDF readers, but I’d be curious what actually works.
You have to scroll a while in the original comments to find someone who actually tried it, and it didn’t work for them either.
It’s hilarious that everyone is just believing it though.
Yay, someone else is actually covering it!
I’ve done all 18,000 pdfs. This must have happened in one document. The vast majority are redacted correctly.
This looks like a disinformation campaign to distract from other stuff. “Some people are saying there are word in the document that should not be in the documents, so we have to wonder how they got there”.
The entire thing is a classic disinformation campaign. Right before Christmas. Multiple tranche release. Then pullbacks and rerelease. Maximum confusion. Make sure nobody knows who to trust.
Fun fact: this technique was developed in Russia.
Maybe I’m wrong but the whole thing seemed like bullshit. No other news organization I can find has picked this story up, after ten hours. Obviously no one can replicate the results.
About thirty minutes ago, USA Today published an article that Trump’s name is in plain text several times in documents released today. No redaction copy and paste necessary.
People are eating it up though.
The incompetence is… here! 😱
*has always been here
Eating it up in what way?
Note you have to paste into something that doesn’t recognize the highlighting. Notepad used to work.
Yeah there’s been some wild stuff coming out but this is implausible. Actual journalists who regularly deal with redacted docs must’ve been through most of it by now.
If this were true i don’t think would be a tweet, it would be an uncontainable story.
If this is correct, doesn’t that mean you can just “unredact” the entire document by systematically searching and replacing positions?
